How long until wages and expectation in poorer countries match Australia's? - Easy Offshore
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How long until wages and expectation in poorer countries match Australia’s?

06 Mar How long until wages and expectation in poorer countries match Australia’s?

Posted at 05:43h in Articles by

Here is an interesting question sent to us recently, and my response:

Hi.. I finished reading your book today.. It was a great read! A bit of an eye opener for what lays ahead.. But that info will enable people to better prepare for it… A question, in the countries we’re off shoring work, do you see in a generation or two the same feeling of entitlement we currently have here? i.e. push for higher minimum wages. We’re all human and always want more than we have!.

My Response:

Hi! I’m glad you enjoyed the book. Please give it to someone else  to read as well. Particularly someone in a non-management white collar job, or someone with kids in high school. 

 If I take Philippines as an example, I see a slow increase in wages and working conditions there, but wages will never get to Australian levels, and neither will living costs – we are a global anomaly, this is NOT normal.

When they eventually get to high employment, and have 2-3 generations of high employment, then yes they will develop an expectation that it is normal and that they are entitled to wealth and luxury. But that’s realistically probably going to take 50 years. They are a population of nearly 100 million, turning out 500,000 university graduates each year (and pretty skilled at breeding), and Australia may end up sending them 1 to 1.5M jobs – its a drop in the proverbial bucket.

The sense of entitlement is developed when memories of the REALLY hard times (not enough food, no work, no jobs) leave the collective consciousness of a country. For Australia, those times were WW2 and before that the Depression. We are 2-3 generations away from those memories now. We have successive generations of greater than 90% of the population who cannot imagine a poor Australia.

Think of it in terms of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs. We are so far away from thinking about the base layers, that we have forgotten they even exist.