On the strangeness of Expats
8 Comments Published by Tom Gara on Wednesday, March 14 at Wednesday, March 14, 2007.
Although I am probably an expatriate according to the dictionary definition of the word, I am far from being an expat as it is commonly understood - and I am proud of that fact. It's shit like the mail below that reinforces this belief for me....
On the CairoScholars yahoo group - a mailing list where foreigners in Cairo advertise apartments for share, sell secondhand stuff, find Arabic teachers etc - a person employed in the Swiss embassy in Cairo - obviously earning comfortably decent money in Euro/US$ terms - put out this advertisement:
This is sick and wrong. This well paid Swiss diplo-weirdo wants to pay their maid 67 cents an hour.
On the CairoScholars yahoo group - a mailing list where foreigners in Cairo advertise apartments for share, sell secondhand stuff, find Arabic teachers etc - a person employed in the Swiss embassy in Cairo - obviously earning comfortably decent money in Euro/US$ terms - put out this advertisement:
"I am looking for a reliable housekeeper to work in Heliopolis. The working time is Su-Thu from 11 am to about 6pm so that someone will be at home and receive the two schoolchildren with a warm meal when they come back from school. The duties include cleaning, light house work, cooking and supervising two children 9 and 10 years old until I come home from work. Salary LE 550."The poster later confirmed, when asked, that this is a monthly salary. For those not familiar, 550 Egyptian pounds equals about US$95 per month. For a 35 hour-per-week job of cooking, cleaning and child minding.
This is sick and wrong. This well paid Swiss diplo-weirdo wants to pay their maid 67 cents an hour.
Dude if expats do anything screwy when it comes to locals, its drastically overpaying for everything they come across and thereby feeding a foreigner complex as well as causing inflation and all sorts of other economic distortions. You think an Egyptian would pay a maid more than that? It's more profitable to be a beggar harassing tourists than it is to work given the economic opportunities the lower class have. And 500LE/month is roughly national per capita income! To be making the national average as a maid isn't too bad.
gen, i am an egyptian local, and i would not pay my maid 500 L.E per month. And neither would anyone i know.
It's too little for the hours specified.
gen you seem like an expatriate yourself....
Where I live the average price for a maid is 7.5Euros a week at 7-8 hours work, including cleaning, laundry, ironing, kitchen, bathroom, floors, windows and cooking. On average the maid will make 1 Euro cent/hour.
The average monthly salary of working at a public office with 2 years experience is 70 Euros/month (Asians work much longer hours than many others).
In theory if a maid picks up 3 reliable customers with steady hours, she can make 20 Euros a month more than a full time working college graduate, and work half the hours. But then they don't get any job stability, insurance or benefits.
Gen - expats both overpay ludicrously for certain expat lifestyle choices, while at the same time often being incredibly cheap and miserly toward "local" services and people.
I'm sure this same person wouldn't blink at spending LE 250 on a dinner at a fancy expat'ish restaurant.
I don't think you are very familiar with Egyptian wages, because anybody who is would know that LE 550 is a very, very low monthly salary, especially when employed by a rich expat family.
Digs - you make China sound cheap....has anyone ever thought of like...shifting labour intensive industries there? Sounds like there is a market opportunity...
the salary is low, but the housekeeper will increase the total remuneration by taking home leftover cooking ingredients and useable items that the swiss person doesn't want anymore, and when she comes up short for her children's school fees, or when she falls ill, or when her son impregnated someone's daughter and they need some money to settle the matter, she will come to the swiss person and remind him that she is poor and he is rich. the swiss person, having offered a low salary, tacitly encourages this, because the low salary acknowledges the distance between him and his maid.
Tom, one of the problems with globalization is that in developing countries (aka the ones getting raped in the process) 'inferior jobs' (maid work, selling pirated DVDs, etc) pay better than your traditional post university f/t jobs. One one hand it's good for the entrepreneurs, but on the other hand it forces many people to go into areas that a westerner would see as inferior. Case and point; a pirated DVD seller in China will earn 3x salary of a high ranking govt official (bribe factor not counted).
it really upsets me that there's a deep rooted egyptian feeling that europeans are superior to egyptians. It's a feeling that the french and the british worked so hard on keeping, and that every nationalist has tried to eliminate. But still 50 years later the "complex of the foreigner" is still there.
Jesse, you make it sound like this housekeeper is better off working for an expat than a regular egyptian family. And if that's not what you meant, it's what people (egyptians and maybe non-egyptians) think.
This - in my humble opinion - is complete and utter bullshit.
Every western country despises its imigrants and treats them like shit, and those who don't do that it's because they haven't faced any problems with them YET, when the going gets tough things will change.
The fact of the matter is that a lot of egyptians have such little respect for immigrants and expats from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America but such great respect for people from western europe.
This is a consequense of years and years of colonization.
And while an over all cost-benefit analysis would prove that colonization was good for egypt, it totally screwed it in other ways.
It's the reason why egypt is not a 4th world country, but it's also a reason why egypt is not a developed country.
I'm a little repulsed by the fact that some people are defending this gross act of underpayment. In all this person is going to make 6000 LE a year, or about $1000 dollars a year, that's not a substantive income in Egypt and its just a cut above the lowest wage possible. It's clear this man could afford more, especially if he expects her to work every week for flexible hours (for all we know he could get back from work around 8).
Jesse, your post makes no sense. Bringing home food, which I don't even see happening, would not compensate for being grossly underpaid. How could someone with such low pay put food on the table, afford a car or daily bus rides, and send their kids to school? Furthermore, just expecting the Swiss man's hospitality to come in in times of need is nowhere near justification for such wages. If the Swiss man were truly generous, he would be paying more than a few cents an hour.