A Warm Fire But No Sense Of Tomorrow On Workers’ Compensation Or Even Double Minimum Wage In Northern Baja.
By Lonce Lamonte - February 20, 2020
I woke up on a chilly Christmas morning just a little less than two months ago feeling content after a night of pervasive rain. I felt happy on my own and well rested in the arms of the Lord as I lay quietly for just a bit before getting up and readying myself to drive to Dymitri’s for breakfast.
Dymitri’s La Fonda Hotel and Restaurant is in LaMisión further south of the Half-Way House a few kilometers just over midway between Tijuana and Ensenada. It’s a truly divine “feel-good” place.
Dmytri always has the fireplace lit and roaring in his main dining room. One can even sit at the bar close to the street and view the fire with a view of the waves on either side. On this nippy morning I felt sure Dmytri would have plenty of wood to keep the fire well fed.
The large bay windows on both sides of the ample fireplace provide breathtaking views of the sea. One can view the rows of waves along the arching coastline for a few kilometers south until they disappear behind the tip of the crescent coast and into the horizon. One can also look north and see far up the coast. No other place on Earth provides the best of both pleasures juxtaposed, in my experience. Not that I’ve seen so far.
That huge fireplace provides elemental warmth and a feeling of joy into the emotional depths of the primitive psyche. Then there’s the motherly warmth of the view of the sea. It doesn’t get better anywhere—especially for the price. Early bird dinners cost between $10 and $20, except for the lobster; and premium gin at happy hour costs only $5.00.
Dmytri's view of the Pacific Ocean on December 24th 2019. photo by Lonce Lamonte, all rights reserved.
Dymitri pays his bartenders $11 per day. I don’t know if he pays the waiters the same but this is what he told me a few months ago about the bartenders. Thus, I’m acutely aware of how much the bartenders are dependent upon tips.
Dymitri is from the Ukraine and is 84 years of age, although he tells some people he is 87 or 88. He exaggerates about his age to make himself older, according to his stunningly attractive wife, Sarah, who is in her seventies. She suggests he may tell people he is older than he really is in order to invite compliments. Dmytri loves to exaggerate facts in order to entertain. He can really tell a good story.
January 1, 2020, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced the minimum wage increase of 20% up from $5.40 per day to $6.50 per day starting this day one of 2020. Read carefully that this is not an increase to $6.50 per hour. I wrote $5.40 per day and now with an increase to $6.50 per day. Yes, you read that right. Now compare that with $15 an hour minimum wage now in many places in California.
So, we can do the math. $6.50 x 7 days equals $45.50 per week. So, for a month, let’s multiply that by 4.3 so we get to $195.65 a month. Thus, that’s the minimum wage for a month if a worker works full time at 40 hours a week.
A waiter down on the beach front in Puerto Nuevo told me last year that the average worker in the area earns about $230 to $250 per month. That’s for any kind of worker position.
I had a housekeeper in 2017 who kept trying to manipulate me into hiring her husband as a handyman when I knew well he was on workers’ compensation temporary disability. She described to me all his injuries, thus, I was well aware of what they all were. Yet, when I hired a couple of workers to install my shelves, she aggressively tried to persuade me to hire her husband. I refused, incensed that she would try to compel me to hire and pay wages to an individual who was collecting temporary disability.
I nearly fired her right on the spot just for asking me to do that. I should have. She further offended me by displaying such aggression. But that’s now history. Needless to say, I know way too much about injured workers collecting temporary disability and then working another job on the side. I was incensed that she would ask me to commit that kind of misdeed. But some people, I know, have no scruples or moral objections to such actions.
What I further found out is that my housekeeper’s husband, who was a building and construction worker, was receiving on workers’ compensation disability (the Mexican system equivalent to U.S. workers’ compensation temporary disability benefit) what calculates to $3.25 per day. Yes, this was his daily rate of compensation. This calculated to $22.75 per week.
I figured out one day that my housekeeper had stolen a large three-pack of lean ground beef out of my freezer. It was one of those jumbo packs from Costco. As I like to joke with people, I have the smallest freezer on the planet. So, for a mega-sized ground beef pack from Costco to no longer be present in my freezer a little larger than a large shoe box, would be hard for anyone to miss.
I fired that housekeeper. She had only worked for me for about five weeks. She was a classic manipulator in many ways. I figured her out quickly. Some people don’t know on which side their bread is buttered.
Someone told me recently that in the area just below the California border, I mean between the border and Ensenada, simple working class people mostly do not have a sense of the future. There are copious numbers of deportees in the area as well. This ex-pat Californian who’s been along the coast of Baja on and off for decades, stated that the majority of workers in the area only think about today and the moment, and can’t project into tomorrow. He gave a lengthy explanation about it and how it’s related to why his roof is so poorly repaired.
That impressed me to hear. I thought that’s probably part of the reason why my short-term housekeeper stole from me even when I had paid her over $500 for about five weeks of work at approximately 32 hours per week. I was paying her more than twice the minimum wage.
I thought over and over about her construction worker, injured-worker husband receiving $22.75 per week on temporary disability. That’s such a low rate of compensation that I continued to think about what it would be like to feel no sense of tomorrow.
If I were egregiously poor, I think, I could feel a sense of tomorrow if I could at least get back to Dmytri’s. On $5 for one martini, I could feel the wealth of the beauty there.
lonce@adjustercom.com, Lonce Lamonte, journalist and editor, adjustercom. Copyright adjustercom and Lonce Lamonte, all rights reserved
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