Last Sunday I had a bit of a poke at Churchianity. This Sunday is a bit of fun with numbers . . . like how my lawyer earns more in one minute than my neighbour in Samoa does in a week. Two hundred and seventy two times more, to be precise! Surely one can only call this social injustice obscene?
I've been spending time with an extended family just around the corner and up the road a bit. As the crow flies they are our neighbour's neighbour. He's a guy called Mate (Marty to you and to me) and the team have been blogging a bit about him and his extended family and others like him without very much to speak of - nothing actually.
The minimum/starting wage in Samoa is $2.50 per hour. This is WST, so in NZD this is $1.47. Corporate types here may earn double, triple or four times this but it is common for the local unskilled, or semi-skilled workers to receive only a few Tala an hour.
Income of $400.00 per hour is standard for a lawyer in New Zealand. I'm being generous now because some of them charge way more than this. Converting this to WST Tala makes $680.00 WST an hour. For the curious, this equates to about $11.00 WST per minute or 20 cene (cents) WST per second. You literally couldn't count the coins fast enough if you were paying him in 20 cene coins!
The chart explains it all. My lawyer in New Zealand earns two hundred and seventy two times (272x) more than a Samoan worker - and lawyers seem to find a way to sleep at night?
In New Zealand the legal fraternity have always known how to charge, so I've used another benchmark familiar to my own life - web development. We charge in the order or $90.00 NZD per hour. Whew, that's only sixty one (61x) times more per hour than a Samoan worker! Still obscene but nudging a little closer to parity!
Administrators and office workers on say $20.00 NZD per hour are earning almost fourteen times more and a junior on $15.00 NZD per hour are more than ten times (10x) the Samoan rate.
But it gets worse. The fact is that our acquaintance over here actually has no job and no income. Sure, he can catch a bus to his plantation and grab a coconut, mango, taro and so on but he still wants nappies for his child and busfare and money for medicine and so on.
It is my opinion that globalisation will ensure that poverty and income disparity will increase, so I think that we had all better get used to this sort of thing happening more. The rich WILL get richer and the poor WILL get poorer. I predict that these above numbers will likely increase in the decades ahead.
The September 2009 Tsunami had a large impact on Samoa. Here are a few figures to put the impact into context.
One hundred and forty three people died. That's .08% of the population. If the same size event took place in New Zealand 3416.11 people would have died, and in Australia it would have been 16,980 people. It would be like "Good bye Hokitika!" or "Good bye Turangi!" Aussies would have lost Broken Hill or Alice Springs.
If you take the human impact and factor in a few variables (actually more like constants) we can make comparative statistical projections on the social impact of this event. Samoans are a VERY strongly family orientated society. Compared to Kiwis and Aussies I would estimate that their family loyalty would be in the order of five to six times stronger. I'm being conservative. If you don't believe me, ask any employer of any Samoan inside or out of Samoa, and they will confirm that when mum, dad, aunty, uncle, sister, brother, nephew. cousin or whatever gets married, dies, has a birthday or falls ill then they're off!
This can sometimes be a source of frustration, and the butt of a few jokes, but Fa'a Samoa is VERY strong and is what "makes" the Samoan society tick.
So taking a conservative factor of say five times the impact in our maths equation, an equivalent event in New Zealand will have directly affected 17,000 people in New Zealand and 86,000 people in Australia. This is of course total nonsense, because the correct figure woudl be WAY higher given the relative size of Samoa. I've yet to meet anybody here who is not feeling the consequences - grief, financial, jobs or even recriminations and soul searching.
That variable now puts the figures up to 100%. Statistics just can't catch up.
I've been trying to think of something that I could compare the influence of the Tsunami here with. It would have to be something approaching either of the two World Wars. A nationwide tragedy that had deep impact across all generations and for a long time. Sorry to get so serious for a minute there, but it keeps coming up this Tsunami thing.
Back to lighter matters.
There are things here that make some interesting numbers too. I've been told that the Prime Minister has allocated some $500,000.00 WST to a library in his home village of Lepa, on the South Coast. Some have told me that he's using money allocated to the Post Tsunami road repairs but that's another issue for the moment. At a population of 180,000, that's almost three Tala taxed on every man woman and children for his library.
I understand that there are nigh on 450 employees to Samoa's NMRE (Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy) which is Samoa's equivalent to the Department of Conservation in New Zealand. That percentage of population is .25%. If we put that into context in New Zealand with a population of just over 4m or Australia at 20m, DOC in New Zealand would have 10,862x employees and Australian Department of Environment and Conservation would have 53.435 happy workers!
We've done some estimates based on populated land area and projections for dog ownership in New Zealand compared to Samoa. My statistician spent four hours pouring over the latest Samoan census data (1965) and developed a complex spreadsheet with circular formulas that scare the living daylights out of me. His figures work out at 146,523.75 dogs in Samoa. Don't forget the three-quarters there! I think he's emotionally involved in the dog issue and might be damaged goods because of a run-in with a dog in his childhood, and has the wrong figure by a country mile. But he cost me $12.50 cents in WST so I thanked him profusely for all his work and told him to go back to his village to learn Excel again.My take on things here is that there is an average of slightly over 1.75 dogs per family in Samoa. Some seem to have a dozen and every now and then, say every fourth or fifth house you can find a family whose lawns entertain visiting dogs but they have none of their own. Average the family size to say 7 people and with a population of 180,000 there are approximately 1,964,000 dogs, or 320.25 dogs per acre. That's a fair amount of bark eh?
So if this was New Zealand on the same dog:human ratios we'd be looking at a gazilion dogs. The official dog statistics department more or less agrees with my estimate of around half a million dogs - I think they're pretty close to my questimate with their last dog census.
The bottom line? There are more dogs in Samoa than you can
Word count is 1309 words in English (Sorry, that's 309 over my target post length) and around about . . . umm . . . 2500 in Samoan.
Tagwords: statistics, dogs. pay parity
