The living wage in Bangladesh is €260 a month apparently.
No, that’s at market exchange rates. A country where GDP per capita is around €1500 a year should be paying a low end worker €3,100 a year before overtime.
At PPP exchange rates they’re saying that somewhere at about $3,300 per capita GDP should be paying $8,700 a year.
They’re just fucking insane these Clean Clothes people.
Entry level garment maker should, before overtime, get 150% of the salary of a high school teacher in the private sector.
Insane.
People in Bangladesh need tickets to the opera too I assume.
I wonder if they realise what happens when you start paying factory workers more than teachers and doctors?
Perhaps we should try it here. Lets start paying manual workers in schools (the janitor and groundsman say) £50-60k/yr and keep teachers on the same salary and see how long before the unions are screaming blue murder. About 1 nanosecond I’d guess.
magnusw>
I also wonder. It seems too obvious to miss. Are they thick as pigshit, or neo-racists who’ve worked out a way of calling for poor countries to lose their medics and schools that is acceptable to Guardian-reading types?
“the minimum wage levels fall far below what a person could live on”?
People are actually living on them!
People are actually living on them!
Not those who cannot envision any minimum wage level that doesn’t guarantee a comfortable middle-class standard of living.
That is key.
Jim – can imagine the union for the manual workers sticking up for its members while the other unions want more than that for their members. Unfair they will cry….
Like a teacher retiring in their 50s but the caretaker being forced to carry on to the day before 65tth birthday is fair…
Dave – surely the joos are involved? Somehow, anti-semitism must be the answer?
So, the “unforeseen circumstances” will be doctors and other professionals getting jobs in these garment factories instead.
Or perhaps the factory workers buying properties or being able to afford to live in places that middle-class professionals cannot, thus stoking the sort of seething envy of working class success that these Western liberals would enthusiastically share if it happened in this country.
I’m sure these people have mental processes which automatically shut down any thoughts such as “I wonder what would happen if…” CLANG!! Crimethought!
Theo>
Amazingly enough, the people who subtly blame ‘the jooz’ for everything also hate people of the darker-skinned persuasion, and put the same tactics to work.
“These people are insane”
Incorrect. They are evil.
“So, the “unforeseen circumstances” will be doctors and other professionals getting jobs in these garment factories instead.”
When I lived in Hong Kong 25 years ago my mother-in-law’s amah was a nice Philipinio lady with a degree in electrical engineering.
The chap who hoses the muck out of our local milking parlour is a qualified Filipino vet.
Chris,
Does that tell you about the value of a Filipino veterinarian qualification, or about the lack of profit means they can’t afford an automated milking shed and Filipino’s are cheaper?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are not dying of exposure, thirst or beri-beri you are ipso facto on a living wage.
But looks like they are just taking the high average as “living”. TBH in a place like Bangladesh that’s probably not far from the truth.
If GDP/cap is €1500, we’d surely roughly expect mean labour income per household (larger households than the west) of €3000, wouldn’t we? The main issue is that there are households on a tenth of that, roughly middle-class wage, a spread you just don’t see in the west.