Amusement

[andrewducker]

Name the following business.

It has a workforce of 39,000 outside the UK, with just 6,000 staff in Britain.

Its biggest business is chewing gum.

The focus of much recent investment has been Poland, to replace UK production.

And 50% of the business and management came from the takeover of the confectionery company Adams from an American drugs business some five years ago.

Who is this faceless, heartless global conglomerate, which opportunistically shifts its capital and people to wherever the financial returns are greatest?

It's Cadbury.

From

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

It gives jobs to people in poor countries, but it means we get cheap shit simply as a result of an economic gradient. I think that's a morally dubious thing to do.

[andrewducker]

It's not morally positive or negative. Keeping the jobs from the poor people on nationalistic grounds would strike me as incredible morally dubious, if not downright evil.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I think the nationalistic grounds are wrong too.

But what happens with outsourcing to poor countries is that we profit from the imbalance. For starters, it's not sustainable, as eventually (one would hope) developing countries will develop, and be at the same level of us. I can see that it's putting money into that country, and providing them with jobs -- but the fact that we profit from their cheaper labour seems wrong to me.

[andrewducker]

Well, the alternative is that be don't buy from them, and then they never improve.

We _can_ offer them more than they'd "naturally" get from a simple capitalistic transaction, and that's where Fair Trade comes in, which I generally approve of.

[lizzie-and-ari.livejournal.com]

Surely the alternative is that a company decides how much labour is worth to them and they pay that, whether the labour be sourced in the UK or on the Moon?

[andrewducker]

Because there is no natural price for anything. There's no "right" price. Things are worth what people will pay for them.

[andrewducker]

Also, if a company in India pays £5/hour for tea pickers (the UK minimum wage) and another pays the average Indian wage (above 60p/hour, if my calculations are correct) then the second company sells its goods for half what the first one does, and the generous company goes out of business very quickly.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

There are a number of reasons to be wary of being too ready to export jobs, though, none of which strike me as exactly nationalistic.

1. If we end up killing productive industries in Britain, we're effectively locked into having to import products. If conditions change and it stops being economically viable to import that stuff (for instance, 'foreign' workers are no longer available at rates massively below what we'd accept in Britain), we're pretty much fucked.

2. Importing goods is environmentally unfriendly (and in the case of food, often results in lower-quality goods because they have to travel further). This cost is often not (adequately) reflected in the monetary price. This is another reason to be wary of reason 1. - it seems likely that better mechanisms will be put into place later to reflect the true costs, whereupon we may be stuck paying more or accepting inferior goods because our own industries have been sacked.

3. As momentsmusicaux suggests, there is a case to be made for viewing with some suspicion the morality of an arrangement which is built on workers in other places being paid vastly less than British ones. But as you've already countered, this one is particularly complicated...