15412: Kathy S. Grey re: 15336: Durban: Minimum Wage in Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Racine125@aol.com

This isn't so much about factory minimum wages in Haiti, but about the wage scale here in Jacmel, which is an agricultural area; and about the dwindling productivity of the area due to the refusal of the younger people to do agricultural work.

Here, if you want a man to work in your garden, your yard, or take care of your animals for you, the going rate is fifty gourdes per day.  Some people pay forty gourdes, but offer the worker "meals" - these "meals" consisting of coffee and bread in the morning and boiled cornmeal at mid-day.

Motorcycle taxi drivers here were renting their motorcycles from the owners for forty Haitian dollars (two hundred gourdes) per day, and then they carried passengers for five gourdes a trip.  The difference between what they earned and what they paid to the motorcycle owner plus what they spent on gas is their profit, which might on a good day be twenty Haitian dollars (one hundred gourdes).  Now the taxi fare has gone up to ten gourdes per trip due to the increase in the price of gasoline, but I don't think the rental cost has gone up.

(Let me interject that I know there is no such thing as a "Haitian dollar", it's just that it's the term used for five gourdes.)

Prostitution is the biggest money-maker for women here, and prices range from twenty five to fifty gourdes for a quickie with an average "malhereuse" to two or three hundred Haitian dollars for a night with a young "belle mulatresse".

Prices for basic commodities are out of this world!  Four small oranges sell for ten gourdes.  That means that a farm worker works a day for the equivalent of twenty oranges.

A "pot" of fresh beans (about a cup) is twenty five gourdes.  A front leg of a goat is about twenty-five Haitian dollars, and it can feed maybe four people if you are lucky.  A live chicken sells for between fifteen and twenty dollars, a rooster for about forty.

A tank of cooking gas is one hundred Haitian dollars (five hundred gourdes).  A gallon of 'kleren' (single-distilled rum) which used to be just about the cheapest thing around, is now thirty-five Haitian dollars.  That's three and one half days work for a farmworker!

Livestock is hugely expensive - a small goat will not sell for less than one hundred and twenty five to one hundred and fifty dollars.  Saddle horses are around six hundred Haitian dollars, mules are about one thousand, and a mama cow that isn't too old is about twelve hundred dollars.

Pigs are impossible to keep, just about, because a sack of "son de ble" (wheat bran) sells for eighty five dollars, and a sow pig can easily polish off a sack in ten days.  There is no way you can sell the pig for enough money to make a profit!

Clothing is likewise impossible, pretty soon we are all going to be naked!  Even "pepe", used clothing, is so expensive it's all sitting in the streets because no one can afford to buy it.  Cotton-polyester print fabric is about twelve dollars a yard, and once you buy four yards, you have to pay a seamstress between thirty and fifty dollars to sew it, and you have to buy the zipper and buttons and what not, for about another ten dollars, so your dress is going to cost you a total of slightly less than one hundred dollars.

In spite of all this, the young people absolutely refuse to work!  The young men of my neighborhood spend their time stealing food from the older men's gardens, but they absolutely refuse, REFUSE, to pick up a pitchfork or a sickle or a machete, not even to work their own land.  They steal goats, they steal pigs, and they go to prison for six months when they are caught, but they don't stop.

The seamstress who sews my ceremonial clothes complains ceaselessly that she can not find girls to train as assistants, "they all are 'bouzen' (whores) and that's all they want to do."  Work, income-generating work, is considered a shameful way to spend one's time, by the under-twenty-five crowd.  God only knows what is going to happen when the last of the old "cultivateurs" gets too old to work!

Sincerely,

Kathy S. Grey

(Posting from Jacmel, Haiti)