Created an account just to disagree with this. I’m sorry but this is a totally backwards attitude.
We need to get to a place where the labor of human beings has a globally defined fair minimum wage. It’s outrageous to me seeing the conditions at Foxconn where young college age children spend decades sitting on a production line doing skilled labor for a fraction of the US minimum wage in order to feed their families, where if they were compensated fairly they could spend that extra time getting an education to escape poverty. There’s no way to slice that that isn’t exploitation and the arguments supporting this won’t age well. It’s right next to slavery, it’s a high offense and we need to call it out bigtime and that we don’t really defines a low point in our moral stance. Because tomorrow we might just find that we are no longer at the top of the food chain and that generation are going to remember how we exploited their poverty to steal their time, keep them poor and keep them subservient.
> We need to get to a place where the labor of human beings has a globally defined fair minimum wage
That is just economic nonsense. Labor productivity of economy depends on utilization of capital and ideas in that economy and it is pretty hard to increase. Average wage per hour in that economy cannot be higher than average productivity per hour. If you set minimal wage higher than its productivity, then you just destroyed almost all legal employment and forced everyone to grey economy or subsistence agriculture.
It’s not nonsense to pay a fair wage. It’s basic human decency. Actually, it’s a sacred obligation. If someone gives you some of their time - literally a slice of their living experience, to help you build your wealth then you need to compensate them fairly. It’s not complicated, not at all. I’d like a detailed explanation as to why you think a young skilled worker in China deserves less than an American performing the same task. Explain it to me like you would face to face with a Foxconn worker over coffee after a 10 hour shift on the production line. Explain that economic nonsense like I’m five
You are right - equal pay for equal work is an easy concept to understand - it is basic fairness. Instead, Africans are played off against local labor groups and it leads to structural imbalances like women still being paid only 82 cents on the $. And folks go around ridiculing equal-pay advocates as "social justice warriors in SF or NY" or "self-anointed do-gooders"!
