the poorest dominicans don't eat

dv8

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El salario m?nimo no alcanza ni para comer en Rep?blica Dominicana - DiarioLibre.com

theoretically, those making minimum salaries should not be alive at all, accordingly to diario libre. you may remember complete failure of an article i posted few days ago regarding the basic costs of power/water/internet in relation to the minimum salaries. today we find that the poorest must sustain themselves on cosmic energy or else how would they be able to survive is the cost of food alone was 150% of their monthly salary...

speaking of which, the is an ongoing discussion about increasing minimum salary. the workers wanted 30%, then 25% and now 20% more, the employers are offering 10%.
El Caribe ? Empresarios desisten de reclasificar empresas; ofrecen 10% de aumento

either way, it's all for naught because as soon as the salaries go up, so do the prices.
 

Criss Colon

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yahoomail.com
The poor SURVIVE, by having several wage earners in the same house.
The more earners,the better they scrape by.
CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
 

AlterEgo

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Poor Dominicans don't usually live alone, they live with other poor Dominicans and pool their money to eat. Many don't see meat on their plates all week.

They do seem to find 60 pesos to buy a bottle of Clarien [sp??] though.
 

william webster

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they pick fruit from the trees, they grow vegetables....

they don't starve.... not our diet but they survive
 

HUG

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The people will do nothing, it is a pathetic selfish society that are too dumb to know how to stand up for thier right, or fight for rights. And those with the intelligdnce and knowhow are employed by the government to selfishly not educate thier neighbours.
Selfish defines Dominican society better than any other word (apart from dumb obviously) Created and moulded that way, too far gone to know it.
 

dv8

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just to clarify, i am familiar with how dominicans manage. i was being sarcastic towards overly dramatic tone of DL.
 

melphis

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I have never seen a Dominican without a cell phone stuck to the side of his or her head. I think thier priorities could be slightly out of whack. Cell phones and internet service are not necessities of life.
 

AlterEgo

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I have never seen a Dominican without a cell phone stuck to the side of his or her head. I think thier priorities could be slightly out of whack. Cell phones and internet service are not necessities of life.

Maybe in the cities and tourist areas. Most of the Dominicans who live around us [campo] do not have a cell phone - and if they do, there are no minutes on them, they can only receive calls. When we want the pedicure lady to come, for example, a kid is sent down the road to tell her.

Until you get out into the boonies, you haven't seen poor people.
 

La Profe_1

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Not Always!

The people will do nothing, it is a pathetic selfish society that are too dumb to know how to stand up for thier right, or fight for rights. And those with the intelligdnce and knowhow are employed by the government to selfishly not educate thier neighbours.
Selfish defines Dominican society better than any other word (apart from dumb obviously) Created and moulded that way, too far gone to know it.

Well, Hug, I have seen unselfish behavior from a Dominican. The last time I had a dental group working in Puerto Plata one of the women I hired to keep the bathrooms and treatment rooms clean always refused to eat the plato del d?a I purchased for her, and for every other worker at the site. She'd say, "m?s tarde" when I would tell her it was time to eat, but then I would see her leaving the site with the meal (she lived across the street). Turns out she was refusing to eat because she wanted to take the meal to her kids who were at home. In my estimation, that is unselfish behavior.
 

AlterEgo

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Well, Hug, I have seen unselfish behavior from a Dominican. The last time I had a dental group working in Puerto Plata one of the women I hired to keep the bathrooms and treatment rooms clean always refused to eat the plato del d?a I purchased for her, and for every other worker at the site. She'd say, "m?s tarde" when I would tell her it was time to eat, but then I would see her leaving the site with the meal (she lived across the street). Turns out she was refusing to eat because she wanted to take the meal to her kids who were at home. In my estimation, that is unselfish behavior.

Good story LaProf. Here's another, similar, story. We eat well in DR, to American standards. Our caretaker and our maid eat the same meals that we do for breakfast and lunch. Our main meal is usually eaten between 1 and 2 p.m., and several times I told the maid to take a break and eat something. Her excuse was always that she wants to finish all her work first, that if she eats she'd be too tired to work, that she'd rather take it home with her and have it after a shower. Turns out that she took it home so that she could share it.

Mr. AE shrugged it off as 'normal', but it tugged at me and I found myself making sure she took extra.

One morning I made a large pot of oatmeal, and a guy stopped by to talk to Mr. AE, so I gave him a bowl too. I was surprised when the maid was very touched at this, and when I shrugged she said "There are a lot of hungry people here, you might have given him the only thing he'll eat today except bread". Very hard for an Italian to hear, we like to feed people. Italian mantra: "If there are no leftovers, you didn't make enough".

Some of the neighbors get a monthly 'canasta' from the government, I think it's staples like rice, beans, oil. It doesn't last long.
 

NALs

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Jan 20, 2003
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The argument presented in the article cited by the OP is a manipulation that journalists and unionists often use in order to support their cause or desire, which is to increase the minimum wage.

Why a manipulation?

They often take one of the many minimum wages that exist in the country and they then compare that to the average cost of the basic goods basketcase (for now on referred to as the basket in this post) for a family (canasta b?sica familiar). There are two basic "errors"(I put it in quotes because more often than not I think its not an error but intentional):

1. You can't compare the minimum wage with the average cost of the basket, because the basket is divided into different layers due to different basic consumption patterns among the different economic groups. A comparison of this nature should always be done with the cost of the lowest basket, because people in higher income brackets, in the case of economic problems, can simply substitute certain products for a cheaper version but those at the lowest income group can't substitute for a cheaper product because they already are consuming the cheapest one, in this case they simply do without.

2. The cost of the basket is for a family of four, because that's the average family size. Due to this, you have to take the cost and divide it by four in order to get the cost per person and then compare that to the minimum wage.

Then there are other issues that I'm not going to get into due to time, but they include things such as most households have more than one source of income (people have multiple jobs, more than one person works, they sell things on the side, etc), a very small percentage (its in the single digit) of the formal workforce actually earns at or below the minimum wage, average incomes among the young is below 10,000 but people in early adulthood and up on average earn much more; and a very long and controversial etc.

A lot of people don't like it when these things are brought up, but these are factors that need to be taken into account regardless how often the media pretends it doesn't matter and reduces the argument to very basic and erroneous calculations and comparisons.

I'm not taking sides on whether there should be an increase or not of the minimum wage, I'm simply pointing out the very obvious and repetitive flaws that often accompanies every media article about this topic.

There are also other issues of measurement, but these have more to do with the Central Bank (CB) and not so much with the media. To give one example, the CB counts as part of the labor force a yone that is active from 10 years old and up. It goes without saying that teenagers, especially the younger ones, earn a lot less than young adults and this affects the average income reported in the lowest income bracket. The minimum age for measuring the size of the labor force, in my opinion, should be at least 16 and at most 18.
 
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HUG

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Well, Hug, I have seen unselfish behavior from a Dominican. The last time I had a dental group working in Puerto Plata one of the women I hired to keep the bathrooms and treatment rooms clean always refused to eat the plato del d?a I purchased for her, and for every other worker at the site. She'd say, "m?s tarde" when I would tell her it was time to eat, but then I would see her leaving the site with the meal (she lived across the street). Turns out she was refusing to eat because she wanted to take the meal to her kids who were at home. In my estimation, that is unselfish behavior.

There usually is one or two decent players in an awful team.
 

malko

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And lets not forget " handouts " ( no negativity meant ), local syndicos give out monthly food boxes ........ and pesos for medical treatment amd such.......
 

Chirimoya

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They've just agreed on the 14% pay rise for minimum wage, so brace yourselves for the price hikes

Gobierno y sector empresarial aprueban aumento al salario m?nimo de un 14% - DiarioLibre.com

SANTO DOMINGO.-El Comit? Nacional de Salarios y el sector empresarial aprobaron un aumento al salario m?nimo de un 14% sin la anuencia del sector sindical.

El CNS dispuso la aplicaci?n inmediata de la resoluci?n que ordena el aumento salarial, por lo que la misma entrar? en vigencia a partir del 1 de junio pr?ximo.
 

Neargale

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Everytime I have workers come to my house I cook breakfast for everybody. I did not at the beginning... one tile worker keeled over while working... I later found out he had not eaten in 2 days... lesson learned...
 

the gorgon

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Everytime I have workers come to my house I cook breakfast for everybody. I did not at the beginning... one tile worker keeled over while working... I later found out he had not eaten in 2 days... lesson learned...

keep on doing what you are doing. i am sure you feel better for it.
 
Aug 6, 2006
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A lot of poor Dominicans do not use money to pay from their earnings. In Barahona, about twice a week, a family I know has a visit from a primo on a motoconcho carrying an impossibly large number of sacks of guandules. Everyone then sets about shelling them for the next five or six hours. After ten sacks of unshelled guandules are reduced to two sacks of shelled guandules, several families take a couple of gallon jugs each of them and the rest get loaded on a moto and are taken to the market downtown. In the PM, a moto brings a large bag of rice home.
The most common dish is arroz con guandules, of course. On other days, several hands of platanos arrive. There are relatives in the campo that sens=d their veggies to town and I assume someone takes money back to them.