Comment 28366

By Grassroots are the way forward (registered) | Posted January 30, 2009 at 09:01:46

A Smith: It does matter where products come from as we need to look at several issues such as the labour practices of an company operating outside of Canada. So even though the product may have a low price per se, what has been foregone, such as wages, are they sustainable, what about workers health and safety issues, what about the materials going into the products, I use the example of lead paint in children's toys. There are many things to look at.

While the globalists want to expand markets and exploit workers, they seem it have issues with the spreading of labour rights, thus this leaves these many workers with no rights.

Anyways they are studies out there that prove the raising minimum wages does not greatly effect local markets, while you may not agree with the results, that does not mean that the numbers and information are irrelevent.

Anyways, why should "business" have all the say and none given to the workers? Personally in today's world, it makes much more sense to have open discussions between labour and management, I mean think of it this way, does someone who is a number cruncher have any reality of operating a machine in production, no they would not, their focus is on the numbers, which do not include many factors, which are of a human nature, when looking at numbers, there is no social cost that is defined.

Anyways to your discussion about the variances between variable or fixed costs, Since studying this in post secondary education, accounting, the model since the 1980's has been to focus in on cutting labour costs, as Man power hours, the variable costs have been replaced with the fixed costs of machinery. So in essence if a company no longer relies on manpower hours but adopted the fixed cost model, then during times of financial hardship, they cannot be as flexible, in terms of cutting out a machine that is vital to the production process, where as before, one could just cut man hours. You still have to pay for the rent or mortgage of the fixed asset, so if your profit margins fall, well you're in a bit of a spot if you cannot pay the bills.

Looking at numbers is one thing, but the reality of the working world is another, things happen such as there can be delays, thus when looking at the models like JIT, there can be additional costs incurred when the delivery does not happen just in time, but then in your world, the blame falls where? Who is punished, is it the managers who spend thier time looking at spreadsheets trying to revamp their numbers to fit their model or is it the workers?????

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