Categories
Antiwork

Working in Belize, from the perspective of an average citizen.

First of all, this is more of a rant to get it off my chest so sorry in advance. To start off, let me state that this is mostly based off my knowledge of Belize district, as I haven't had as much conversation with people from the other districts as I have my own. So as with any poorly developed country, most “average” people here live in poverty, or very close to it. With the minimum wage pre-covid being only $3.30bzd(1.65usd) most of us that grew up in that time were unable to afford going to university, hell, a good portion of the citizens couldn't even afford going to highschool as pre-2010 government didn't do squat if jobs were under-paying (I'd know as my mother worked 50 hours a week and only made 150bzd) This has gotten a bit better now as the government has finally started shaping up somewhat…


First of all, this is more of a rant to get it off my chest so sorry in advance.

To start off, let me state that this is mostly based off my knowledge of Belize district, as I haven't had as much conversation with people from the other districts as I have my own.
So as with any poorly developed country, most “average” people here live in poverty, or very close to it.
With the minimum wage pre-covid being only $3.30bzd(1.65usd) most of us that grew up in that time were unable to afford going to university, hell, a good portion of the citizens couldn't even afford going to highschool as pre-2010 government didn't do squat if jobs were under-paying (I'd know as my mother worked 50 hours a week and only made 150bzd)
This has gotten a bit better now as the government has finally started shaping up somewhat but it's led to a large majority of us who grew up in that generation only getting as far as our highschool education, which in turn means the few jobs that wanna hire us are either hard labor jobs that only pay the recently increased $5bzd minimum wage or call centers which in Belize are widely known to treat their workers as shit.

Honestly, we Belizeans have been hoping for an increase to our minimum wage for so long only to be disappointed when living expenses(food, rent, electricity) increased with it, don't even get me started on our corrupt water supplier that belongs to the government and has recently for some unknown reason started charging between 2-3 times the prices before covid.

And know as for our work, most non highschool / highschool graduates are forced to work for the Chinese who have basically taken over the fastfood and household appliance buiseneses in Belize, they'll hire pretty much anyone without a criminal record but for the majority of the ones I and my colleagues have worked for, they basically treat us like damn slaves, working us for 45-60 hours a week, with barely any water(some don't even offer, and some of the worst don't even let you drink your own as your wasting valuable time) with no health insurance even in the most dangerous of jobs, and they'll constantly be looking for reasons to dock your pay.
I'm still only 25 and I've developed back sciatica working for those damn people and i already wanna just give up completely.

Tldr: Belize sucks, working in Belize sucks, I wish I could leave to a better country.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *