Hmmm, which one of these names doesn’t fit with the others?
Okay, that’s obviously a rhetorical question. Pretty much everybody knows Angelina Jolie – star actress, tabloid favourite, married to Brad Pitt. If you’re at all attuned to professional sports, you know Alex Rodriguez is a superstar baseball player.
So who is Guillaume? Well, he’s just an average guy in Haiti. Nobody in particular – just a typical Haitian name I chose to represent that country.
So why throw those three names together? It’s a way of shedding light on how far wrong we’ve gone in assigning value to people by who they are or what they do.
Angelina Jolie is in an elite group of actresses – Reese Witherspoon, Cameron Diaz, Julia Roberts among others – who command $10 to $20 million dollars per movie. Yes, you heard right – per movie.
Alex Rodriguez checks in at $27.5 million per season as the most highly paid athlete. There is a laundry list of other athletes racking in seven figure salaries.
A little perspective: The average Canadian family income is $69,000. Let’s assume for the moment this is you and me. How many years would we have to work to match Jolie’s take for a single movie? Answer: 217. So much for Freedom 55.
Let’s back up a bit. What about the person earning minimum wage? Assuming they work 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, their annual income will be $21,320. That’s .14% of what Jolie commands for a few months work. Yes, the decimal point comes before the numbers.
There are a disturbing amount of people in this minimum wage category. A newspaper article in the Toronto Star today reported that 43.6 million people in the U.S. are living below the official U.S. “poverty line” of $29,954 for a family of four.
And then there’s Guillaume. He earns $2 a day which equates to $730 per year if he works 365 days a year. I won’t bother doing the math on what percentage his annual salary represents of Jolie’s take-home package.
But let’s calculate how many Guillaumes it would take in a one year period to match Jolie’s cool $15 million. The answer is about 20,600. And to match Rodriguez’s annual cheque – 37,620.
Okay, enough of the inequality math. The injustice of it is pretty self-evident. Those of us who are in the average Canadian income category have a right to be disgusted but not to pity ourselves. We’re damn fortunate in the grand scheme of things.
Guillaume is the metaphor I’d like to leave you with. He’s a metaphor for the stark injustice of a value system that’s off the map when it comes to judging people by who they are, where they live and what they do.
I’m sorry, Guillaume. It just isn’t right – and the worst of it is, everybody knows it.
~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of “Until the Deep Water Stills – An Internet-enhanced Novel” – double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.
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Tags: Alex Rodriguez · Angelina Jolie · injustice · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · povertyNo Comments