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In France, full-time contracted factory workers get paid the SMIC (minimum wage), which is currently around €1400 per month. There are various ways to hire work

In France, full-time contracted factory workers get paid the SMIC (minimum wage), which is currently around €1400 per month. There are various ways to hire workers for lower wages, such as summer interns, who are typically only entitled to the third of the minimum wage. Similarly, Eastern European facilities typically pay workers the local minimum wage, which is in the range of €200-600, depending on the country. It sounds like you're pretty convinced that non-western workers are less skilled so there's no point me commenting on that, but I'll try. People want to be doctors, engineers and lawyers, not lathe operators or metal workers. Training low skilled labour is really not that difficult, it's just that in more developed economies anyone who's at least a bit good at anything has the opportunity to find a better career, which is not necessarily true in less developed countries. In those countries, more skilled or competent people end up doing manual jobs simply because of the lack of opportunities. Managing low skilled labour is very different from managing highly qualified professionals. These workers (whether French, Bulgarian, American or Chinese) typically can't work independently in an efficient manner and need constant supervision and micro-management, that's what foremen are for. Basically, if you want your factory workers to be productive, you have to run your factory as a Nazi labour camp. (This is obviously an exaggeration but you get my point.)

briandon 14y ago
Ultra-skilled workers in developing countries tend to make their way to developed countries in order to earn more. That leaves low/un-skilled workers behind. Both Romania and Bulgaria have been in the EU since 2007 and in two more years (2014) workers from those countries will be able to work in France without a permit. Romanian and Bulgarian workers can already work in many other Eu countries without those permits, so how many highly-skilled workers do you really think there are just kicking around in their home countries waiting for someone to come in an employ them at a wage much, much lower than they would earn if they took a train ride to another, neighboring EU member state? In other words, so much for the idea of teeming masses of highly-skilled workers in low-wage countries clamoring to be underpaid. That leaves us with the low-skilled, unmotivated workers who, as you said, need to driven practically like slaves (and worked much, much longer) to approach developed-world levels of productivity. That doesn't sound very alluring.

briandon 14y ago

Ultra-skilled workers in developing countries tend to make their way to developed countries in order to earn more. That leaves low/un-skilled workers behind. Both Romania and Bulgaria have been in the EU since 2007 and in two more years (2014) workers from those countries will be able to work in France without a permit. Romanian and Bulgarian workers can already work in many other Eu countries without those permits, so how many highly-skilled workers do you really think there are just kicking around in their home countries waiting for someone to come in an employ them at a wage much, much lower than they would earn if they took a train ride to another, neighboring EU member state? In other words, so much for the idea of teeming masses of highly-skilled workers in low-wage countries clamoring to be underpaid. That leaves us with the low-skilled, unmotivated workers who, as you said, need to driven practically like slaves (and worked much, much longer) to approach developed-world levels of productivity. That doesn't sound very alluring.