Where I live, there are thousands of drivers and dispatchers, pier workers and cargadores, vendors and hawkers, sales workers, GROs, plain housewives and freelance sex workers, illegal drug peddlers and shady underworld operators. Name it and we have them in the city that has been their easy playground in the past few years. Economists have classified them all as belonging to the ‘underground economy’, their practitioners being perennially tax exempt.
Add in a few thousand more factory workers, white collar executives and government employees, and we have a composite population that is found in other Philippine cities in their varying quantities and undesirable qualities, that sometimes you’ll have second thoughts about the wisdom of keeping them alive.
I’m pretty sure those in government will weather the storm so long as their political fortunes do not change or their protectors do not change their minds about their protégés. Government cannot be expected to go bankrupt considering its parasitic nature, its tendency to squeeze the population dry with onerous taxation and propensity to borrow when its coffers are empty. Like the Catholic clergy, government functionaries can only become richer and richer even when crisis suffocates the rest of the population. Thus, all those in one way or another earning their daily bread from either of these two sources can’t fare too badly.
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Farmers and fishermen have been used to survival techniques since childhood. For centuries, in fact. If they have been able to survive unscathed for 20 or more years, they’ll come out with flying colors in the next few years, while the rest of the world will be howling about the recession and unemployment and the falling of stock markets and the Dow Jones averages. Farmers will keep on producing food in times of scarcity. I have seen this in my almost daily trek to the farm where sloping hills by the roadside have been planted to upland rice and corn when the rice shortages forced long lines of buyers outside NFA retailers. These slopes used to be devoted to flowers and vegetables.
Like their inland counterparts, fishermen will always go out to sea when weather permits and the sea does not look too rough for their small boats. The assorted fishes sold at the market are proof to their unflagging industry and tireless search for food. Happily for them, the price of fish rises in inverse proportion to our increasing miseries.
Those employed in the private sector – sales workers, drivers, bookkeepers and accountants, clerks, janitors and delivery boys – can’t fare too badly either because the enterprises that they serve sell basic goods (food and consumer items) and services. These are goods people can’t do without – and you can safely include cell phones in your list. I can only think of call center agents as the possible victims of this recession, dependent as they are on global connections. But since most agents are highly talented people, they can easily find new jobs elsewhere. So why worry about them?
This leaves us with the sector operating in the underground economy, the sector that thrives on sheer wits and a little capital, on native ingenuity and knowledge of the marketplace, on a keen sense of supply and demand that the more educated classes can’t see, and on a boundless capacity to endure adversities, honed as they are on the edges of survival. This is the sector that has eluded government accountants and collectors, a sector that counts its income and expense not with calculators but with their heads. This is the sector that keeps our city’s economy alive at night, where transactions are made underneath folding umbrellas, dingy bars and barbecue stands, and a host of adventures take place unseen. This sector should be the least of our worries because recession or not, it will keep on thriving.
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