It's Time For A Global Minimum Wage

[polly7]

By Jason Hickel

Source: Aljazeera

Friday, June 14, 2013

The real problem has to do with the way the global labour market works. Because of neoliberal economic policies imposed over the past few decades, companies now have the power to rove the globe in search of what CEOs refer to as the "best investment conditions". Poor countries like Bangladesh have to compete with other poor countries to attract much-needed foreign capital by offering the lowest minimum wages, the flimsiest safety standards, the cheapest taxes, and so on. Most economists justify this destructive "race to the bottom" under the banner of "comparative advantage".

As part of this deal, companies no longer have to bargain with local workers - they can opt out of the social contract whenever it suits them. If workers in Savar, say, got together to demand better wages or safety standards, the companies that use them would just start sourcing from somewhere else, leaving them unemployed. Such a move wouldn't take more than a mouse-click at the headquarters of Gap or Wal-Mart.

To put it bluntly, the global labour market is rigged in the interest of multinational companies; it is designed to allow them to pump value out of human bodies - mostly poor, brown, female bodies - as efficiently as possible. Those bodies generate the enormous wealth that flows into corporate coffers, but only a fraction of it goes back to them in wages - the vast majority gets pocketed as profits and CEO bonuses.

This process of appropriation - or theft, really - helps explain the shocking trends in global inequality that we have seen over the past few decades, to the point where the richest 200 people now have more wealth than the poorest 3.5 billion - more than half of the world's population.

Full article: http://www.zcommunications.org/its-time-for-a-global-minimum-wage-by-jason-hickel

[annabanana]

1. Yes!

Elevate the world's workers!

[cstanleytech]

2. But how exactly do you decide what people should be paid in other countries when each country has

its own currency with different values compared to other currencies?
Wouldnt a global minimum wage need a global currency?

[angstlessk]

5. No there are currency markets that set the difference between

all other currencies vs the dollar...say minimum wage in the US is 15.00 (I wish) then it would be equal in the currency of each nation.

[djean111]

6. That's addressed somewhat in the article.

The suggestion is to make each country's minimum wage a percentage of the prevailing wage, or something along those lines.
And it is recognised that even that would leave many many people still mired in poverty.
(my first thought, when reading the OP was along the lines of Yeah, let's pay everybody a dollar a day, corporation would adore that.)

[Warpy]

3. As predatory corporations hop from country to country

in search of the cheapest people possible to produce goods, leaving polluted land and the shattered dreams of abandoned workers behind them, I think support for this idea will grow.

It's either that or a resurgence of Marxism. Really.

[The Magistrate]

4. Past Time, Ma'am