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Comment by irahul | Hacker News Reader

> Wait.. you're saying by working in US, you can support yourself here AND support your family back home

Considering that 1 USD is 49.5 INR, why does this come as a surprise to you? For context, 1000 USD will be around 49000 INR at current conversion(it will be less but for argument's sake) which is more than what a software engineer with 3 years of experience makes in a month.

> including hiring a maid!?

I pay my maid 800 INR to do my dishes and clean the house. Manual labor in India is dirt cheap.

> I wish I could work there with a global pay salary...

It's easy. Find a contract job in the US which allows you to work remotely from outside the US, move to a country where the currency conversion makes you rich and cost of living is low. Places like Singapore won't work - currency conversion doesn't buy you much, and cost of living is high.

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Ah, the benefits of not making low-pay jobs illegal: the maid _has_ a job, and a middle-class family can afford to hire her for what the work is worth to them.

This in contrast to the USA, where it is illegal to pay her what the work is worth (thanks to "minimum wage" laws), so she doesn't have a job and must be given some form of welfare, which the middle-class family which wants to hire her ends up paying without the benefit of a clean house in return.

My maid does the job because the job is pretty light weight and takes about half an hour on an average day. This setup enables her to work at other places.

Maids aren't paid highly here because there is no welfare, the general income is quite low, and my maid can either make those 800 bucks working for me, or has to find another job. Depending on the situation, it might or might not be working well for her.

Wait, are you saying she'd make more if there was welfare? How does that work?

I am saying since there is no welfare, and she needs money, she might be going through a job which doesn't pay enough.

I don't know how does the minimum wage calculation work, and it might be more than 800 INR for about half an hour of work(+/- 10 minutes - most of the days I don't cook, so no dishes. Sometimes I use almost every dish in my house) per day.

But consider the minimum wage were much higher and enforced say 5000 INR. I don't need her - I don't cook very often and I can clean the house once in a while. In that case, she would lose the job she has now, and would be eligible for welfare. Depending on the amount, she might be better off with this scenario.

This is all hypothetical though. She does multiple jobs, and works for me because it's convenient for her. She gets some cash for light weight work. That spares her time for her own home and other jobs. A minimum wage and welfare system might result in a scenario where she makes slightly more than she does now, but might prove more demanding in terms of time spent and labor.

You either have a maid or you are a maid. Even some of the maids have maids, go figure.

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