World’s Richest Woman (Australian) Suggests Workers Should Make $2 Per Day
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/09/05/797221/worlds-richest-woman-minimum-wage/?mobile=ncThe worlds richest woman has equated Australias minimum wage to class warfare, following her controversial article last week where she called poor workers coddled, lazy drunks. Australian billionaire Gina Rinehart, who inherited her $30 billion fortune and mining empire, pointed to workers who make less than $2 as a model for economic competitiveness in mining:
We must be realistic, not just promote class warfare. Indeed, if we competed at the Olympic games as sluggishly as we compete economically, there would be an outcry.
The evidence is unarguable that Australia is indeed becoming too expensive and too uncompetitive to do export- orientated business. Africans want to work. Its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day. Such statistics make me worry for this countrys future.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)...but a lot of people handed it to her along the way.
IMB: She is a member of Ingrates without Integrity, Extraction Industries Class.
appleannie1
(5,069 posts)liberalmuse
(18,672 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)atreides1
(16,093 posts)Right up there with any and all pro-slavery advocates...
marmar
(77,091 posts)nt
Moostache
(9,897 posts)wonders to herself if ANYONE in her life really loves her, or if they are all in it for the money.
I hope this not to be mean but to understand such a warped human mind as the one that would advocate what she appears to support - the wholesale slavery of the under-classes around the globe to serve her ilk's desire for profits without end. To be so cold, callous and out of touch with reality is truly an indictment of society at large...why do we allow people like this to become what they have?
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)So I'm not going to do that again.
Douglas Carpenter
(20,226 posts)a fair measurement of their productivity. (Mitt Romney actually said that at one point) If one were to conclude that the market alone can "fairly" set prices - it would stand to reason that there is nothing fundamentally different than paying a worker in America or Australia or Europe $2.00 per day and buying a product made elsewhere by someone making $2.00 per day. In fact if on the global stage the western worker in the global economy is making more than what someone in the third world is making in a global economy - that would be only because of market distortions which are unjustly paying the western worker way more than their productivity. Thus the western worker making $8.00 per hour is ripping off people and in a effect stealing from the global market place in order to make his artificially inflated wages.- Not that I believe this for one second, of course. But this is the natural conclusion to right-wing economic thinking.
treestar
(82,383 posts)so she can hardly move operations to another place - not for that purpose - so she's whining. Oh she has to pay people here a real wage - but then the cost of living is what it is, does she want to reduce her country to conditions where people do live on that amount per day?
And good on Julia Gillard, who responded to her nonsense and contradicted her.
struggle4progress
(118,350 posts)pity the billionaire