Old time story and a muddle of statistics

Oct 16, 2016 Countryman

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By Dennis Nichols

In my early reporter days, I was exhorted to write as simply and as succinctly as possible bearing in mind the

readership of the hypothetical ‘average Joe’ – the man working in the biscuit factory – whose major concern was the material welfare of himself and his family. He probably wouldn’t have had the time or the inclination to digest the kind of social, political, and economic jargon contained in some news stories.
Budgets, and the subsequent debates on them, are notorious for their long-winded and convoluted content which can leave those most affected by them scratching their heads in puzzlement. And the news reports aren’t usually much clearer. Thankfully, the last one, though endemically complex, made enough sense for the common folk to gauge what it meant for them and their families – how much money they could earn, and what it could buy.
It is on behalf of the countless average Joes, (mostly public servants) and to the arrogance of some governing officials and big business people that I direct this article. Many of the former earn about $50,000 a month and some of the latter, well over $1,000,000 for the same period. Some of us wonder if it is always education and expertise which make for such a wide variance.
My parents grew up in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. They often waxed colonial and were wary of independence. Before they died, exactly one week apart, in 1971, they complained about, and battled, the then-perceived high cost-of-living, while sighing nostalgically over the days when 25 cents could provide dinner for an average-size family. You could get a small loaf of bread for one cent, my mother said, and rice was two cents a pint.
My father taught and headmastered for 40 unbroken years, while struggling to escape the plebeian poverty that threatened to engulf his family. He wore frugality like a badge. My mother was the magician who prevented our inundation. She used charm and guile, and when those failed, anger, to wrest the few occasional extra dollars from him, and wring the last ounce of sustenance from the grocery supplies.
I know that struggle firsthand with my own family of nine, and I assume that there are many more magician parents like ours out there. With thousands of teachers, clerks, the police and disciplined services, nurses, and other civil servants’ monthly earnings hovering around the $50,000 mark, how does an average family of, say five, make ends meet, particularly if there is only one wage earner and the family lives in a rented apartment?
I don’t know enough about other categories of wage earners like sugar workers, rice farmers, miners, and small business operators, to estimate their periodic income, but if they deem themselves poor, I would guess that they also battle the economic blues as far as providing for their households is concerned.
We Guyanese at the narrow end of the wages scale are known for our ability to ‘cut and contrive’. I remember in the early nineteen-sixties when one dollar (the paper equivalent of that insignificant coin we now disdain) was enough to buy the ingredients needed for breakfast for a family of seven. A loaf of bread, a tin of milk, a packet of Milo, a pound of sugar, and a couple ounces of butter and cheese would leave you with enough change to buy some parched nuts and a few scoops of boiled channa later on.
An approximate equivalent today for the same items would be about $1,000, or one thousand times what they cost 50 years ago. Furthermore our hypothetical (low income) family could rent an apartment in 1965 for about $10 per month. A similar one today would carry a conservative rental of about $30,000 or 3000 times what it was 50 years ago.
Now for the clincher – the average income of a low-level public servant in 1965 was about $100 per month. For that same individual today a corresponding salary is in the vicinity of $50,000 or a ‘mere’ 500 times what it was five decades ago. So with my layman economics, I conclude, rather simplistically, that in 50 years, the basic cost of living in Guyana (more so for the poor) has increased at least a thousand-fold while the wages of public servants have gone up to ‘just’ 500 times what it was then.
These statistics obviously are not absolutely accurate, and do not take many human and circumstantial factors into consideration, but they do explain, in my opinion, one of the reasons why so many Guyanese still wage (pun intended) an almighty battle to make material ends meet, which often translates into frustration and anger. It doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to see its connection to corruption, lawlessness, and crime in general.
But back to old time story! I started teaching in 1976, a few years before some of the hard times of the late seventies and early eighties – the banned items and consumer lines, the ‘traders’ and roadside vendors, the North American barrels, the upsurge in remittances, and the amazing underground economy including foreign currency trading, really began to flourish. And by 1983, with five children in six years and a combined salary (with my wife) of $700 a month, I began to grimly appreciate the value of home-grown economics.
Today, so much has changed and yet so little, but it doesn’t make much sense to belabor the point. For poor families, the impossibility factor must be bewildering.
Tell me again someone, how a poor, one-breadwinner family of five with a no-fringes, minimum wage income of $50,000 a month, survives in this country today, when two-thirds of it has to go towards food, and the remaining one-third falls way short of the rent, and the electricity, water and phone bills. Then what about clothes, shoes, school supplies, medical needs and that unquantifiable expense called miscellaneous?
If there is a minimum wage, why not a maximum wage at the other end of the public service scale? Too socialist? Again, since I’m no economist, I am just looking at this through layman’s eyes. I think it would be oh so nice if the most menial of public servants could earn a minimum of over $100,000 per month, and those with the most expertise be content with a maximum of under $1,000,000. What’s so wrong with that?
Maybe the figures I mentioned just don’t add up to the conclusion I arrived at, or the suggestion I proffered. Maybe it’s just an old time story with a muddle of statistics from a naïve point of view. And if it is, could someone please explain, in simple, household language, why and how a teacher, policeman or nurse should be content with what they earn today in our public service.

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