Cheap Labour on a One Trick Pony
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Here’s a thought for your weekend. If labour production is outsourced to the cheapest country, and during the process we trash that country’s environment by slipping into their lax environmental / legal system, then isn’t that a one trick pony? I mean, there’s a cycle with labour production that sees a country evolve from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge economy… people want higher wages and better conditions.
So we’ve seen cheap labour move around the world with this cycle… its currently in China but moving into Southern Asia. This is because Chinese workers are naturally going to want higher wages, and we want to pay the lower wages. And the same will happen in Southern Asia as a matter of course. Its not rocket science.
Now, just humour me, but eventually we’re going to hit that large untapped potential production market of Africa with its natural resources and available cheap labour. They’ll probably be our last stop. And then what? Who is going to manufacture? And, for the life of me I’d like to know this one, what are they going to do it with? Because as we followed the cycle of international exploitation (the ugly side of globalisation) the resources were plundered and diminished. The reality is that a cotton shirt takes way over a thousand litres of water to produce (around 1600 litres per shirt from memory). Resource availability is a critical issue.
One trick ponies work for shareholders and investors in today’s terms. When greed hits the far end of the Africa-Labour wall – what’s next? Because in human terms that isn’t so far down the road as you’d expect.
