The Universal Living Wage essays

The Universal Living Wage essays According to the 2002 Human Development Report, from the United Nations Development Program, of the 6.2 billion people on earth, 1.2 billion live on less than $1 a day for their hard work. This would be fine if they were able to afford basic food, clothing, shelter, and access to health care on this amount. Unfortunately, no one can. All across the world, people are desperate to work, but the wages they are paid wont afford them even the basic necessities in life. According to Global Inc., an Atlas of the Multinational Corporations by Medard Gabel and Henry Bruner, there were 63,000 multinationals in 2003 that are taking advantage of this impoverished situation with their 821,000 subsidiaries. They are globetrotters in the pursuit of the bottom line. (Bruner These companies attach themselves to no single country. Instead, they operate without ties and allegiance to any nation or any group of nations. While they unabashedly pursue maximum capitalism, some of their business application practices come into question. Their pursuit of riches along with their lack of allegiance leads them to make their businesses mobile. They locate their operations in the direct vicinity of the lowest paid workers around the world. Once it becomes cost effective to abandon one cheap source of labor or workers start to organize in an effort to improve their working conditions or raise their wages, the parent organization picks up and leaves. Jobs that started in the United States shifted to Mexico in pursuit of the $5.00 a day wage. Recently, those jobs shifted from Mexico to Haiti and China where workers are earning $4.00 a day wages. (Bruner It is estimated that one in ten jobs will be outsourced to countries like India by the end of 2004. At the end of five years, it is expected that this will no longer be cost effective and those same jobs will move to China. (Bruner & Gabel, 2004) The fact that these trans-nationa...