$5

“These people are earning less than $5 a month.” I think Kaicito’s argument is valid. It is true that when we are talking about people’s income specific to a country, we cannot simply the monetary value between one country and another. If we look across the globe, $5 in Mozambique might be different with $5 in China or Malaysia or Brazil. Hence, just by saying that some people in a certain country are earning $5 a month is not adequate enough to say that they are worse off compared to other people in different country. Perhaps, what we should do is to actually look at their purchasing power parity in each country. And then we can say the payment that they receive for their labour is worth it or not. Well, when I came to this conclusion, it doesn’t mean I am a very strong supporter of Starbucks because I don’t drink coffee. Haha. But one thing for sure, by this time, Starbucks would have sorted out this slave labour issue. It’s because we have seen companies’ image tarnished for a while because of this issue for example, Cadbury, Nike, and Nestle. And I think the number of companies in this world who still use slave labour is almost none. Ciao.

Comments

kaicito said…
wow, thanks for referring and responding to my comment!
while i'm no economist, i think that wage differences are at the core of the globalization situation... a case in point is Electrolux recently closing down their washing machine factory in Germany and moving it to Poland, where people work for a fraction of German wages. and i presume once Polish wages go up significantly, production will again move elsewhere.
as a (small) investor in some multinational companies, i do hope they're paying their workers a reasonable and livable wage, wherever their factories are.
Saturday, January 28, 2006 11:51:00 AM
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