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Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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...

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.

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

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

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.

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