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Subject:RE: India - wave of the future? From:"Mark Baker" <mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 3 Sep 2003 17:38:47 -0400
Mike O. wrote
> The business world was shocked when Henry Ford paid his workers
> $5/day when
> he could have paid the same workers $2/hr.
>
> Now, after several generations of unprecedented prosperity and
> increases in
> the US standard of living, driven by high wages like Ford's, Ford is now
> losing ground to other countries with lower labor costs. But it
> took most of
> the century.
Sorry, but you don't produce prosperity just by throwing money around. Money
is just a medium of exchange. Prosperity is produced by creating actual
stuff. Then more efficiently you produce stuff, the more stuff there is.
Stuff is wealth. Money is just a means of exchange. All that you achieve by
artificially increasing the price of anything is inflation.
There is, of course, a good economic argument for paying your workers more
than the going rate. It can produce a high degree of loyalty and attract the
most highly skilled and dedicated workers. Staff turnover and high defect
rates may add more to the cost of producing a product than paying higher
wages. Ford had to operate in a competitive environment, and his costs
therefore had to be competitive with those of his competition. However,
lowest wages does not always translate into lowest costs.
---
Mark Baker
Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504 , Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1J 1A3
Phone: 613-745-4242, Fax: 613-745-5560
Email mbaker -at- ca -dot- stilo -dot- com
Web: http://www.stilo.com
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