The Banker and the Maid

 

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There is much debate over the benefits of IMF policies in Africa. For both sides see http://tinyurl.com/IMFhardship and http://tinyurl.com/IMFbenefits

International Monetary Fund Managing Director and, before he was charged, likely candidate for the French Presidency, Dominique Strauss-Kahn now sits in a cell on Rikers Island charged with assaulting the maid in his $3,000 a night hotel suite.  How long do you think the maid has to work to earn that?  One BBC report I heard last night said he likely would have been charged a discounted rate of  $800/night.  Still, I pose the same question.

I checked out hotel maid’s salaries in New York City on PayScale.com.  I ran reports with a few different sets of variable.  don’t know how long she has worked at that hotel, whether she has a supervisory role or how that hotel’s pay scale compares with others.  It seems like she might have made something in the neighborhood of $20/hour.  That’s $800 per week, i.e. the reduced rate Strauss-Kahn would have paid for one night!  The per capita Gross Domestic Product of Guinea, the woman’s home country, is $1,000 annually!  Mull that over in your brain for a minute.  If I heard those figures correctly, the room that the Managing Director of the IMF occupies in NYC costs 3 times the Gross Domestic Product of Guinea at full rate.  Fortunately the IMF is fiscally responsible and they insist on a discount rate.  They pay only 80% of Guinea’s GDP for EACH and EVERY night!

It boggles my mind.   I know that I am a cultural studies person and not an MBA, but I am pretty smart.  And I did fairly well in the Macroeconomics classes I took in college in the hopes that I could understand such things.  I guess it didn’t work.

Particularly ironic to me is the fact that one of the primary purposes of the IMF is to make loans to developing nations in order to reduce poverty, and his alleged victim was a young immigrant from Guinea!  I say alleged because I am a believer in the doctrine of innocent until proven guilty and learned in journalism classes that this is a protection afforded to those charged with, but not convicted of a crime.  If he is eventually proven guilty, I hope he gets the harshest allowable penalty.  I can’t imagine a more repulsive abuse of power and position than for a man at the top of one of the world’s strongest financial institutions to attack a woman from the developing world sent to clean his hotel room!