Quote:
Originally Posted by STEED
Did he leave you off his last party list throwing the last wild party trashing the white house and blaming it on Big Foot? If so I will ring him and tell him off.
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Relations between myself and the US government have not been the same since that one time at Roswell...
No bashes taken, I understand your frustration. A lot of it is down to the respective overheads of the companies involved, which comes down to taxes and operating costs, chief among which is wages. Polish coal mines and Chinese steel manufacturers don't spend as much on wages and other operating costs as we do.
Take a look at this chart, it's a bit out of date since the Polish currency is still in zlotys, whereas I'm pretty sure they're on Euros now, but you get the gist of the situation:
http://www.worldsalaries.org/miner.shtml
When you factor on top of that the less stringent safety protocols (the type of which has seen
numerous deaths in China over the past decade alone) which means that mining companies have to spend less on making their employees safe, as well as paying less to their employees, whilst still being able to make it an attractive wage because the whole cost of living in that country is lower, as a result the mining company or steel manufacturer can afford to sell its goods at a lower rate than those who are spending more money on their workers and their safety.
That's the primary reason that we've lost pretty much all of our
primary and secondary industries (farming, mining, manufacturing) because other countries perform the same tasks at a cheaper rate and we are able to bulk ship it in at a low rate. Of course, if something were to happen to our ability to ship things in, then we're be royally
! I believe it was mentioned a few years back that this country generally only has at most six months reserve supply of food.
But it's not just us, if you look at most western nations you'll see that the vast majority of them have moved away from primary and secondary industries into teritary industries, the service sector, and that's probably the biggest employer in this country by far. It's unbalanced, but it seems to be a natural progression. As a nation moves from being a Less Economically Developed Country to a More Economically Developed Country it moves from being Primary Industry focused, to Secondary Industry focused to Teritary Industry focused, China is at the Secondary Industry stage, Britain at the Teritary Industry, and somewhere like Zanzibar relies on its clove industry in agriculture.
There are outliers though, tourism is a big industry in many LEDCs, and that's a teritary industry, and China is still heavily into mining and farming, so it's still got one foot firmly into the primary sector, but its secondary sector grows by the year, and I imagine that as the population in the coastal cities continues to increase then so will the teritary sector.
In short, blame the free market, it's a double edged sword, on one hand we can buy cheap products, food from Aldi for example, but on the other hand it hurts local industry. Hence why there's been a big thing in the food selling industry about 'buying local', which is all well and good...if you can afford it.
Still, it's not all bad, some industries are finding it more expensive to operate abroad and come back to the UK...the beloved Pot Noodle, for example, was manufactured in China until a few years ago.
Sadly, steel manufacturing isn't one of them.
