But who cares? They don’t buy anything from us anyway. As a matter of fact, the gigantic nation of India imports less from the USA than the city of Singapore. Can you imagine?
Note to India: What’s up with that? Why do you shun American products?
In 2009, Singapore imported $22.2 billion, while India imported a paltry $16.4 billion. And with over 1 billion people, that comes to less than $15 per capita – not even a carton of Marlboros.
Recently, Azim Premji, CEO of Indian company Wipro said:
“It’s a simple thing for our government to raise tariffs.”
Simple indeed. And insignificant.
India is upset because the US government is finally taking steps to limit off-shoring and immigration. Here is a ComputerWorld story that explains what Senator Charles Schumer is doing. A quote:
“Students can see that paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for advanced schooling is not worth the cost when the market is being flooded with foreign temporary workers willing do to tech work for far less pay.”
The university where I got my computer-science degree shut down the program years ago. Why? Lack of demand. Students aren’t dumb; they know that tech jobs are reserved for foreigners.
Schumer also has a call-center bill that would tax off-shored customer-service calls. What’s great about a tax like this is that no company has to pay it – as long as they employ Americans.
You can read more on Bob Cringely’s blog:
“I graduated in 2002 from Electrical/Computer Engineering at a top-20 university in North America. Sent out several hundred resumes, each customized to the needs of every employer I could find in the Silicon Valley. Barely heard back from any. Still unemployed even to this day, as is most of my graduating class.”
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So, for comparison, and using the Singapore population from 2000 of 4,151,264, the people of Singapore spent over $5,347 each on imports. I think you will find that the folks in India are being paid so low a wage (to help make it lucrative to steal jobs from the US and from other countries) that they cannot actually afford any US made goods (or much of any goods at all, I’ll bet).
A campaign to create a global minimum wage would do wonders for this global wage arbitrage that is merely spreading like a disease from one “ideal” country to another over the last many decades (centuries?) – of course it would also be the mother of all uphill battles to get something like that passed by the all world’s governments… but I can daydream if I like….
Tom,
Yes indeed. If you were an exporter and were forced to choose between marketing your product in India or Singapore, you would be crazy to choose India.
As far as I can tell, Mexico has a minimum wage of about $4.50 hour. However, it has been reported that Whirlpool’s new refrigerator-making workers down there only get $70 a week. Maybe Mexico’s minimum wage laws are just for show.
A global minimum wage would be great. However, it wouldn’t work for high-tech workers. Corporate America’s position is that Americans are stupid and that they must be free to bring in engineering and software “talent”. But my question is: why is the “talent” always some starving Indian willing to work for peanuts? Why isn’t it ever a Brit or a Canadian, etc?