Unbounded

Hullo. This time, I’ll be babbling on the underground economy of barkers.

Dirty Laundery

The journalist inside me (tabloid?) sparked again when I first wrote about the existence and prevalence of barkers in the metropolis, gleefully shouting and pretending to help my fellow commuters, free from apprehension, and more noticeably, free from the arms of the law (ehem, to sidetrack, I was told that barkers are now required to get their licensees. As to licensures to do what, I do not have a clue. And we psychologists have been battling it out in our country’s legislation to get our practice license).

Anywho, I interviewed a jeepney driver in Manila and asked about these schmucks. He revealed to me that barkers are actually in cahoots with the law (isn’t that something new), that the money they get from tips serves two purposes: that one, they are indeed tips given by FX and jeepney drivers as appreciation for their help in facilitating passenger boarding; and (a darker one) two, that it also serves as dirty money, somewhat a bribery to the law (well, not really to the law but to the policemen covering these road areas), so that they would turn a blind eye to colorum public transports.

In other words, barkers serve as kotong launderers.

Another interesting note to be taken is that the (eloquent)driver that I talked to specifically mentioned that a barker (together with hisno good police friends or corrupt people in the barangay) would be able to fill up a bucketful of coins from their day’s worth of racket. As to how much? Five hundred pesos worth (assuming that the law already got their cut) - well more than enough to buy themselves bottles of their local cheap gin to disinfect their livers with every night.

Well now, isn’t that something? An organized underground economy of kotong laundering.

I wasn’t content with what that jeepney driver said that day so I sought out to do some statistical analysis. Yep, I’m serious. I was able to compute and test whether a barker would be able to earn 500 pesos worth of tips a day using inferential statistical analysis (t-test).

Counting Change

I used a two tailed t-test inferential statistical analysis to see whether it’s true or not.

Of course, one would have to take liberties as to the “workhours” of a barker, since no one in his right mind would ask him about his set schedule of labor. So, I assumed that a barker would assume his duty (as a euphemism for “work”), about five (5) hours aday (intermittently from 1pm to 10pm, from my fragmented observations), for five hours a week.

Now, consider this observation matrix that I made on barker tips:

[link]

Filling in the blanks, assuming Mondays and Fridays as peak days (wherein more tips would be given at less amount of time, the mean tip amount / hour a barker would receive on a day would be arithmetic mean = P54.67 / 60 min

[link]

t = 0.6173, by conventional criteria (α = 0.05 levels ofsignificance), this difference is considered to be not statisticallysignificant. This means that the computed data of a barker earning of about P546.70 in ten hours (a day) is neither significantly bigger nor smaller from the P500/ day that the jeepney driver shared. This suggests that 1: it is possible to reach a P500 / day quota, and 2: that the actual data computed is probably smaller that what is actually being collected. Why? Think about the cuts the police and the kagawads would take before you are left with the assumed P500 peso-bucketful of coins for cheap gin story.

So there. I leave this one open for your inputs and interpretations.