Hacker News Reader

Comment by ihsw | Hacker News Reader

Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation.

"Exploitation" is a relative term, some people would rather be exploited in the countryside of a first-world nation rather than the countryside of their homeland.

View on HN

> Being paid $5/hour farming in Australia vs $0.50/hour assembling shoes in Malaysia. Wow, such exploitation.

The Australian national minimum wage is $19.84/hr.

Getting paid about a quarter of minimum wage is very clearly exploitation. There may be other benefits for actually working in Australia, but that's not really relevant here when you're trying to attract native Australians to work for you.

In particular, when the wage is low enough you have slavery in all but name. People working for your shitty pay staying in your shitty dormitory eating your shitty food because they can't afford not. The end result people leaving when visas run out with more debt, and headlines about people forced to pick fruit in bikinis and allegations of sexual assault, because that happens when some people gain that sort of power.

Yes, they are both exploitation and they are both evil.

Which is more exploitative, working for $5/hour in agriculture in a wealthy country, 50¢/hour in an urban factory in a poor country, or $1/day in a rural peasant village somewhere or having no work at all?

It’s all relative.

That's a bit like asking, "Which is worse? A shot to the head or an overdose of morphine?" Either way the person's going to die.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com