Tuesday, August 26, 2008
8:59 PM ICT
Equinox Restaurant
Phnom Penh, Phnom Penh Province, Cambodia
***This is another post I've been writing for a little while, and an issue I've been thinking about basically since the moment I got to Cambodia. The post remains a little rough, and probably not as well thought-through as it should be, but whatever.I think I’ve mentioned at some point that I planned to do a blog post about this, and I’ve been thinking about it for a while anyway… the issue, not the blog post. It should be noted that I’m writing this post while sitting in a restaurant that in Canada where a drink would probably cost 6 bucks each; but I’m drinking a pint of beer that cost $1.25 and I just ordered a sicilian pizza that costs $4.00. So in a way, if I say a civil servant here gets $40 per month, that figure can’t be considered in Canadian terms. Salaries must be considered in terms of cost of living is basically what I’m saying. That being said, when I say a civil servant’s monthly salary is $40, you must also remember that it’s been determined that a living wage would be $110 – so difference in cost of living only accounts for part of the difference in wages.
(Another way to think about it, and a bit closer to my area of expertise: One study comparing Canadian and Cambodian beer girls four that beer girls working in Canada made an average of $846.10 per month, while beer girls in Cambodia made an average of $58.30. They’re making a lot less, but they also need less per month: Canadian beer girls reported needing $433.62 every month, while Cambodian beer girls only needed $119.79. The problem is this: the Canadian beer girls, though they had higher expenses, made 267% of what they needed, but Cambodian beer girls only made 48.7%... it’s not how much they make, it’s how it compares to what they need. And it compares shittily.)
(Also, while most things are cheaper in Cambodia, not everything is. Anything produced outside the country remains expensive. So a meal at a nice Cambodian restaurant is 4 dollars, but a meal at a McDonald's is still closer to 6, and a bag of Doritos is still 2.50. That doesn't matter so much, but the fact that gas is the same price in Cambodia as it is in Canada does matter; and it also matters when Cambodian businesses try and compete on an international level.)
I should also mention that this post may sound vaguely like a left-wing rant. I should also mention I talk about economics, and use phrases like ‘GDP,’ ‘trickle-down effect,’ and ‘macro-level factors’ in this post. I also probably use the word ‘fuck’ somewhere.
Now, let’s consider the implications of the low civil servant salaries for a second. I want to do this because, even though civil servants are only one group facing economic difficulties in Cambodia, and though they’re not the group I know the most about; they are people like teachers, policemen, and judges. So if there’s a problem for them, it becomes a problem for the rest of the country. And the name of that problem is corruption. It is commonplace for teachers to charge extra fees to their students for ‘tutoring,’ for police to do random checks and to accuse people of imaginary crimes. The criminal justice system is a joke, because even the most serious criminal charges can be (and have been) dealt with, with a bribe to a judge (past examples of this have included a pedophile sex tourist who was arrested in Cambodia, but paid a judge $1000 and got off scot free). This is not corruption out of greed or malevolence, it is subsistence corruption. When you talk to Cambodians about government corruption – and people, including government officials, are willing to talk about it quite openly – no one blames those who demand or take bribes; it’s simply how they survive. But not only that; it actually allows the salaries to stay low, because it’s known that the money will be made up through bribes (sort of the same way the minimum wage for waiters is lower because they get tips, except that this destroys the rule of law and any chance of accountable social services).
(A side anecdote: Dr. Beat Richener, the founder of the Kantha Bopha hospital I talked about in a previous post, knew that, in founding his hospital, it was essential there be no corruption. So, he made the base salary at the hospital $250/month. And by base salary, I mean that’s what the custodial staff make. In a country where police make $40. And guess what? No damn corruption. Pay people enough, and they generally won’t often choose to be evil.)
But the low civil servant wages also have other consequences. For example, the beer companies, who pay the beer girls I have been doing work with, can brag about their high salaries (normally starting at $45, then increasing to $55 a month). So even though they provide only around half of what the women need to survive, they can legitimately claim they’re giving high wages! (And also, unlike civil servants, who have a degree of power that they can use in order to get bribes, the beer girls have no power, and so are forced to find other means of making up the difference, like selling sex.)
So who benefits from such a system? Well, clearly, those in power who are allowed to pay these obscenely low wages. In this country, that starts with the great prime minister
Hun Sen – who has the unique distinction of being a member of the Khmer Rouge that terrorized Cambodia in the 70s, the Vietnamese forces that occupied Cambodia in the 80s, and being the prime minister ever since 1997 (when he staged a bloody coup, but since then he's been reelected twice, most recently earlier this year). Hun Sen is a key figure in this because he bridges the two groups that benefit. The first is high-up members of the government, who squander domestic resources and foreign aid and line their coffers in forms of corruption that could never be considered subsistence corruption. And the second group are foreigners who own businesses in Cambodia (Hun Sen fits this group because he’s been accused of slowly been selling Cambodia off to foreign multinationals). It is these companies (beer companies included) who are benefitting from poor Cambodians. That’s right, not only are the poor getting poorer in Cambodia, the rich are not getting richer, because there are no rich Cambodians, because everything is foreign-owned (hotels, for example, are largely owned by the Chinese and Vietnamese; and the genocide museum, housed on the site where thousands were tortured and died under the Khmer Rouge, was recently sold to a for-profit Japanese company).
I rarely root for the rich, but at the very least, as the rich get richer, there would be a trickle-down effect. Now I’m normally suspicious of trickle-down, but it’s real in Cambodia, for one reason: the $40 per month salary for civil servants was determined based on the country’s GDP (makes sense; taxes pay their salaries). So if there’s more Cambodian business, and more Cambodian profit, Cambodian salaries go up; and a new cycle is formed.
And this is what needs to happen. As Cambodia has entered the world market and tourists have flooded the country, cost-of-living is slowly increasing. My driver in Siem Reap (a very sharp guy who can talk about Cambodia’s social troubles for hours if you give him the chance) pointed out to me a new condo development that’s going up where the units will cost $200 000 each. He pointed to it with pride, as evidence of Siem Reap ‘on the go’, but also with a fair degree of consternation, aware that everything is getting more expensive, and soon, the 80% of Siem Reap’s inhabitants who live below the poverty line will be left without options.
But there’s a whole other set of problems associated with Cambodia’s rapid expansion… not micro-level expansion like new condos, but macro-level factors. Cambodia was reintroduced to the world stage in 1993, and changed in the space of 15 years from post-genocide borderline-agricultural society to tourism destination and free market economy. It’s not only that people can’t pay for their dinner; it’s that they’re being forced into a way of life entirely foreign to them within a very short period of time. Society needs time to evolve of its own accord; it can’t simply have such dramatic change forced upon it. When they’re feeling generous, foreigners comment on Cambodians as ‘relaxed’ and ‘easy-going’, but when they’re feeling capitalist and cynical, the words ‘lazy’ and ‘unambitious’ seem more to apply. These are people without capitalist minds being forced into capitalism hyperdrive.
And this is where my comments about the fishers and farmers in the countryside come from. They are living in unimaginable poverty, but, in general, I don’t feel sorry for them. Sure, I feel sorry for them if they need medical care they can’t afford, if the fields or the rivers become barren and they can’t buy food to survive, if natural disasters strike and they’re not prepared. But I don’t think that in general more money will make their lives better. They simply live outside the market system. This is what they’ve always done, and just because the UN came here in 1993 and brought McDonald’s, doesn’t mean they need to change.
And, going back to what I was saying in my ‘Phnom Penh – first impressions’ post, it’s not even simply that the people don’t have the resources to adapt, as evidenced by Phnom Penh’s rapid adaptation, it’s that government initiatives (welcome back Hun Sen) that could aid in this transition, fail to make it to the provinces. Those outside the large cities (and in general, anyone outside Phnom Penh), who are those who need to make the biggest adaption, are given the least support.
Goddamn this beautiful amazing country!
