That it is that is - your perception. As the examples illustrate, people differ in the assessment of whether it is dignified or not. The observers differ. The affected people differ.

Not at all. Not. At. All. Obviously you do not know about the working conditions in some branches. Not all low-wage jobs are slavery. But some are, and their share is growing rapidly. Also, exploitation of the socially weak/dependent like this is growing, and it kills regular jobs and replaces these regular jobs with low wage jobs. a six-digit number of jobs. Per year.

That the German economy is still going, has its price. And the price gets payed by the employees: socially, financially, and time-wise.

Anyhow, 1 Euro per hour is exploitation equalling slavery if a company makes a business model from such working conditions. The difference to what the subject needs to live in a month, must be payed by the tax payer. The company abuses the tax payer as well, therefore., And then demands to not get stripped of these cheap slave workers, since paying them ordinary wages would mess up their finances, and that would cost "jobs".

Jobs. Calling such infamy "jobs", is the climax of cynism.

Really? You're going to play that game? And here I was thinking better of you.

I seriously doubt that you do either. Can these workers be legally put in chains and sold? Can they be whipped or killed because their master wills it? If not they are not slaves.

@ Skybird, I'd rather get one Euro an hour then none at all. Well in my case it would be one dollar an hour but its still better then nothing. I worked for a day just to help out my father a his job and I made 90 bucks out of it, it was loud,dirty and backbreaking then again what job in construction isn't?

As for your comparing getting one Euro per hour to slavery doesn't make much sence. I would agree that such a thing is exploitation but the worker is being paid, where as in slavery the worker doesn't get paid, they might but chances of that are slim to none.

Edit: are there even jobs in Europe that have such a low wage? Just wondering.

Its the German version of workfare he is on about, people still get their existing unemployment benefits plus an additional 1 or 2 euros an hour tax free if they take the positions.

See now what I mean about dignity, especially the dignity of work, Takeda?

If an employer makes his business happy by paying you one Euro for your hands' work, he spits in your face. That simple. He could as well give you a toffee by the end of the day, and a clap on the shoulder. Great.

Wrong answer. Totally wrong. You must be kidding. You get treated like that, and you even excuse it? No dignity in that, man. No self-respect and no honor. You just allow yourself getting exploited and abused.

Or move a bit more far away. Workers in China's electronics factories. Sewers in Bangladesh. Shipwreckers in Karachi. Should they also accept to be told: better the hunger wages you get than getting nothing?

If soembody abuses the weak position of others to exploit them to the maximum possible, if he tailors hius business to have taxpayer paying social wellfare to his employees, becaseu he does not pay them himself, but gives them 14+ hours per day, bad work, and by the end of the day sendcs therm home with 1 Eurpo per hour, then this abuse compares to slavery. A slave you give bred and water so that he can work for you. Here, you give him not even enough money so that he can buy the bread and water he needs over a day and the shelter he needs for the night. Actually, slaves in ancient Rome and Greece often were parts of the household, integrated members of family structures, and not rarely got released when their master was kind and their service was well.

I talked about dignity. That some of you guys think they need to start a forensic examination between the juristic definition of slavery and exploitive work while I obviously was in generally pointing out a general problem spreading int the West, just illustrates my point that Takeda so far indicates to not having understood. Is the meaning of this word, dignity, so very different in the anglosaxon language and economic conception?

If you guys think it is okay if you bet payed extremely low wages for dirty and heavy work that you nevertheless must accept because there is no other available to you, then this is your problem. I say you are more like whining dogs wagging their tails when being kicked, and self-respect you do show not if you just accept to get sold dramatically under your value. The dignity of man should be inviolable. Even yours. If you do not care for that, then maybe you indeed have no dignity?

Fair wages for fair work. That's what it is about. You owe it to your own self-respect to not accept being treated like a piece of sh!t. If you do accept it, then you deserve it indeed, if Kant was right n his nice quote about worms.

We have branches in germay with extremely low wages, of less than 5 Euros per hour. the 1-Euro job is a German speciality, unemployed people getting welfare can work such jobs if they do not get more money than 1 Euro per hour, else they lose welfare. The problem is that no longer only social welfare organisaiton who depend on voluntary work offer such opportunities to work, but that main business has jumped onto the waggon long time ago. They found companies that from all beginning on calculate with extremely low wages and later argue if they would be expected to pay fair wages, they would not survive and the jobs" would be lost. Exploitation as a business model, the social costs are payed by the tax payer. The government also argued that 1 Euro jobs were opportunities for people to get a foot ion the door and getting regular contracts later. But statistics prove with dramatical clearity that this is wrong. Almost everybody who falls through the net and ends as low-wage worker, never gets a chance to reenter the regular job market again. The number of low wage workers thus is dramatically expoloding in Germany. Today, every fifth already is like that. Hundreds of thousands of regular jobs were killed over the past ten years (the initiator has been a claimed socialist, ironically, Gerhard Schröder) and replaced with such low wages jobs. Of course you cannot make a living when beeing payed wages like that. The state has to pay welfare and come upo for the difference. So, private enterprise effectively sacks in the profits, but externalizes wages and fees for its employees to the public tax player.

It a very big social dynamite bar that gets planted there. People are unable to pay insurances. Investing into their future. Their age, pensions are planned to drop to almost only 40% by 2030. In one generation you will see millions and millions of extremely old people in germany who live in bitter poverty, while the small handful of working mid-agers and young ones must pay and pay and pay like crazy, because there will be so few people in working age, and so many old.

It is a premium recipe for complete social desintegration of a society.

My health is such that I can be optimistic to not be around anymore when the **** really hits the fan. The past four years so far - have been NOTHING.

There is no dignity if people get treated like dogs, and their weakness gets exploited as best as possible. No dignity there. None at all. It's bad enough if you are in a situation where you are defenseless against the fist beating you. But if you even take that fist and kiss it, then you are lost, and your life as a human being has been a waste.

My question is, can you live off 1 euro an hour in Germany.

In NJ our minimum wage is 7.25$

And with our extreme rents you are lucky to able to pay rent in a crime ridden cesspit, and have enough to eat. Mortgages are cheaper than rents in most cases, but a poor fool with a crap job can never get a loan.

Most the people who make that work only 20 hours a week, as they are part time.
The new thing with companies who offer benefits is hiring part time workers, and working them under the hourly limits on providing basic healthcare. Then slaving them in the process.
Ahhh, funny to all us with money. But not funny when they riot, because they are starving.

"Maybe they should work harder"

Maybe I should spit on you, and laugh...Spare me that one please.

Minimum wage jobs are not, at least in this country, intended to be jobs that provide enough funds to support a person to live on their own, let alone support a family as well. They're supposed to be jobs that a kid gets to pad out his allowance or the part time night job that someone takes to earn a little extra cash for Christmas or get the down payment for that new car. They are not intended to provide a living wage.

If a person expects to make more than that, if they expect to support a family then they need to have a marketable skill. Even a college degree is useless if it isn't in a needed discipline.

Prepare for an extreamly long reply!
 

1. In America you can have self-respect and still have a crappy job.
2. No company I know hires employees based on that persons honor, dignity, or self-respect let alone care two cents about it.
3. I never said that I would excuse getting treated in such a way. But if its the only job I had would I want to risk pissing off the boss and getting fired?


For the first bit of this I do agree that it is abuse, that it is wrong, but I disagree that it should be called slavery. As for the second part as a definition of slavery.
"Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work.Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation."
The difference between what you are calling slavery and the true definition of slavery is:
1. The persons you are talking about aren't captured and held against their will.
2. Slaves don't get paid for their work.


As I stated before companys don't care about dignity. Dignity doens't exist in the economic volcabulary.

I would think that there are some in America who would say "Well thats what imigrants are for." And I've seen with my own eyes imigrants from Centeral and South America who most likely are paid less then the average American worker doing the same job, but they work harder and in some cases do a better job then that of their higher paid counterparts.

Once again I do agree with fair wages for fair work. You say a thing like that to Mr. Trump, chances are he would give you a strange look and then laugh in your face.

And I will also take a passage or two from the book The Age of Napoleon, page 99 about econmic ideas that are from the 1800's but are very well and alive today.

" Owen was a new kind of man, such as the eighteenth century had not known. A saddler's son, he began to work in a cotton mill at the age of ten. In those times a working day of fourteen hours was standard. Young Owen not only worked but also managed to read practically everything that was written in the past hundred years; he not only read but also managed to rise from the ranks, and at the age of twenty-three he owned one of the most profitable cotton mills in Manchester. The facts suggest that Robert Owen was a remarkable lad. Among prosperous cotton manufacturers he was particularly remarkable in that he did not reguard the wretched lot of his workers as the necessary reward for their sinful and brutish ways. At his mills at New Lanark, Owen build a model industrial community, with decent housing for the workers, schools, sanitation, and non-profit making stores. In the factory working conditions were, measured against the prevailing standards, almost humane. To the consternation of of his fellow manufacturers, far from being ruined by such extravagances, Owen made bigger profits then ever."

And from the end of page 99 " While Owen tried to improve the workers' lot (the passing of the Factory Act of 1819 was largely to him), Jeremy Bentham proved mathematically that the workingman's happiness was best promoted by the industrialist's self-interest; Thomas Malthus argued that any attempt to feed the starving masses only incresed the masses and their misery; and David Ricardo demonstrated that it was no use to increase the workers' wages. Like Jacobin radicalism, these doctrines rested on eighteenth century assumptions, but the conlusions derived from them were more pleasing to the wealthy and well-born."

It seems quite obivious that the German government and/or economists should have a look at such low paying jobs and figure out a way to improve conditions in favor of the workers and the company that employs them.

So then shouldn't that society look for a way to make it better and equal for all instead of making better for the few?

Please see earlyer replys about diginty and companys.

Soopa, they don't exist so the question makes no sense. It is one euro an hour on top of all the payments you already recieve.

The rent subsidy would be one of those payments they already recieve.

Don't get me wrong, the is a good arguement behind what skybird is trying to get at, but as usual he dresses it up as something it isn't and invents "facts" to fit what dress he wants to put over the basics.

Oh, it was not intended to become like that over here, too. But it did, because regular employers accepted the invitation. Per year a six-digit number of regular jobs gets destroyed and reestablished as low wage jobs. It goes like that since over ten years. Two or three low wages is cheaper for a company than 1 regularly payed worker/employee. Low wagers also do not show up in unemployment statistics - that's why the government for years supported the development, and why Schröder in the first initiated it: "we have battled unemployment!"

Yeah. Sure. And taking a chocolate bar away from one starving man to give it another starving man battles hunger in the world.

And if it abuses people like discussed here, that is not a problem, and a shame anyway...?

Thank for illustrating right the points I am about.

And before you said "But if its the only job I had would I want to risk pissing off the boss and getting fired?", and in general you gave the impression earlier that treating people like sh!t and sending them home with a symbolic pocket money after a 14 hours shift is nothing ypou worry too much for,m that it does not violate a person'S dignity. You really refuse to see the relation? When you depend on a slave job to get along by th eend of the month, and cannto defend yourself against that due to no other jobs available, then you are a slave to the situation and the employer. And like a slave you swallow what he is throwing at you, since you have no other alternative. And despite all your formalistic hair-splitting - that I call slavery, abuse, exploitation.

[quoter]The difference between what you are calling slavery and the true definition of slavery is:
1. The persons you are talking about aren't captured and held against their will.
2. Slaves don't get paid for their work.[/quote]
To 1. in the situation you have desribed yourself, you are capturede in it and cannot escape. To 2., slaves get payed, though not in money. They are kept alive and what is needed to keep them alive. That is what a low wage job does, too. It keeps you alive for the monet. Not more. As I said, in ancient era slaves could even win their freedom, and often were more a member of the household than a slave in the later underdstanding of blacks in North America.

We can split hairs until all heaven falls.

And again: that is okay? Terms like "human capital" and "processing mass" to describe employees ready to work are no degrardation of humans?

And that is not violating to their dignity as human beings? Thats is not unfair? Ethically criminal, and maybe also criminal according to the laws? Agaion that simple question: that is okay?

He is not alone. All globalization of Western economies was about shifting jobs into countries were the people are so poor and depending on jobs that they could not afford not to accept being underpayed and treated badly. Globalization was avoiding regular payment obligations at home. Different to all their other claims and announcement of international cooperation, balance and helping other countries to get on their feet, cost reduction was the driving motivation behind it.

But on their feet they got. And now they eat us in quite some branches: computer electronics, textiles and clothes, steel... Gotta love globalization.

I cannot escape the impression - here and at earlier situations - that the mere observation of that capitalist economy management at the same time serves as an excuse not to adress it's excesses were it violates human rights and human dignity. Now you say one should do it. And ask at the same time wether one should really do it. Well, what shall it be now for you? Is exploitation of the weak laborforce and the intentional increasing of low wages jobs for regular jobs something that is ethically acceptable or not? Should it be attacked, or not? I also would like to hint out that "low wage work force" not automatically means "proletariat" where social low class meets a family tradition of being simple workers (in factories, mines, docks etc). We see - statistically proven - a higher - and growing - number of academics loosing their jobs and falling down the social ladder. Mid-class families. And by far not all of them were in exotic subjects, at least as long physics and mathematics, teachers and chemists are not seen as exotic nowadays. People with specialised job trainings, and university diplomas. "Low wage" and "low qualification", as well as "low status in social hierarchy" and "family origin in social hierarchy" should not be taken as synonymous. It is by far no longer only the social low class being effected. Which makes it all even more threatening for society, since it erodes the very vital basis of its existence, and strips the state off tax income.

P.S.
Statistically, females get for the same work they do or the same job, posting, office, seat they hold, on average 20-30% less payment than males - from blue collar workers to seats ion the board of directors. That is sexual discrimination, and and of course a violation of human dignity. I am not for all that gender engineering madness going on, and I oppose the new insurance tarrifs in the EU that sees women and men having different different health risks and different life expectancies, but now both paying the same for health and life insurances. That is absurd and a denial of biological realities (but what do I wonder - all gender engineering is a denial of biological and psychological and social realities). But paying women less for the same work because they are female - that is not acceptable. And a 25% difference is far beyond any random fluctuation. Difference seems to be the higher the more upwards the job is seated, so in parts it can be explained by psychological differences - women may negotiate their directors wages differently and less "pushing" than males. But in ordinary jobs where wages are not negotiated individually, but are prefixed, the difference between male and female behavior cannot explain or excuse such differences.

Well whose chocolate bar is it anyways?

I see a lot of immigrant families over here working for low money and in low profit businesses but they work hard and know how to save and how to pool their resources. It doesn't take them very long to earn enough to to put their kids through college and instead of liberal arts degrees (code here for 4 years of partying) they'll be engineers and architects and scientists with a bright future.

That is the American dream, not sitting on your butt thinking that the world owes you a candy bar and whining when you don't get it.

Do we really need to write an essay for a reply?
 

Yes it is a problem, it is a shame, it is wrong. That being the case then why don't the majority i.e the Workers tell the minority i.e the Rich people what they want and if they don't get it they would do something like go on strike, or better yet bring the problems to the attention of a person and/or group that is pro workers rights, since striking could lead to them getting fired from that job and also losing their welfare or whatever source of income in the process.





Either you missunderstood or misinterpreted what I ment. I DON'T repeat DON'T think its right to treat a worker like they are dirt or as you put it "sh!t". And I do understand what your getting at but I think you don't get what I'm trying to get at. If its so wrong than why isn't there some law that would fix it? I'll tell you why, the laws have been and will be more benifical toward the rich while appering to be benifical toward the working class. There for the "system" if one could call it that is rigged, fixed, whatever so the rich make the maximum amount of profit while paying the minimum amount of wages.


Agreed.

For the perspective of the working man no, it is not okay. For the perspective of the CEO, it is okay. Plain and simple.

Again simple answer, no it is not okay. Is it unfair? Yes it is unfair. It is corruption which is in my mind is quite criminal. But in responce to the question of human dignity I respond with the following.
1. Are the workers called by numbers and not names?
2. Are they forced to work against their will?
3. If they do a bad job in the eyes of their boss, supervisor, ect are they beaten to a bloody pulp? Are the familiys of the workers threatened?
These are examples of violation of human rights in the eyes of the law in most cases.

Its not just cost reduction its greed, its all about how much more money an already rich person can make. Also think about this for a moment: India was a "third world" nation with extreme levels of poverty. Now India is slowly becoming a global super power, it will take a long time but it is the result of globalization. Will poverty in any form go away though? It could happen but it is doubtful.


I am not, nor in anyway suggesting that someone should run a company at the expence of human rights or human dignity. In fact I was doing what I do best: look at an arguement from both sides, i.e in this case looking at it from the perspective of the worker and of the CEO. Your agrument though be it a very good one, is also very one sided. I have found that it is always better to look at such a thing from more then one side.
Now this is something that I need no reminding of, in fact I've been reminded of it on a constant basis by my mother, who experianced exactly what you're talking about and I quote, "I was a supervisor with five employees under my supervision. A new male employee under my supervision was earning more then I was." And yet again I do agree that paying a women less becuase she is a women, while a male counterpart makes more because he is a male is just plain wrong, it is also very stupid. I belive that a women should have equal pay for doing the same work as a man does.

@August your post is something I really agree with.

I participated in partying last time two years ago. When I graduate, I will have qualifications for three different job fields, all of which I have chosen to do extra work to acquire instead of just being a generic master. I feed myself plus a medium sized dog by working at the same time and use the rest of the time for volunteer work in order to acquire job experience from one of those fields.

I wish there had been someone to set me straight when I began studying. Obviously I went wrong somewhere.