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Comment by 9nGQluzmnq3M | Hacker News Reader

In Europe and Australia, all those jobs get done and the people doing them get fairly compensated for it. For example, the pay for a garbage truck driver is actually quite high, because it's an unpleasant job and they need to attract people to do it. And because the salary is high, it's also heavily automated, with pickers that grab bins and empty them into the truck.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, the same job is done by three people, two of whom jog outside next to the vehicle in the sweltering heat and manually empty the bins into it. They're breaking their backs and get paid like crap.

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> In Europe and Australia, all those jobs get done and the people doing them get fairly compensated for it.

Having worked in the service industry in wealthy Iceland for years, I can’t say I agree with this statement.

While working exusting 12 hour shifts with mandatory minimum pay (sometime a little less because of exploitative unpaid overtime), the owner of the business was regularly found to be the highest payed person in the country.

In other words, my work, contributed to some rich guy getting richer, while my compensation was only as little as he was allowed to pay me. That doesn’t seem fair does it. Ask any working class person, in europe and I’m sure they have a similar story.

Fairness is relative. In Iceland, that minimum wage guarantees that you can live in some comfort. In the US, you can work in a similar job with similar hours, but your shifts are often completely unpredictable (and intentionally kept below 35 hrs/week to avoid paying benefits), you can be fired at any time, and a single unexpected expense like a health problem can see you reduced to homelessness.

I live in Vietnam and get to see the rubbish truck go past my house every day exactly as the person above you described. It's summer time here, 35-40 degrees and high humidity every day. One person drives the truck, the other two go through people bins and sort their rubbish, extracting the recycling since nobody here has the habit of separating their waste. I don't know the exact wage of these guys, but judging from other government jobs it's probably around 3 million VND/month (~$130), slightly less than $1600 a year, and it's likely they work 6 days a week.

Food and rent is cheap here, but not that cheap. You can barely survive on that wage, especially if you have a family. You will be eating mostly rice and probably scrounging for other work on the grey market.

In Iceland, you'll get at least minimum wage, $2500 a month, ~$30,000 a year. Of course, the economies are different. However, using PPP (purchasing power parity) [1], Iceland minimum wage would be equivalent to around $13,000 a year in Vietnam, or 8 times a garbage collector's pay here, for significantly easier work and less hours.

I'm not trying to say that you had it easy, or that it was OK to pay you that amount for such long shifts and to stiff you on overtime. However, by objective comparison people working equivalent jobs in developing countries have it much, much, worse.

[1] https://partnersontheroad.com/salary-comparison-city-country...

Thanks for the link to the tool, which compares (effective) salary between different world cities.

Agreed. I’m glad you left that comment.

Even though the working class in rich countries like Iceland is constantly cheated out of their fair compensations for a (relatively) shitty job. One must not forget that in the grand scheme of things, we still have considerable privilege by the nature of our birthplace.

We can—and should—complain about how we get the shorter end of the stick in the current economic system. But we must not forget that globally we constantly are the beneficiaries of much worse cheating of the foreign working class.

As I write this we are still calling for the arrest of Icelandic business owners who were guilty of bribing Namibian government officials in exchange for a privileged and unfair access to common Namibian fisheries in a scandal known as Fishrot. We are also waiting for the justice system to act on a slumlord who took advantage of imported labor, and left a house he rented them with inadequate fire escapes. The house burned down with three people (all foreign laborers) still in it unable to escape. The Icelandic justice system seem to be unwilling to pursue justice in either of these scandals, demonstrating how Icelanders are criminally benefiting in the international context.

What it costs to have your garbage collected also matters a lot.

>> In Europe and Australia, all those jobs get done and the people doing them get fairly compensated for it. For example, the pay for a garbage truck driver is actually quite high, because it's an unpleasant job and they need to attract people to do it. And because the salary is high, it's also heavily automated, with pickers that grab bins and empty them into the truck.

This is true in America as well, FYI. It's a large source of union jobs.

Well in New Orleans right now they’re using prisoners to break a strike. And they do ride/run behind the truck.

They actually stopped using prisoners, but are still only paying $10.25 an hour and work one of the hardest jobs I can imagine. They are basically not allowed to use the lift on the truck because it slows them down, so they hand lift my cans every time in the 95 degree heat.

I do hear them (here in lower nine) use the lift sometimes.

In Southeast Asia? Try New Orleans, Louisiana where sanitation workers have been striking to make $15 (they currently make $10.25 with no benefits) and jog along side the truck and empty the cans by hand.

> And because the salary is high, it's also heavily automated

That isn't really obvious to me as having a cause/effect relationship. Could you please expound? Why would high salaries cause heavy automation in a given field?

Automation reduces costs, which are proportional to salaries in most service industries.

Automation only reduces cost if wages are already sufficiently high so that the cost of initial investment and maintenance is economically justified in the mid/long term.

The reason you see trash pickets riding robotic trash collectors in rich western countries is simple: it's far cheaper to buy and maintain a robot than it is to pay the salaries of enough people to achieve the same goal.

You don't get robotic trash collectors in southeast Asia and Africa and South America because for the price of a single robotic trash collectors you can pay the salary of a bunch of people for a few years. Hence, you get people carting wheelie bins.

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