"K. Feete" schreef:
> Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten wrote:
>
> Cool. Chaos is *fun*.
Hold your horses, chaos is my area of expertise. Ask Jeroen I don't think he
considers my chaotic nature fun.... ;o)
> >The local companys would have to start investing into safety, shorter working
> >hours, environmental policy and more social stuff. Also they'd have to pay
> >higher wages in order to attract good enough workers. This has the potential
> >to put them out of business because they cannot sell their stuff on the local
> >market and they usually don't have acces to any other markets. Also no good.
> >
> >If you think about it a little longer you can see that all kinds of trouble
> >could come from that, it isn't the way I like it, but there also isn't an
> >easy answer to the problem.
>
> Of course it's not an easy answer; there's never an easy answer....
>
> I actually liked your scenario right up to the "cannot sell their stuff
> on the local market" bit, because I see that as something that ought to
> be a priority of "developed" countries; not only bringing capital into
> other countries, but also bringing a better system, which I believe is
> what JDG rather optimistically claims they are doing already. That does
> produce a rather sticky point, though....
>
> I would have to do some research, but I have to wonder if a lot of local
> businesses aren't experiencing this problem already. After all, American
> (and other) countries have the infastructure and the capital to invest in
> more financially efficient production methods, which means they can
> *already* undercut the local businesses even without environmental/labor
> regulations, and, as far as I know, they are. I have a book around here
> somewhere that I gave my dad for Christmas called "Ten Ways WalMart is
> Destroying America- And the World" which I should dig up and take a look
> at; I believe it had some figures on how WalMart was destroying the local
> markets of less developed countries. I know the damned place has
> destroyed the local market of my hometown.
Quit right and I hadn't thought about this angle at all. I forgot about the
effect, that you do create a more western oriented society with lots of goods the
locals wouldn't really need but wanne have because of status. And they can buy a
lot of those because of better payed jobs in the foreign companies putting the
locals out of business faster.
What I actually envisioned when I wrote the first mail is not the slow climb to
improve all the local living and working circumstances but more of an instant
cleft appearing when companies are held to the standard in their home country.
More like something that happened when West and East Germany merged.
East Germany is still struggeling with their old infrastructure and the very high
invading standards inherent in West German businesses moving East to cut costs. A
lot of Eastern firms went out of business or were taken over and modernised by
Westerners with Western money, just because the locals couldn't afford to live up
to the environmental and social laws of the West _and_ produce at low enough cost
on their old equipment to stay in business long enough to make investments
profitable. It's something the Westerners could easily do because they already
had, and developed their infrastructure and cash reserves since after the building
of the wall. They only had to move it East to harvest the profits.
* Since West and East Germany became Germany the Western firms were largely held
to the same law as were they came from. There were some exceptions on
environmental and wages issues. I'm not sure you get my drift of the implied
similarity between the scenarios. Although not as extreme as the first and third
world scenarios, the wages in the East were a lot lower and their infrastructure
was old and rusty just after they joined into Germany. They are slowly getting
more equal pay but are still payed less then in the West, since living costs and
living standards are also much lower (but rising fast) in the East.
Sonja
