People and Businesses with Money

Today there is more money in the world than ever before. The 20 richest countries alone have an economy of over 100 trillion dollars each and every year. If that money was divided equally for every person on earth, we would all receive $15,000. That would be $1,250 (ONE THOUSAND TWO HUNDRED FIFTY U.S. DOLLARS) every month for each person, even including every baby! Every day we could spend $40. If you had a family of five people (wife and three children), you could spend $200 or $6,000.00 a month. Now, remember, this is only the money the richest countries make and does not even include the trillions and trillions of dollars the more than 200 not-so-rich other countries make. If you put all the money that the whole world makes every day, divide it up, we would get a lot more than just $15,000 a year.

Rich businesses are owned by rich people. And rich businesses make me mad. They have made me mad for more than 40 years. Every time I start to think that a rich business is good, I find out they are not. However, rich businesses control everything in our life and we have to do business with them but it is better to not support them so much. Rich businesses are greedy and they want more and more of poor people’s money and they invent different ways to get it.

This is true with the richest English language institute in Santa Cruz, the richest store in the world, the richest cell phone company in the United States and the richest mall in Santa Cruz.

For example, the richest store in the world goes into a town and opens its store. It makes sure that it sells everything cheaper so that all the other stores go out of business. After all the other stores go out of business, then it raises its prices. People who live in the United States think this store is wonderful, but I don’t. I think the world would be better off if there were no stores like this one. People who work at these stores are not happy because they are not treated right and they are not paid much. The real reason why this store is so popular is because people have become lazy and want everything they need in one store. Thanks to this store and thanks to people becoming lazy many many stores can no longer do business and must close their shops.

From 1974 until 1978 I worked at the richest English language school in Santa Cruz. At that time teachers who were from the United States or England were paid 75¢ (SEVENTY-FIVE CENTS) per hour for teaching and Bolivian teachers were paid 50¢ per hour. The teachers later wanted a Dollar an hour but the director said no. In the meeting I said: “But we teach 15, 20 and even 30 students. Only two students pay for what you give us.” He became furious and no longer talked to me. When I returned the following year for my classes he told me there were no students for me.

The same is true for the most expensive school in Santa Cruz. What they charge just one student is more than what they pay the teacher. A university in Santa Cruz asked me to teach students every day from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. but they could only pay me Bs. 350 per week. I found out that each student was paying Bs. 1,250 every month and I had 12 students in my class. Just one student was paying my salary, and the university could not pay me more?

In 1997 I started working in Houston, Texas with a cell phone company called GTE Wireless. It was a good company and it always tried to help the customers. They really loved their customers and taught us that it was the customer that was paying our salaries. Then the biggest and richest cell phone company bought them in 19999 and told us that we no longer needed to be good to the customers. One person in the company even said that the customer is NOT always right but that the customer is usually STUPID. Yes, this rich cell phone company called the people using their service STUPID! Our job, we were told, was to teach the customer to do what the company wanted them to do. If the customer did not like it, then they could go somewhere else for service but they had to first pay $250 to cancel their service. They told all the Spanish speaking workers to go home but still had a Spanish call-in number that never gave people any service. It was the year 2000 and this company made millions and millions of dollars charging them more. The customers were charged more on purpose. I saw that they were stealing but they saw nothing wrong with it. Many people were made to pay because they did not want it to affect their credit. Customers stopped doing business with this rich company but the rich owners did not care. They said that with every customer that left they could get five new and better customers. Their stealing and lying worked because they spent millions of dollars on advertising with a “Can you hear me now?” commercial than convinced everyone that their company was the best! The GTE Wireless office in Houston had 1200 workers, but the rich cell phone company made over 900 of them leave by making life difficult for them. I worked for this company for more than five years, half of that time as GTW Wireless and the other half as this rich cell phone company. I never like working for the rich cell phone company because it was all about money, money, money. They are biggest and they keep getting bigger, but they will steal from you if they can and they will pay their workers only what they have to by law. The owners invest in the network but only because that make it a better money-making machine.

My next example with a money-hungry company that I know of is a luxury mall in a poor country; Bolivia. When you come to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, there is a mall that is just like ones you find in the fancy rich places you find in the United States, Canada, Japan or Europe. It is very very expensive. I helped a young deaf man get a job there in their cleaning department.

These people at this mall have given me so many problems and they have cost me time and money. I am not their customer and I do not work for them. I was only a translator for someone I helped to get a job there. I can see it is because she and people like her are rich and they think that everyone needs to be their slaves. These are the people of class and the people of privilege. I thought that this company, this luxury mall, would pay a little more money but they do not. They only pay the minimum they are allowed by the government to pay, which is only about $1 an hour.

Not only do they pay the people who work at the mall very little money, they also make them slaves. They do not even respect the laws of the country. When I give office information about permission deaf people need for their education and said it was the law, like paying taxes, the person in charge of the cleaning department proudly told me that she does not pay taxes and that she has never paid any taxes. She was not going to give permission for the deaf man to attend a conference.

The poor people who work at cleaning this luxury mall in Santa Cruz cannot ask for time to attend any emergency and not even an event when notice is given to them four months ahead of time. Why? Because they only have just enough people to cover the work of making the mall perfectly clean all the time. One person cannot be missing, ever! If a worker cannot get to work, like if his mother dies or he is seriously ill, he must pay someone to take his place! If this mall cared anything for the people that work there cleaning, they would hire a few extra people to be “on call”, that means these extra workers would cover those who need to take a day off for a sick child, a death in the family, a responsibility or a special event. But they do not do that, they will not do that. Why? Because it would cost them a little more money and they want all the money they can get. Plus, they believe, (yes, they have really told me) that if you give one favor to one of these poor people, everyone will expect the same favor!

Many times rich people do not think correctly because they are selfish, and they only think of themselves. If their servant dies they wonder who will clean for them. They really care little about others and this is why there is so much suffering in the world. The cleaning people at this mall suffer because management cares so little about them. In Bolivia, people who clean are not given respect nor are they valued. Bolivian rich people are royalty and those who clean are their slaves. Rich people only pay poor people what they have to pay and nothing more.

This article, written in Basic English, is the first of many to come. I hope many rich people and businesses read this can try to prove to themselves and others that they are not like the selfish people I describe in this article. I believe, as human beings, we should all try and make life easier for those we do business with, not harder. We should pay as much as we can, not as little as we can.