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Comment by syntheticmindai | Hacker News Reader

If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.

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> If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced?

These people weren't "sent to work in Kenya." They already live in Kenya, and are getting wages that are typical of jobs in Kenya.

> Pay people what they are worth

There is no "what they are worth". There's competition for employees and what they can accept. The same force drives you being paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's not an abstract "what you're worth". They aren't being kind to you. They're just paying what you'll accept, exactly as they are paying those people what they would accept.

Not to say companies couldn't be a little kinder to some people, particularly when it would cost them so very little. I just think phrases like "what you're worth" only obscures what's actually happening, and makes it harder to understand it.

This is simplistic thinking. There is a reason there are minimum wage laws. While those rates are usually woefully low, there was a reason for them to be enacted.

Certainly we can agree that a person’s “worth” from a full-time job be able to live in an inexpensive 1 br apartment, pay utilities, afford medical care, eat healthy food and purchase basic hygienic items, transportation to work, maybe 1-2 weeks of vacation every year?

If a worker effectively performs the required tasks for $1.46/hr, this demonstrates the work's intrinsic value quite explicitly. The onus to make a higher wage to improve their lifestyle is on the individual, given the freedom they have to allocate their time as they see fit. It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.

> It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.

in the US, we've collectively decided (through elections) that there should be a minimum wage, from which it follows that we've also decided that the "wages have no bottom" argument, i.e. they should be able to go as low as possible without limit, is unethical and detrimental to society.

Yes that’s true. I’m not making the argument that “wages have no bottom”. As another poster has noted, the wage paid in this case is above the local minimum. But as the US participates in global trade, solutions that are extremely uncompetitive like those that rely on relatively higher costs of US unskilled labor, are bound to not be chosen. Forcing the decision makers to use sub-optimal higher cost solutions ultimately makes them uncompetitive and increases the risk of failure. I haven’t seen any logic to justify that.

The minimum wage is zero. 'Minimum wage' laws don't have anything to do with the actual minimum wage. They forbid employment at wages within a range between the minimum wage and a certain so-called 'minimum wage'. People that would otherwise be paid within that range instead get paid the actual minimum wage: nothing.

you're making a common argument in a very roundabout way that "the minimum wage leads to unemployment", which is not borne out by any data whatsoever

You would not take this option because you prefer living in the U.S. (or wherever) and being employed there, but that's not the relevant counterfactual for the people doing this work, and it seems like it's preferable to other options they actually have, else it would hardly attract workers.

Don't get me wrong, companies have an obligation to guarantee some level of workplace safety and healthy conditions etc.! But arguing that it's exploitation to buy labour where it is more affordable is plain silly.

That Kenyan workers don't have more favorable counterfactuals for employment doesn't place companies' behavior beyond critique, because the (collective) behavior of companies that employ workers in Kenya is partially determinative of what the counterfactuals themselves are.

If you fall off a bridge into a river and are drowning, and I'm the only person around, it's still exploitation if I try to make you promise to pay me $10k before I'll throw you the life buoy. It doesn't matter that, counterfactually, the alternative is death. It doesn't matter that you'd be far worse off if I wasn't around to offer you my help (at the maximum price I can extract).

Likewise, the fact that many Kenyans have no strong employment prospects doesn't mean that companies moving their labor to Kenya aren't wrongfully exploiting the situation. And that's leaving aside the fact that centuries of exploitation have created the economic conditions in Kenya. Benefiting from that is something akin to making money off the guy in the river, and it turns out your dad is the one who pushed him in to begin with.

My perspective on this is more like "the locals will work x amount of time to get by either way, and you are offering them to work x amount of time and get a better living, or maintain their standard of living at lower x." (replace "time" with "time x enjoyment lost from missed leisure time", i.e. opportunity cost of time, if you will). You win because you get the work done cheaper or get to get more work done than you would "back home", the worker wins because they have a better alternative they didn't have before.

This hinges on the fact that I assume that if you take a job for OpenAI over, say, working at the local market, or your local family business, or doing subsistence farming, ... (I don't know the employment history of Kenyans doing this) you do so because you consider the job at OpenAI, in your own judgment, the better alternative. This assumes some amount of agency in the decision, yes — I would not argue the same if you e.g. forced prisoners to do the work for below minimum wage or whatever and then went and said "hey at least they get two dollars a day more than zero" (I exaggerate). Also, again, this assumes you don't mislead them about the mental toll and then hold them "captive" with sketchy contracts or whatever.

It also seems to me that you have an underlying assumption that companies in the global north could collectively decide to outsource as much labor as they are currently outsourcing, at wage levels matching their "home countries", which I don't think is economically true.

As for your analogy, I think I see the equivalence you draw, but I'm not sure I agree with it. For me the most natural read would be that the "payment" here is the workers' time, the ring you throw is the pay for the job. In that case, the payment (time spent doing some kind of work) happens either way (weird world where you always have to pay for getting saved by some strange law of the universe, I guess), and you're just offering a better ring, or the same ring for less time.

This is incoherent. If Kenyans don't have strong employment prospects then offering them jobs isn't "wrongfully exploiting the situation". It's the exact opposite: it is providing them employment prospects they'd otherwise lack.

The economic conditions in Kenya were not caused by 'centuries of exploitation' but by millennia of non-development.

in general, there's an economic argument to be made that if you pay disproportionate wages for unskilled labor then there will likely be less skilled labor (doctors, engineers, etc.) in the market which can cripple the ability of the area to grow past unskilled work

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