Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie

How do you feel about buying products made in china, considering....

Options
2»

Comments

  • Options
    #32
    newacc2015
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,379 ✭✭✭newacc2015


    The fact is manufacturing in Europe doesnt pay amazing wages. If you look at manufacturing jobs in Ireland, a lot are minimum wage jobs. Where as ironically manufacturing jobs in places like Vietnam are huge compared to farming or being a day labourer. It is nice to live and work in a modern factory versus working under the sun in the likes of a rice paddy living in a mud hut.

    If you think about it this way. How horrific was life for someone that they prefer to live in a slum in somewhere like Mumbai over the village they came from. They choose to move to a slum as the standard of living was superior to the village they moved from.

    Its kinda funny that people obsess over living standards for people living thousands of miles away in factories making goods when the workers selling the goods in a developed country are probably the ones living in poverty. Look at the amount of workers whose sole job is $10k per year as a worker in Walmart, where they dont get enough hours to have health insurance and live on food stamps. In the developed world we obsess so much over what the banana or vanilla farmer is getting for his produce in Africa, we forget Irish farmers rarely break even on their goods.

    I feel that people should stop obsessing about the living standards of those thousands of miles away, when poverty in the developed nation is getting worse for the first time in decades. The amount of people in the developed world living in poverty is a fraction of 50 years ago and even 20 years ago. Yet poverty in the developed world is soaring and people arent concerned. That is alarming.


  • Options
    #33
    eeguy
    Closed Accounts Posts: 3,478 ✭✭✭eeguy


    newacc2015 wrote: »
    Yet poverty in the developed world is soaring and people arent concerned. That is alarming.

    It really depends how you define poverty.

    People have more money now than they ever did and social welfare is more generous than ever.
    Food and clothing is cheaper than ever. Few people are starving or freezing to death in Europe and America.


  • Options
    #34
    coylemj
    Registered Users Posts: 25,457 ✭✭✭✭coylemj


    eeguy wrote: »
    It really depends how you define poverty.

    People have more money now than they ever did and social welfare is more generous than ever.
    Food and clothing is cheaper than ever. Few people are starving or freezing to death in Europe and America.

    The 'poverty industry' has an answer to that. Instead of defining poverty as lacking the basics of modern living - shelter, nutrition, clean water, sanitation, education, medical care etc., they define poverty as someone who makes less than a given % (might be 60%) of the median income.

    So regardless of how wealthy a country is, there will always be 'poverty'.


Advertisement