Driver Earns P50 a Day to Feed his Family

INCREDIBLE BUT TRUE BECAUSE OF COVID-19

By Mortz C. Ortigoza

The economics’ stocks of these motorized trike drivers turned ugly after the pandemic’s Corona Virus Disease-19 continues to wreck havoc in and out of the country.

I bumped into Manuel “Amboy” Rivera, 35, the guy I interviewed for our newspaper weeks after the lock down in March, how he fared ferrying passengers near a university in Dagupan to any point of the city and her nearby towns’ Mangaldan, Calasiao, and Binmaley.

“It's getting worse, sir” he told me in Pangasinan

 I asked him how much he pays for a day's “boundary” or rent to the owner of the trike, the gas money he spent, and what dough left him for his family’s expenses.

“Say i-iter kod samay operator P150. Say gasolinak isakoy agew et P100. P50 labat lay atilak ed siak (I remitted P150 for the operator. My gasoline expenses for a day was P100. What left for me was P50),” he lamented in Pangasinan.

“P50?! I reacted incredibly.

“Yes sir P50 na lang,” he retorted.

SORRY DRIVERS. Author poses as motorized tricycle driver while flanked by drivers whose look did not betray them to earn a pathetic sum daily because of the scarcity of commuters in Dagupan City due to the bogey of the lethal Corona Virus Disease-19 that continues to rampage globally.

Another tricycle driver Rommel Lazona,4, a migrant from Mindanao, collaborated what Amboy narrated to me.

“Totoo iyan sir. Sa akin P300 gross kita ko. P120 boundary ko sa amo ko pero sa gasolina P100 na may naiwan ako na P80 para sa pamilya ko”.

Doggone it! I could not imagine how the measly fifty or eighty pesos could buy a meal three times a day to feed a downtrodden nuclear family of five.

They said some if not many of their fellow tricycle drivers used to have – pre-COVID time - a net earning (after they deducted their P120- P150 boundary fee to the owner and P100 gas expenses) of P400 to P300 a day.

These fares' heydays ensued when students from Lyceum Northwestern University, Mother Goose (Special Science School), La Sallete, Dominican, La Maria, Edna School, and City National High School teemed by thousands in the streets where they had all the day's servicing them during those school days.

But all of them disappeared in thin air after the government mandated that schools do online and modular learning for their students to avoid being struck by the lethal pandemic.

Aside from the lethargic number of customers patronizing McDonalds - Tapuac and some food chains like the famous Nigerian owned Shawarma nearby, banks like BPI, China Bank and BDO, and money and cargo carriers' Palawan, Cebuana Lhuillier, and LBC the human traffic significantly dwarfed to the magnitude of people that appeared on the streets there before COVID-19 wrought havoc early this year.

“They should be shifting their jobs like working in the construction,” my son Niko butted in when I told the deplorable story of these drivers to my wife Miles.

“But there are no construction jobs available in the city and the nearby towns. Even in Manila jobs are still scarce,” I told Nico.

But Hernan “Balong” Cabunot, 26, my other motorized trike - interviewee last March and May 2020 for our newspaper, told me that the income of each of the more than a dozen of his fellow drivers who parked their vehicles across McDonald fluctuated everyday.

“Depende sa araw. Gaya sa akin P350 kada araw halos akin na lahat iyan kasi ako ang may ari ng tricycle”.

He said if he deducted the P150 a day gas because of the lenght of time picking up passengers. He has P200 a day without worrying about the day’s rent of the vehicle.

He said the lease of the tricycle is P150 to the operator if the driver brings it home after the dusk trip and P100 if he returned it to the owner after the 6 P.M service.

Manuel “Amboy” Rivera and Davao Fruits' employee

Galman Torres in a huddle while both wait

for their customers.

“Before the pandemic I can earn P500 a day net because there were students and other people in the periphery,” he told me in Tagalog.

He cited that some of his fellow trike drivers left the trade for construction sites work in the city and Pangasinan Province because the daily pay there is P400.

“But it is a tough job because you have to labor under the scorching sun and you have to lift heavy loads”.

The drivers told me they envied the 43 years old Galman Torres – the all-around employee of Davao Fruits located just across McDonald.

“Mabuti pa si Galman walang asawa tapos nag sasahod ng arawan ng P400 (Davao Fruits gives him his pay daily not monthly, higher than the P282 minimum wage of 1-9 workers’ business in Region-1, because he spends whatever money in his pocket to booze with friends after store closes at 5:30 P.M)".

 "Kami P80 a day lang ang kita may pamilya pa,” Rommel grudgingly admired Galman – known as perennial drunkard at dusk because of his alcoholism problem.

READ MY OTHER BLOG/COLUMN:

                Drivers Resort to Loan to Avoid Hunger

(You can read my selected columns at http://mortzortigoza.blogspot.com and articles at Pangasinan News Aro. You can send comments too at totomortz@yahoo.com)