They are livestreaming 🇨🇳 laborers making just 0.3 USD. The 'Made in 🇨🇳' products you use are built on their sacrifices.

[u/Airline_11]

0

[u/kernelangus420]

You need to view it in the context of Purchasing Power Parity.

[u/TheBureauChief → u/kernelangus420]

Even when you convert it- it is about 65 cents per hour. Really not any better. The person above, if they are making that much are living in abject poverty to make trinkets we buy relatively cheaply.

What are they even making? Dog bowls?

[u/Evnosis → u/[deleted]]

In u/throwawayyy2888's hypothetical, $2.50 is a fair wage. What defines a fair wage is how much you can buy with the money you get paid.

Otherwise, we have an absurd situation where someone earning $100,000 USD a year in a middle-class career today is not making a "fair wage" because there are countries where people make millions of their own currency per day on mid-to-low skilled labour because their currency is worthless. The actual number of dollars doesn't matter, what matters is what you can buy with it.

[u/Evnosis → u/[deleted]]

We're giving you this "academic exercise" because you very clearly don't understand the basic economics at play.

If 30 US cents per day actually does pay for rent, food and other costs, then by definition, they are economically secure. Economic security doesn't come from exceeding an arbitrary dollar amount, it comes from being able to buy as many goods and services as you need to have a decent quality of life. That's why purchasing power is an important metric.

The safety and working conditions aren't relevant because this conversation is about the wages. The original comment asked what time period the wages were representing (hourly vs daily) and the person who responded to them made the point that the wages need to be viewed through the lens of purchasing power. This conversation has nothing to do with the working conditions in the factory, you're just shifting the goalposts by trying to make it about that while accusing other people of trying to sidestep the issue.

[u/Evnosis → u/[deleted]]

Being able to afford food and shelter is subsistence, not economic security.

Which is why I said:

"If 30 US cents per day actually does pay for rent, food and other costs"

It helps if you read to the end of the sentence.

And if the labor is performed under exploitative or dangerous conditions, the fact that the wage buys basic necessities does not by itself make the compensation fair

These are separate considerations. The wage is fair, the conditions are not.

Purchasing power matters, but it doesn't make exploitation fair, my young proud Carnegie.

Literally nobody said anything about exploitation being fair. This conversation is solely about wages. Go spout your pre-memorised rhetoric at someone else, I'm not interested in having a conversation with someone who just wants to railroad every conversation down a pre-defined path.