Living on minimum wage - Survival stories from low income earners

Avia Collinder, Business Writer

Jamaicans who earn the minimum wage, or amounts close to it, employ a combination of survival tactics to get by. These include extra work, help from relatives locally and abroad, loans, and what might be termed strategic relationships that produce financial aid, a random survey by Sunday Business shows.

Precious Miller, a resident of Montego Bay who will be 43 on her next birthday, has done many courses - computing and training as a waitress among them - as part of her long search for a job paying better than, or equal to the national minimum wage.

In her last job, Miller was employed to care for an elderly woman and was paid J$3,000 per month, way below the now roughly J$4,070 a week, or J$101.75 per hour minimum wage.

Survival, she said, was possible only by living with relatives and relying on financial help from her common-law husband.

Now, after completing a six-month housekeeping training programme at the Kenilworth HEART Trust/NTA Academy in Hanover last year, she hopes to find work in a western Jamaica

Survival stories from low-income earners

hotel where conditions and pay are expected to be better.

Some minimum-wage earners have found lodgings with relatives, a few with employers as live-in household helpers, while some couples move in together.

Most of those who spoke with Sunday Business said they were unable to afford rent on their own, and many stick to inner-city communities where housing is more affordable. Their biggest expenses appear to be food, transport, and the needs of children — obligations which drive many to borrow or pursue other means of earning extra income.

Workers who earn the minimum wage are employed both in the formal and informal sectors.

The trades and industries covered by national minimum-wage regulations include baking, catering, dry goods, garment, hotel, industrial security guards, laundry/dry cleaning, printing, retail petrol, rural passenger transport, as well as household help.

Several workers who earn at this level report changing jobs quite often in search of employment offering even a little more pay.

Lee Goldbourne, a 35-year-old driver of St Catherine, changed jobs four times in 2009. At his last place of employment, at a major furnishing and jewellery chain in 2009, he said he would work long hours making deliveries islandwide by day and night.

His pay for overtime, he said, never exceeded J$1,500 - given atop the minimum J$4,070 for 40 hours - and his employer refused to indicate the hours worked on his pay slip.

"It was sufferation," said Goulbourne.

He walked off the job last November, he said, as he dreaded the heavier demands of the Christmas season which would have come with no commensurate financial reward for him.

At some work places, employees say they are advised that they could earn more than the basic pay if extra hours were put in or certain production targets achieved. But several workers in our survey said even when they accepted the challenge, the performance goal post was continuously and arbitrarily moved by employers, making it difficult to meet targets.

impossible targets

Mary Jane (name changed to protect identity), a 40 year-old customer -service, worker in Montego Bay, is a squatter on captured land, the only place she says she is able to afford rent. Along with dozens of her colleagues, she worked in industries located in the free zone area. There, she was paid the minimum wage, but was promised incentive pay based on performance.

"The targets were impossible to reach," Mary Jane said, as the company also had a demerit system by which workers were punished for mistakes. Errors were accompanied by pay cuts, and the regulations changed at regular intervals that appeared to Mary Jane to happen weekly.

She said she was convinced her employer was bent on keeping payments at the minimum wage despite the talk of incentive pay above that level.

The scenario landed Mary Jane in a vicious cycle of debt. To survive, she said, she borrowed money from the company's staff-loan scheme.

"Lord, I used to borrow! I borrow and pay back every week. As I get my pay, I pay back," she said.

Mary Jane has been receiving help from relatives in Jamaica and overseas to pay her J$10,000-a-month rent and send her son to school. Budgeting, she said, was difficult, as she has had to pay back most of her minimal earnings to the company.

Still, some people are grateful that there are some employers who will pay above the minimum wage.

May Gordon, 50, of Porters Mountain in Westmoreland, told Sunday Business that in four and a half months of working as a housekeeper at a guest house in the parish until mid-April this year, she was able to save J$17,000 out of her weekly pay of J$6,000.

She used her savings to rear chickens in her backyard, earning extra from poultry meat sales.

Gordon's thrift and entrepreneurial instincts paid off in part, because she was able to forego paying rent by living in staff quarters at the guest house. She was also fed by her employers, she said.

Her sole child, a frequently unemployed carpenter, she said, also encouraged her to save her money and not to "worry her head" about him. As a result, her only expense, she reported, was bus fare to go home on weekends to the extended-family residence, where she lives without paying rent.

She also gives a stipend of "a small change" to a grandchild every fortnight.

"My pay was very small, but I still satisfy," she said.

minimum-wage saver

Another minimum-wage saver is Camille Robertson, 37-year-old security guard who lives with relatives and currently takes home J$17,000 after tax every two weeks. She is able to save, she said, after paying insurance of J$1,800, buying groceries of J$5,000, and meeting other small expenses.

Robertson is an avid saver, she said - a lesson learned from past experience when she was out of work and out of money.

She says that being without children, she does not share the fate of many of her co-workers who survive on loans needed to meet household expenses, school fees, and other education-related expenses for their children.

She has no interest in buying clothes, she said, and does not spend on entertainment, hence her ability to save.

In most Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries, the state-imposed minimum-wage rate is above the poverty line demarcating figure of US$2 per day.

However, according to a 2007 World Bank study titled Minimum Wages and Social Policy, the minimum wage is not sufficient to meet household consumption needs in most LAC nations.

Where there is only one dependent of the minimum-wager earner, it can provide basic subsistence in only seven of 17 sampled countries, according to the report. Jamaica is not among the seven.

lowest minimum wage

In fact, among LAC countries, Jamaica was said to rank among those with the lowest minimum wage.

While the minimum wage here has been increased each year since the publication of that study - by 15. 6 per cent in 2008, and 10 per cent in 2009 - the Bank of Jamaica reports that between January 2007 and December 2009, real income fell by 47 per cent, effectively wiping out the minimum wage increase gains.

With new tax measures, particularly on consumption, implemented since then, and increases in transport costs, workers at the bottom of the income scale have seen additional erosion of their spending power.

It has been reported that trade unions and the Jamaica Household Workers'Association are batting for a 10 to 20 per cent rise in the national minimum wage this year.

Other groups have recommended increases of up to 50 per cent, but business representatives have drawn attention to the possible adverse effects of such an increase, including job cuts, higher operational costs, and increased prices of goods and services to consumers as a result of passing on higher business expenses.

The advisory committee has made its 2010 recommendations, but the labour ministry is yet to declare whether it has accepted or rejected them.

austanny@yahoo.com




Minimum wagers often are required to do back-breaking work for long hours, with little pay. - File