Some are holding out for increases up to 20%. That'll bring their hourly up to $1.65 an hour range for many.
Crooks and Liars Excerpt:Remember when senate candidate "Red" Ron Johnson said, "the climate for business investment is far more certain in communist China than it is in the U.S. here." To this day Johnson has absolutely no idea what he's talking about on nearly every subject, but ...he's our senator. Just months after that statement however, Master Lock of Milwaukee is now claiming that the business climate in Wisconsin is far more certain than in Communist China.
In China, local minimum-wage standards are rising incrementally as factory workers are increasingly eager to get a piece of the modified-capitalist pie. Beijing just announced a 21-percent boost starting in 2011, following a similar pay hike last summer, and several other provinces, like the trade hub Guangdong, have followed this trend in their recent wage reforms (though this doesn't necessarily mean that the laws will be followed).
Raising the wage floor is partially an effort to stimulate economic growth via consumption. But perhaps more importantly, it reflects the governent's concerns about escalating labor unrest, along with the private sector's anxieties about retaining workers and staving off rebellion.
JS Online Excerpt:What? American business capitalists can't even rely on the oppressive certainty of communist governments to grow their wealth? Is nothing sacred? The apocalypse must be near.
In a new twist, however, it's China where Master Lock's costs are rising disruptively. The company has responded by pulling production back to Milwaukee, where the manufacturer of iconic padlocks was founded in 1921.
"In order to keep people in factories, they now have to pay them higher wages or they go somewhere else," said David J. Hofmann, director of the InterChina Consulting group in Washington. "This is a new phenomenon."
Salaries for managers and engineers soar even faster. China is spawning a massive urban middle class that wants cars, their own apartments and the wages to pay for them.
1 comment:
Republicans tend to forget that labor costs are part of the free marketplace. They charge what the market will bear for their products, so why can't labor charge for their wages under the same pretenses.
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