20/06/2026
An Open Letter to the Government of Sint Maarten: Raise Wages Before We Lose This Generation
Sint Maarten runs on the backs of its workers — yet too many of those workers cannot afford to raise their own children. This is not a parenting crisis. It is a wages crisis, and it is quietly costing us our youth.
The Math That No Family Should Have to Live With
As of January 2026, the minimum wage on Sint Maarten sits at XCG 10.93 an hour — roughly ANG 1,899.63 a month for a full-time worker. That follows years of small adjustments, most recently a wage update effective January 1, 2026.
Meanwhile, a modest one-bedroom apartment on the island rents for anywhere from $900 to $2,500 a month. Industry groups themselves acknowledge the imbalance: while housing typically takes up around 30% of income in countries like the US or the Netherlands, most people on St. Maarten spend 50% to 60% of their salary just on housing.
Do that math with us. A single minimum-wage income cannot cover rent, food, utilities, and transportation — let alone leave room for savings, school supplies, or a sick day. So parents take a second job. Then a third shift. Not out of neglect, but out of necessity.
What Happens When Parents Disappear From the Home
When both parents are working back-to-back jobs just to keep a roof over their children’s heads, something has to give — and it’s time. Time to ask about a child’s day. Time to check homework. Time to simply be there when a teenager is making a decision that will shape who they become.
Without school structure, without jobs of their own, and without guidance at home, our teens are left idle and unsupervised — not because they are bad kids, but because no one has had the time to show them otherwise. Children are not born knowing right from wrong. They learn it from the adults around them. When wages force those adults out of the home for 12, 14, 16 hours a day, that lesson simply doesn’t happen — and the street fills in the gap instead.
The Cost Is Showing Up on Our Roads
Drive through our neighborhoods and you’ll see it: teenagers on bikes and scooters, weaving through traffic at reckless speeds, some clearly riding under the influence. The numbers back up what residents already see. In one recent nine-month stretch, the Sint Maarten Police Force logged over 600 road accidents — roughly two every single day — with speeding, reckless lane changes, and riders hopping scooters in and out of traffic among the most cited causes. Local reporting has tracked a continued rise in scooter and moped crashes, many resulting in severe head injuries or death, often involving young, unhelmeted riders.
These aren’t reckless kids for the sake of it. Many are bored, unsupervised, and quietly struggling, with no school to structure their day and no job to give them purpose. For some, the recklessness isn’t carelessness about life — it’s a symptom of not seeing much to live for. That combination is what’s now turning up as accidents, injuries, and young lives lost on our streets.
A teenager who feels like no one has time for them, who has no school and no work and no clear future, doesn’t arrive at that place by accident. It is the predictable result of a household stretched too thin to notice the warning signs. This is why wages cannot be treated as a separate issue from road safety or youth mental health — they are the same issue.
Our Community Isn’t Waiting on Government to Act
While we wait for policy to catch up, some of us are already doing what we can. This July, Coffee Lounge Frontstreet — owned by Seema — will open its doors to teens completely free of charge, no purchase necessary, every day from 3 PM to 6 PM for the entire month. The space will be filled with board games and books ( we need people to donate the books they are not using in good condition ), with Seema herself supervising and creating the kind of environment where teens can simply be kids again — playing together the way our generation did, before empty afternoons and idle hands became the norm. Quietly, through conversation rather than lecture, she’ll be sharing the life lessons and guidance many of these kids aren’t getting anywhere else right now.
It’s one small business, doing what it can, with no funding and no mandate — just because someone cared enough to try. Imagine what’s possible if government got behind efforts like this instead of leaving them to chance.
This Is a Solvable Problem
We are not asking for charity. We are asking the government to recognize a simple truth: a wage that cannot cover rent is not a living wage — it’s a slow-motion crisis for every family trying to live on it.
We call on the Government of Sint Maarten to:
1. Raise the minimum wage to reflect actual cost of living — not just CPI, but real rent and food prices on this island.
2. Invest in youth employment and after-school programs, so idle time isn’t the default for teens without school or work.
3. Expand affordable housing options, so families aren’t forced to choose between a roof and time together.
4. Review this annually with input from working families, not just employers.
Every dollar spent fixing this now is cheaper than the cost of a lost generation later — in social services, in policing, in young lives that never got the chance their parents wanted for them.
Our children didn’t choose this wage gap. But they are the ones paying for it.
It’s time to pay people enough to parent.
Seema Mirchandani Vaswani
