ETS:
Grandpa:
I meant combined EU WTD and employer’s greed with a low cost foreign workforce.You got it backwards - it’s the general public’s (aka consumers) greed for low price goods. Everyone wants to buy more - now, pay less - later, if possible - with 0 thought about the real cost down the line.
The reality is that the vast majority of consumers do not sit around scheming ways to force down their own pay at work.
Consumers could not even possibly be expected to know whether the supermarket selling cheap goods was doing so as a result of attacks on their own wages at work, or as a result of better investment or organisation, or even as a result of lower profits. Consumers have no right to inspect records, to demand data, or to inspect private areas and question staff.
Correspondingly, they cannot know whether tolerating higher prices in the shops means allowing more pay for themselves as workers, or whether it just means super-profits for CEOs and shareholders (who may well attack workers at the same time as putting up prices).
The idea that I should walk into a shop and behave as a supply chain analyst when selecting my loaf of bread is simply absurd. Standing in front of the shelf in the supermarket is not even the appropriate place to engage in such analysis, even if I were inclined to perform it for each and every good on the shelf, even if the tidal wave of information were available, and even if there were actually choices as a result (since there’s no point analysing the price of bread, only to find that all available loaves are made by poorly paid workers, and I must either accept that and buy, or else go hungry).
Whereas bosses do actually sit around scheming ways to force down the pay of workers. They do have payroll information. They do have the right to inspect and question. They are paid for the time they spend doing this, as a full-time job. And they do have power to impose their own decisions, not simply select amongst equally poor choices presented to them.