So this isn’t related to North Africa and also doesn’t have to do with my blogger. Andrew Heavens is dead to me. But posting has dwindled and the suburbs are dull this time of year (most times of year, really).
Many probably saw the front page of the NY Times, it had an article about labor in China, and violations of labor laws. It named a couple big companies: Wal-Mart, Dell, and Disney. The article stated that in this part of China, the minimum wage is 55 cents an hour – this is the minimum wage that violating companies aren’t even paying.
Here is what caught me, and often does with articles about injustices: I hear about absurd minimum wage violations so often that when it made the front page of the Times, I just to shook my head and tsked my tongue, as if an estranged Spears popped up, also pregnant.
Enter gunshot analogy.
Spreading as cocktail-conversation is a tidbit about people’s reactions to getting shot. They say that the most surprising thing about being shot is how much it hurt. Because getting shot is all over media, because little kids play with paintball guns, because 50 Cent survived 9 bullets, getting shot seems kind of normal, and definitely not painful.
This isn’t at all a new discovery, but it’s twisted that the more coverage a topic gets, the more unreal it becomes. 55 cents an hour. That’s horrendous-55 cents probably means something different there, the idea that companies can’t even fork up half a dollar an hour, when they should be grateful that they aren’t made to pay $8 (I think thats about minimum wage here) is embarrassing: they are saving so much money by going to Asia that it seems beyond a business choice to go below minimum wage -its cruel.
