Hacker News Reader

Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

The author argues against fair and equal salaries because… T-shirts made in Bangladesh might become more expensive? Because people in foreign nations might be paid more? This feels very similar to the common arguments against raising the minimum wage, and I really don’t buy it.

View on HN

I didn't read it as arguing against or for anything. Rather, I read it as "I really want <this>; extended to its logical conclusion, that would also suggest <this> which I don't want. Conundrum!"

It even says at the end, "I’m not here to make any grand pronouncements about globalisation… My only point is that, when it comes to “location-based pay”, maybe we should be careful what we wish for." I take that as a pretty explicit "hey, this is difficult and I don't have a good answer".

The value of a T-Shirt is pretty low and manual labor can only produce a few T-shirts per hour. That forces T-Shirt production to go to low cost labor countries. If you could somehow train those workers to produce 10x as many T-Shirts they would also get paid 10x as much.

There simply isn't enough value to pay them more. Software is the opposite. Each worker produces a lot of value so companies can afford to pay them more.

A few decades ago western countries were worried that Japan would take over the electronics market because they could produce much cheaper there. In reality Japan went up the value chain and Japanese products are just as expensive as in any other western nation.

> There simply isn't enough value to pay them more.

Why? If your answer is “Because a T-shirt isn’t valuable”, then that’s a circular argument.

Mass market T-shirts are worth some maximum amount to consumers. It’s a circular argument with its center rooted in this fact.

A T-shirt manufacturing employee’s wage is capped as some fraction as the value of that shirt to an end consumer times the number of shirts they can make in a year.

But how much would consumers pay for clothing if mass-market clothing (which is only possible due to low wage labour) wasn't available? What with clothing being pretty essential to everyday living, I'd guess quite a bit more than the current market value of a t-shirt.

If you’re going to charge $100 for a shirt, I’m sure not going to have drawers and drawers full of your shirts. The first reactions will be sharply reduced consumption, increased repair and secondhand purchasing, long before people are going topless.

I can't find it now but I read an article once with a title like "The $10,000 Shirt" or something like that, which argued that in medieval times, the amount of labour that it took to produce a single shirt would cost about $10,000 at modern minimum wage.

If you were a peasant back then you might have owned two shirts: your regular one that you wore every day, and a 'fancy' one for church, weddings etc.. When your shirt got too ragged you cut it up and tailored it into clothes for your children, or used the material to patch up holes in other clothing. When even those got too decrepit you'd use them as kitchen rags etc. until they literally disintegrated. Cloth was too valuable to waste!

We truly do live in a world of abundant excess in the modern era, and we should appreciate it.

> We truly do live in a world of abundant excess in the modern era, and we should appreciate it.

We do, as in you and I, sure. But isn't the point here that those making things like mass-market t-shirt for very low wages are not sharing in that world of excess. At least not in an equitable manner.

Why is it that these people should work for low wages so that you and I can enjoy cheap T-shirts, but I'm not expected to produce websites and computer programs for low wages so that people can enjoy cheap business tools?

Scarcity of people who can create websites and computer programs as compared to the demand for that vs the lack of scarcity of people capable to make T-shirts vs the demand for makers of T-shirts.

This is in large part driven by most website development being semi or entirely custom. (People who use Shopify to make storefronts or Facebook to make company landing pages don’t make the same amount as Shopify or Facebook devs.)

It seems to me that much like remote workers often get location-based pay which is lower than that for someone for doing the same work in a location like San Francisco or NYC, it's less that there is oversupply of t-shirt makers, and more that the pay rates of their local market are lower overall which puts them in a weaker bargaining position.

And when you start looking at why that is you get pretty awkward answers like: because of selectively enforced free market ideals where capital is free to move across borders but labour isn't. Which are ultimately backed up by military power.

A thing is “worth” whatever people are willing to pay for it. T-shirts are cheap because they are cheap. Diamonds are expensive because they are expensive. But perceptions can be changed, and circles can be broken. These things are not unalterable.

If you doubled the hourly wage of the workers in Asia or Africa, the price of a 20 Euro T-shirt sold in Europe would increase by.... 20 cents (incl. VAT).

Companies do this because they are not hold liable for the environmental damage done locally and by the transport, not even mentioning the low safety standards etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com