Dinero

Gavin recently did the math for me (not a direct quote)…

So you work about 20 hours a week, make $10/hr at best, and spend another 10 hours driving between classes and home.  Logan, that’s $6.67 per hour!  Can’t you find something more lucrative?

The sad reality is, when you account for gas it comes out to be even less.

Working for pennies in the 3^rd world drives a guy to contemplate the economic value of his time, the purpose of working at all, and to constantly compare prices here vs. prices there, all the while converting between two currencies (“divide by 10 and subtract 20%”… i.e. 100 pesos = $8 USD… the reverse would be “multiply by 10 and add a quarter”).

Sure, from an American point of view I’m working for next to nothing.  Less than minimum wage.  Pathetic.  In order to accept such a drastic change in salary, I’ve spent the last two months attempting to put things into perspective.  One perspective is that if I work 20 hours a week, make just under $800/month, and live carefully, I can get by.  To save everyone the mental and emotional turmoil that my constant perspective calculations involve, I’ll sum it up here for y’all:

-I pay $240 per month for a two bedroom, 1.5 bathroom 2-story house.  In Berkeley I was paying over 3 times that for a 100 square-foot room (hey, you pay a premium for kick-ass roommates). 

-A well-educated professional can hope to make about 20,000 pesos ($1,600 USD) per month. 

-Jobs that require neither education nor experience (i.e. cashier at a little store) pay 100 pesos ($8 USD) per day.

-Day laborers (construction, road work) work for as little as $4 USD per day, possibly even less. 

Now the question of “why work at all?” grows even stronger.  If you’re working for $4 per day you can barely even cover the bus ride to and from.  The answer is that you also earn rights to government support in the form of healthcare, loans, and vouchers.  To all workers, public and private, the government provides nationalized healthcare for the employee as well as his family, and also guarantees a loan (no- or very low-interest, I believe) to facilitate the purchase of a home.  Once the school gives me something like 25 hours per week, I’ll be eligible for these same rights. 

So the employer of that worker who takes home $4 per day might actually be paying $20 per day, but 80% goes to el gobierno in order to pay for healthcare for a big Catholic family of god-knows-how-many.  I’m still trying to figure out the voucher thing.  Apparently many companies will decide to give their employees vouchers for gasoline or food, subsidized partly by the government and partly by the employer, on top of their contracted salaries.  Brenda couldn’t quite explain it to me; she just knows it exists.  And since I have trouble believing in outright altruism, I don’t yet understand how this can be beneficial to both paying parties (govt and employer).  Will look into it. 

Continuing with the theme of financial perspective, let’s talk prices.  There’s a huge discrepancy between the prices of various products; the more primary a good, the more 3^rd world the price:

-3 lbs of tomatoes, $1.

-Bananas: $0.25 per lb.

-Tortillas: <$1/ lb.

-Over 2 lbs of dry beans for $1.

-A bus ride costs less than $0.50

-A pack of made-in-Mexico Marlboros costs $2.25

-Meat and dairy aren’t AS cheap; milk runs about $2.50 per gallon and cheap beef about $2.50 per pound. 

-A dozen quality roses, less than $5.

-Services, obviously, are incredibly cheap as well.  For less than 30 bucks a mechanic made the smashed-up front of my car look almost as good as new. 

-12 sandwich-sized rolls, $1.

-2 lbs of limes, $1.

Then there are products that carry exactly the same price as in the US, even though folks here make about 25% of an American salary or less:

-Little netbook laptops cost $300 to $400 dollars.

-I can guarantee that any Apple product costs the same or more over here.

-Gasoline is just under $3 per gallon.

-Yesterday I paid $3 for a stick of deodorant.

-A pack of Trident gum and a two-liter Coke both cost about $1.20.

And then there’s pirata.  Pirated goods.  Knock-offs.

-We used to rent DVDs for $1.60 per night; now we go downtown and buy a copy of the damn movie for $1.25.

-You can take a textbook to these paper/Xerox stores and the next day they give you a spiral-bound copy for about 7 cents per page.  More than half of my students acquire their text books in this way. 

-“Namebrand” clothing can also be found at incredibly cheap prices if you know where to look.  Shirts, jeans, even shoes.  The shirts are totally convincing and 3 “Abercrombie”-esque etc T-shirts usually cost maybe $10; the jeans, upon donning them, reveal themselves as not having been produced with the expert craftsmanship of Mr. Levi himself; and the shoes I’m told fall apart pretty quickly.  

Fitting In

A quickie.

A friend of mine owns a little “cowboy wear” (sombreros, saddles, belts, boots, etc) shop in a pueblo on the outskirts of Guadalajara, close to one of the businesses (circuitboard/electronics company called Flextronics, previously Selectron) where I give a class some mornings.  For perspective, the shop can’t be more than 100 square feet.  In order to beat traffic I decided to pay her a visit yesterday. 

Got to talking to a 13 year old kid that spends his afternoons there for lack of a better thing to do.  He claims that he also goes to school.  We chatted for a good hour.  I guess his family owns some horses and gives tours of the surrounding countryside, and he promised to take me around next time I’m in town… I’m still trying to determine if this is a real promise or a Mexican courtesy promise. 

A shipment of cowboy hats arrived and we tore into the box and began sorting them all out and trying them on.  I put on a wide-brimmed feaux-leather sombrero and the kid stared at me for a second, laughed, and declared “You look like a foreigner!  Wait, are you from here?”  Hilarious and flattering.  I guess I’m gradually fitting in, starting with ignorant country children and hoping to one day deceive the rest of the nation as well.

Small Business

Dad’s a veterinarian of 26 years and over time has upgraded his location from utter slums to his current office, situated on prime real estate between the local church and market.  Despite gradual improvements in locale, I get the impression that upgrades to his equipment have occurred at a much slower rate, if at all.  The majority of his business is house calls, so he spends most of the day passing between home and office (4 blocks apart), receiving and running errands from mom, eating and napping from 2 to 4 as is the Mexican way, all the while anticipating phone calls from clients. 

When he’s at his small office, he is guaranteed to be sitting outside, probably due to the smell of animal filth that has at this point thoroughly saturated every fabric of the place.  But there is also very poor lighting which, if you could stand the smell, might also cause you to prefer to be outdoors.  On the inside, there’s an old wooden desk and a plant; a divider separates front from back behind which you’ll find a metal table, a couple cages in the corner of various sizes, and that’s about it.  It appears that all of his tools and supplies fit into one of two carrying cases.  The only semblance of beauty in the place are the four framed photos on the wall, captured and framed by photographer extraordinaire Trish Linderman, of an iguana, a donkey, a parrot, and a pair of elephants, respectively.  The donkey gets at least as much attention as the other three combined. 

Prior to arriving here for good, Brenda and her dad has both individually more-or-less boasted about the fact that dad doesn’t pay income taxes.  Apparently four or five years ago an auditor came by the office and dad basically told him: “You’re right.  I haven’t been paying taxes nor do I keep very thorough records [I think he actually does], but come in and take a look around.  Do you see clients?  Do you see evidence of prosperity?  Does it look like I make more than the bare minimum to survive?”.  The auditor, seeing the bare and (in my American opinion) filthy office, and not realizing that a large majority of his business consists of house calls, was content with that explanation. 

HOWEVER, just recently the Mexican government has been really pushing to root out non-paying business owners like Brenda’s dad, as well as those who engage in more unofficial and under-the-table type businesses (food sold from houses, various services, people who make a career out of flea markets, etc); if you’re prosperous, or rather if you have a little left over after you feed your family, then you’d better share with the government.  And rightfully so.  I’m coming to realize that in some respects the Mexican government offers comprehensive social services.  Medicine is one that stands out.  There are cheap, government-owned hospitals that are covered by social security; any worker in Mexico plus their family is entitled to some level of health care.  But they also respect the other side of the coin and demand more of the Mexican people.  A law was recently passed that says that obese teachers and parents with obese children can be fined.  Will continue to investigate.

An auditor recently came to dad’s office and basically told him “you’re busted and it’s time to pay up”.  Dad was freaked.  I watched him grow clearly more and more worried over the course of the week as he waited for his appointment.  The damage?  He had to pay a fine of 4,500 pesos (less than $400 dollars) to cover the last FIVE years, and from now on he has to pay 100 pesos ($8 dollars) per month.  I explained to him what I think he already knew… that mathematically he lucked out.