Should we stop importing goods from countries that dont have a minimum wage

Its the only feasible way I can think of of getting our manufacturing going again; there's no way the minimum wage will be abolished here, so if we stop importing goods from countries that use cheep labour, it should force companies in these countries to pay people a minimum wage equivelant to ours; so in theory, company's decisions on where in the world to set up business will be based on where the skills are rather than who's the cheapest.

I'm sort of at a loss by this suggestion. China and India are both massively expanding markets. The majority of China's massive production output is sold to its own emerging middle class. So if they increased wages of those making the goods those buying them would not be able to afford them unless their wages also increased causing massive inflation. If we in this country stopped importing them inflation here would also reduce the standard of living until we came into line with the Chinese.

Whatever happen to the concept of a fair days pay.

£6 an hour would not be a "fair day's pay" in many parts of the world. It would transform the wage earner into a vastly wealthy man inside of a month, and would quite likely lead to runaway inflation and make things even worse.

It's a noble concept that would not work in practice.

Its the only feasible way I can think of of getting our manufacturing going again

What makes you think it ever stopped? We manufacture a higher gross value of goods today than we ever have done before.

you want to get manufacturing going, increase the duty tariff on all non-essential imports.

 

you'd kill a lot of discounters off (poundworld etc) but i agree with you.. they've cheapened everything to such an extent (to get it in for a price and retail at a £1) that all it is is worthless tat that breaks in 2 minutes... and then it takes 10,000 years to get rid of it.

The problem with that is most of our manufacturers export more than they sell nationally. They also trade with other companies abroad & rely on them to supply components or raw materials. We're just a small country. If we introduced high tariffs on other countries' goods, they'd retaliate & introduce high tariffs on our goods & services. So our industries wouldn't be able to export, financial services lose all their foreign customers, etc, it'd all close down.

Also, we can't produce enough food domestically to feed everybody, we import about 40% of our food at the moment. We import fuel too. As a country we've had to import food since the industrial revolution, a good few hundred years now.

So... we'd be dirt poor & have famines that kill millions, like other small countries that tried to be isolationist, North Korea for example. I think killing millions of Britons through starvation, freezing & making the world a poorer place would be a bit of a worse problem than poundland having to close.

It is very sorry to listen about a worker who work in a factory for 18 Hrs in a day and sleeping in a factory. They are not robots and we must abuse this system that is offering like this.

Should we as a country(and all other countries with a minimum wage) only import goods from countries who's workers that produced the goods are on an equivalent minimum wage?

Not unless we want to make people who are poor already (by our standards) even poorer.

We have had high immigration from the new EU countries; these countries have high unemployment, a lower standard of living but do have a good infrastructure. We should have invested in these countries to help them start manufacturing the cheap good we buy from china instead of allowing them to come here as a cheap source of Labour. I was told this by a latvian and I do agree with her, she expected employment in increase in Latvia as a result of joining the EU and didn't expect to have to move here to find work.

It is very sorry to listen about a worker who work in a factory for 18 Hrs in a day and sleeping in a factory. They are not robots and we must abuse this system that is offering like this.

but we don't control the world, not now, we're just a small country. We can't really enforce many of our rules on other countries & if we ban imports, they'll still export to the rest of the world & it'll make very little difference - maybe the kids will be paid a bit less & treated a bit more harshly. Worse than that these countries may see it as the start of a trade war & take retaliatory action against our exports. We might even need some of these imports to cover basic essentials.

We can't do anything without the support of the US, EU & Commonwealth.

Even if we got that support, we'd need to give a lot of aid to help the countries that use child, slave & extremely low paid labour to develop, so that they can educate those kids instead of having them working in factories. Otherwise we'd just make the problem worse & make them even poorer.

Bad idea,

In poorer countries, it's cheaper to hire workers than invest in machines.

Make labour expensive and you'll make machines viable.

That won't do a lot to help "the workers"

Should we as a country(and all other countries with a minimum wage) only import goods from countries who's workers that produced the goods are on an equivalent minimum wage?

 

Could a mod change the title to "should we stop importing goods from countries that dont have a minimum wage" please?

Protectionism doesn't work, so no.

yeah it's true. We need some kind of ethical investment fund. If I won euromillions or something, I'd look to invest in a product or something. Produce abroad but pay a fair wage, look to invest in local infastructure and education programs. I wouldn't over pay as that would upset the local economy.

 

Seeing as I don't need to make a profit I can hopefully undercut the competition whilst still retaining the marketing budgets that the big boys have. Fair wages could be paid to staff at this end and their wouldn't be any shareholders to appease. Also it is still essentially a capitalist model, so it wouldn't stagnate, we would still have to inovate and compete, but excess profit wouldn't be our prime motivation.

 

We just need some super rich nice guys who won't get corrupted by power!

 

The average wage across the urban parts of China rose to just under $8000 this year. As the prices over there are very low the people in the factories are hardly on starvation wages.