alt text: 18 of our 40 employees are located in the Philippines. Insanely competent, great judgement, and $5 per hour. If you run a small business and don’t have overseas help you’re at a disadvantage
alt text: 18 of our 40 employees are located in the Philippines. Insanely competent, great judgement, and $5 per hour. If you run a small business and don’t have overseas help you’re at a disadvantage
I understand your argument, but a living wage in the Phillipines is lower than a living wage in the US. As long as the employer is properly compensating their employees, I think it’s unfair to blame said employer for the Philippines’ economy. Even if this transaction is more beneficial to the US than the Phillipines, it would still benefit the Philippines, no? More outsourcing should mean a more trained labor force and greater purchasing power from exchanging USD for pesos.
Think of labor as a resource like food, coal, iron, etc. A country only has so much labor power just as it only has so much of it’s natural resources. When it comes to building a country as efficiently as possible in which the most people are benefitted would you rather have foreigners take your limited natural resources for a payment that while helpful makes you eventually dependent on them or would you rather use that resource to build an economy with solid foundation based on local industry?
The thing about proper compensation under capitalism is that it doesn’t exist. A person is paid enough to cover their cost of living and the rest of the value their labor produces is owned by their employer. So even within capitalism that labor value is is more secure if it is kept within ones own borders.
This isn’t a perfect explanation I don’t think but I hope you get what I mean
Using your analogy, you can argue that training and work experience provided by a foreign company is like building ports, roads, or other infrastructure that is necessary for trade. Infrastructure, as long as it’s used well, is undeniably good for a country.
Also, if wages were based on net revenue generated from a worker, that would 1. be impossible to measure, and 2. remove any incentive for a company to hire Filipino workers.
Another issue is that you really can’t build a country efficiently like the way you describe it. Trade is necessary to get good technology, and investment is needed to get said technology within your country’s borders. Effectively banning trade is just like shooting yourself in the foot and getting your other 3 limbs chopped off.
That is why it is not a perfect analogy. Training, skills, and information are not specifically a foreign resource. It is not something that is generously provided to 3rd would countries by places like the US. There’s why these can’t be cultivated domestically. Not to mention most exported labor isn’t exactly “skilled labor” (hate that term but it gets the point across).
Wages being based on net revenue generated from a specific worker would be difficult to calculate but it wouldn’t be so hard to distribute profits among types of labor based on their value to the company. Though I don’t think thats a solution at all, I don’t think companies should exist and I don’t think the profit motive should exist to be clear; I’m just trying to argue within the bounds of capitalism here.
I never said anything about not trading, trade is incredibly important because not every nation can manufacture everything domestically. Not every nation has every resource etc etc. letting foreign “investors” control your labor force and direct your economy is however, a terrible idea. Its a short term solution to long term problems. Unfortunately not every country has much of a choice though.
Give it up. Buncha kids in here white knighting for Philipinos they don’t even know.