I think whether you love Taiwan or not, I think I speak for all us when we say Taiwan has really low wages and it’s unfortunate. We foreigners could also benefit from higher wages in this country.
What was good before may not be good enough for now or for tomorrow. A nation , like a successful company must always be on the go, adaptable, taking steps to remain a going concern and solving problems so that they are gone so it can be ready for new problems as surely there will be.
Wages are so low here because the average business owner is so stingy you couldn’t pull a pin out of his arse with a tractor; and the average worker here doesn’t own a tractor, can’t afford to hire one, and wouldn’t know how to drive it if he had one.
No tractor, no driver= low wages.
I think this is the money quote, because Taiwan seems to have major difficulty finding a new way of doing things. The twits in government are really not helping either. Doing the same old thing is not going to work.
Culturally I think Taiwan needs a shakeup too, young people need to be more questioning of authority and the way things are done. That may happen or Taiwan may simply become an emigrant nation, joining the sad ranks of countries like my own who tend to export the brightest and best.
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I agree in principle. I’m just wondering where that actually works. Certainly not in the Anglosphere and much of the developed West, where they do indeed question authority. However, the questions seem to be along the lines of, “Where’s me bloody handout?” or “Which store can I loot the most stuff from?”
I’ve seen Western yoof. I’ve taught them. I’ve seen them carrying on in Southeast Asia. It’s all rights and no responsibilities. Hopefully, they’ll grow out of it, but if previous generations (especially the Baby Boomers) are any indication, they won’t.
There’s also a lot of half thought out questioning attempting to discredit their professors. Everyone likes to think they know more than their professors because of ten minutes of half-assed research. If they want to debate their professors, at least do a decent amount of research beforehand. Got so sick and tired of smartasses trying to get their teachers on a point the teacher just went over minutes before.
Definitely, but this is almost a given in an age where everyone gets an opinion and everyone’s opinion is “valid”. Sometimes, I watch those kind of grand debate shows where they’ll have a panel of experts (who obviously might not be completely infallible) play whack-a-mole with the most ridiculous questions/points/rants from the audience at the end. Some handle it better than others, but it must be hard. It’s especially annoying when the moderators allow some tool to get up and make a two minute rant on some tangential issue with a non-question slyly framed as a question at the end, e.g. “…rant…rant…rant…rant…rant…Do you think it’s right that Mr Cameron supports the genocide of trans-gendered Palestinian starfish in Bolivia?” in a debate about austerity measures. The BBC are especially bad at this. I think they vet the audience to make sure that there will always be that one chick in a headscarf who will ask a question about Palestine.
“Up next on This Week in Sport, is Lance Armstrong a drug cheat?”
Thirty minutes later…
“…rant…rant…etc…Will the Minister for Sport please explain why her government supports the genocide of trans-gendered Palestinian starfish cyclists in the French countryside?”
Haha. but of course it’s the same deal wherever they locate the school… rent goes up with productivity, absorbing the profit that should go into wages and improvements
I am considering showing myself the door… haha… but, what if I make above-average wages? And I don’t mean English teacher wages…
What I’m doing is feeling the pain of the little man… trying to figure out if I can help the commoners!
Taiwan is indeed controlled by big-business interests. It’s why people can’t even expect to get paid for overtime…
There’s this new thing in the media called “22K” which describes fresh university graduates who can’t expect to make more than $22,000 per month. It’s a big thing and lots of people are in this boat.
For my claims of unpaid overtime… well… just go ask any Taiwanese!
Ahhh, the old high-level equilibrium trap: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level … brium_trap
“Essentially, he claims that the Chinese pre-industrial economy was efficient enough as it was that there was no profit motive for the capital expense of technical improvements. Late imperial production methods and trade networks were so efficient and labor was so cheap that the economy reached an equilibrium point where supply and demand were well balanced, and there was thus no economic pressure to improve efficiency.”
Yes, the theory discusses China about 100 years ago, but you could argue it’s what’s happening in Taiwan today. Maybe… maybe…
Wow, wait… the high-level equilibrium trap really does seem to apply to today’s Taiwan: if labor is relatively inexpensive, there is no incentive for scientific and technological innovation…
The business owners should not let the landlords bully them so. I know an Italian factory owner in Toronto who spent $2 million to move his factory, because the landlord wouldn’t agree to delay for three years raising his rent. What did the landlord have after that? An empty warehouse!
Could this not be Taiwan today?
"Elvin says that substantially all extant arable land in China was already under cultivation by the 17th century. Prior to that, food production was expanded by simply cultivating new areas rather than through technical improvements in production methods, which was possible only because of China’s vast size. Once all arable land was under cultivation, the lack of technical progress meant that crop yields were relatively flat, whereas the population continued to grow. This led to a large labor surplus, which drove down wages substantially. He suggests that this abundance of cheap labor rendered the capital investment required for ongoing engineering research and improvements simply not cost-effective compared to hiring laborers to do the work by hand.
Further, the wealthy merchants who financed cotton production wielded effective political control over government officials. They had the trade laws written broadly in their favor in such a way as to prevent any significant accumulation of wealth by the independent peasant contractors who were actually doing the spinning, rendering it less likely that one of the spinners would be in a position to develop efficiency-improving technology."
From: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level … brium_trap
I think I’ve got another theory why Taiwanese wages are so low: Taiwanese labour is competing with Chinese labour.
If Taiwanese labour starts getting too expensive, well, the business owner just moves production to China, where you can hire ten Chinese for the same wage as one Taiwanese… thus, the jobs are going to China, and the jobs that are left in Taiwan (due to inability to outsource overseas) now have more people competing for them. Too much labour supply equals low wages.
It’s another fact, too, that in order to remain competitive; instead of investing in the latest machinery and continuing production in Taiwan, a factory owner can continue using his 15-year-old machinery in China, because although the old machinery requires more labour, labour is far cheaper in China. This goes back to the high-level equilibrium trap theory of a civilization stagnating due to not innovating.
There are several issues I want to challenge Elvin on and this is the first. In the west, progress to industrialisation was not necessarily led by, or dependent on capital investment and funding. People like Jethro Tull and James Watt were practical people driven by intellectual curiosity and a genuine interest in progress. People in post-enlightenment Europe were receptive to their new ideas.
In medieval Europe, or pre-1911 China, they would have been hung, drawn, and quartered, or possibly boiled in oil.
By 1780, which is still the eve of the industrial revolution, England had hordes of unemployed, landless laborers begging for jobs to do by hand, but industrialisation and technological progress continued unabated.
There are many other countries that are competing with China too, many American manufacturers have also relocated to China because they can hire 100 Chinese workers for the price of one American.
Not really, at least not in my industry. A machine is just a tool, and if the people operating it are idiots, then a million-dollar robot from Japan is just a very expensive paperweight. It might be cheaper to hire ten peasants who, last week, were driving a bullock cart, but it’s not nearly as effective as hiring one Japanese guy who knows that machine inside and out.
As for fifteen-year-old machines, there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you design with those machines in mind. A 15-year-old CNC, as long as it’s been serviced and calibrated and looked after (not always a given!) will still produce precision parts. There are still loads of semiconductor fabs in China using outdated process equipment. It’s still pretty good stuff (sub-micrometer features) but not even close to the 28nm tech they’re using for the latest designs. That’s fine. Silicon is cheap, and large feature sizes typically mean higher yields and better reliability.
But yeah - the key is innovation, or more generally the intellectual capacity of your people. If they can’t think for themselves - most Chinese people have been specifically trained not to think for themselves - you’re screwed.
Talking about cost-of-labour is something economists and MBAs do, because they’re clueless about how the real world works.
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It depends on the industry, for textiles or call centres it seems to be a real concern. For higher end manufacturing it’s supposed to be a low component of costs. The problem is when you cut everything to the bone for ‘cost down’ then cost of labour also becomes a concern. It’s seems a lot of manufacturing is located in china due to industry clustering and preferential rents along with lack of environmental work regulations and benefits. Quite a lot locate there in order to access the local market, such as car manufacturers in joint ventures.
A sobering report on Taiwan’s overall low wages.
not this crap again whos paying to post
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Another bleak report on wages and employment
This is talking about the same person as the YouTube video two posts up. Not saying it’s not still a problem, but if 57% of Taiwan’s population has undergraduate degrees and terrible salaries, you’d think they could find another person to interview?
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The same person? Lazy…
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To be fair, it’s from the same source , they probably created two bits of content from the interview