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When I was 16 I spent the summ...,
2004-04-11 19:11:25
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My problem with sentiments lik...,
2004-04-12 12:01:45
listen, o peasants:
$40 billion in back-pay is really nothing, see:
Nicholas Lardy, a China expert at the Institute for International Economics, argues: "I just find it quite frankly very implausible that if Chinese workers have the right to organize, they could raise their wages by the amounts suggested [in the AFL-CIO petitition]".
The AFL-CIO has said elsewhere that "if the Chinese government enforced workers' rights and its own minimum wage and workplace standards, manufacturing costs there would rise between 12 and 77 percent, or an average of 44 percent", the petition in question is only somewhat less detailed. I'm not sure what Lardy is smoking, the article he is quoted in notes that employers in China refused to pay $40 billion in wages in 2002, and that's before enforcing the minimum wage. If the pay is some 30 cents an hour fulltime yearly would be $672 and that $40 billion in unfulfilled obligations alone would pay that yearly wage to 60 million people, doubling the income of any migrant factory worker who got paid in the first place. It's frankly implausible that if contracts were enforced that that alone wouldn't raise wages by the amounts suggested, and it'd still be criminally cheap.
:: posted by buermann @ 2004-04-12 10:40:51 CST |
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