Elizabeth Allchin's view that the low minimum wage is the problem in the economy has been proven time and again to be true and applies to an even greater degree when job creation is mainly in the service sector – as is the case in North America everywhere. But in spite of this evidence corporations still make overblown and self-serving claims to the contrary and the fast-food industry balks even at paying this modest amount.
What they want is a version of "outsourcing", but in situ: bring in foreign workers who have no access to our labour laws, modest and often ineffective as they are, or to social programs like EI. Foreign workers programs also place downward pressure on all fast food sector wages because they are non-competitive.
Conventional outsourcing is not even good for foreign countries, or more specifically, the ordinary workers of the lower economic classes who work for the lowest wage the company can get away with.
In the most interesting video, Let's Make Money, a German industrialist lauds the "democracy" of India where foreign industrial contracts are reliably and rigorously enforced by law, and at the same time candidly observes that the masses in India will remain extremely poor for a very long time to come. An Indian social worker expands on this theme with the information that before the invasion of foreign companies and full-blown globalization ordinary people could save a substantial amount from their earnings, but are now constantly in debt and unable even to buy necessities. The film also explores the dire situation in Burkina Faso and the soil on which nothing will grow, having been made infertile by the ruthless one crop policies induced by the foreign cotton manufacturing companies.
The plight of foreign countries has a lot to do with Western policies: exploitation did not end with the demise of formal imperialism but continues in an economic version, vicious even in its less bloody forms. In the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, author John Perkins explores an unsavoury history of which many people are completely unaware. And if Canadians don't vote on the basis of the government's foreign policy, as a CBC At Issue panel recently claimed, maybe it's time we did.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
