Month: March 2014

The shock of working a lowpaid job

March 12, 2014

No, it didn’t happen to me and I hope it never does.* Basically, a veteran journalist goes from covering the White House and appearing on MSNBC to living on foodstamps and having to work as a part-time salesman at a sporting goods store. Not to demean anybody’s job since a lot of people do these kinds of work, but it’s tough and doesn’t pay much. This is probably why it’s a good idea to save your money too, or at least refrain from spending too much. After all, if you have a good career spanning decades and you’re making more than US$10,000 a month**, then it’s your fault if you start living on foodstamps and staying at someone’s else’s home for free when you become unemployed.

It’s a good read, being compelling and revealing lots of interesting little details. I can see why working retail can be tough and frustrating (I don’t agree with nasty and brutish), having to put up with unpaid overtime, mandatory body checks and patdowns before leaving the store on brief breaks, and being berated for coming in a few minutes late (I’d never make it if that was me). The writer, a longtime journalist, is frank about his life, having been fired for criticizing Mitt Romney for only being comfortable around “white people,” and then having a media outlet expose a case involving alleged assault against his ex-wife right after, which led to him being unable to find another job.
It’s obvious that the writer is used to a much more higher way of life, and it’s a major shock to him to realize he’s actually working in a low-paying part-time retail job. To be honest, I’m of two minds about this article – I like the article and I feel sympathy for the people who have no choice but to work under those conditions for a long time, but I don’t really feel sympathetic to the guy himself.

* My very first fulltime job in Taiwan was quite low-paying, albeit not in retail, and I wouldn’t want to go back to that salary either. I’ve also worked for free (for family of course).

**The writer was paid $300 a week at his retail job, which is $1,200 a month. At the end he says as a communications director at an NGO, one week “paid twice as much per week as I’d earn in a month at the store,” which means he is making $2,400 a week. Then he says “That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck.” So in other words, he was making way more than US$10,000 a month before.

Brazil’s World Cup starts in 3 months, for good and bad

March 8, 2014

The World Cup will soon start in 3 months time in Brazil, probably the most fitting and fascinating nation to host it. There’s almost no need to explain why Brazil is considered the spiritual home of football (soccer), despite the sport being invented in England – I’ve linked to an article below that does explain it very well. Football is tied so strongly with the nation’s identity and culture and it’s played with a special kind of passion and style that no other nation can rival. It’s also fitting the nation has the most World Cup wins at five. Part of me wishes I could go, like I did in 2010, but I can’t just up and leave so soon after coming to China and working. It’s a pity because the next two will be in Russia and Qatar, which aren’t too appealing to me, especially the latter.

With that in mind, here’re some appropriate reading about Brazil and football- a Soccernet piece about how much football means to the nation and a Roads and Kingdoms article about the creativity in how Brazilians come up with football nicknames and terms. Roads and Kingdoms has a whole series of football articles like this one about African-European players and multiculturalism, focusing on the French and Belgian teams.

However, not everything is so straightforward and sunny because there’s more to Brazil’s upcoming World Cup than a celebration of football. Construction and preparation work are seriously behind schedule, but even more serious, the enormous spending on the event has caused social tensions to erupt into riots and protests, notably when a million marched in the streets during last year’s Confederations Cup in Brazil. While Brazil is still a developing country, I was surprised there is such anger. For the past few years, I’ve only seen positive stories about the country and its economy and the millions being pulled out of poverty. Brazil is a Latin American powerhouse and one of the major emerging nations, being one of the BRICS nations. Apparently the socioeconomic situation isn’t as good as assumed, when so many Brazilians are openly protesting against a world sporting event about what is one of their most treasured national attributes. Even in South Africa, which also has serious poverty and inequality, the public outrage wasn’t so great as to have mass protests before and during the event (there were a few at the beginning of the World Cup but they were localized).

Taiwan salaries, workforce going down

March 7, 2014

Taiwan’s economy hasn’t been doing too well, and here’re some bleak news to bolster this fact. Firstly, this news says that Taiwan salaries have actually decreased from 1998! It matches what I heard from a family friend from Taiwan who said that entry-level salaries have dropped since he started working (20-something years ago).

Then this report describes young Taiwanese going to Singapore as contract low-wage workers, putting them in a similar status as low-paid SE Asian workers (Filipinos, Indonesians, Thais) who come to Taiwan and Hong Kong on contracts. It’s very ironic considering how some Taiwanese look down on SE Asians since they only know them as manual laborers and maids. It’d be something if Singaporeans start thinking of Taiwanese only as lowly service staff. More than that though, it’s both embarrassing and a damning indictment of Taiwan’s economy, given that it’s GDP per capita is above US$20,000 which should mean it’s a solidly middle-income nation. Instead, Taiwan youth would rather go abroad to work in low-level contract service jobs in Singapore or farms or factories in Australia or New Zealand (on those working holiday visas) rather than stay and contribute to their home society.
However, the cost of living in Taiwan is quite low and social support, such as the national health care system, is quite good. Perhaps low salaries are a sacrifice that Taiwanese need to bear in order to maintain such a standard of living. On the other hand, perhaps higher costs, and higher salaries, would be a way of spurring Taiwanese on, because one thing I find is that Taiwan people always like things cheap (which admittedly I, and many of us probably do) and they seem to think everything should be cheap. Taiwan firms and businessmen should not be exempt from the blame either. The “cheap is good” concept applies both to how they run companies, especially the salaries they pay. I’ve experienced this at all the places I worked in Taiwan and it resulted in situations like high employee turnover, low morale, and pitiful marketing.

A little more turmoil in the world

March 4, 2014

Just came back on the weekend from a short holiday to find the world has become a bit more turbulent.

On Sunday evening, China suffered a ghastly terrorist attack when alleged Uighur separatists attacked civilians in a train station, killing 29 and injuring about 130. This attack took place in Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, which is far from Xinjiang, and represents a disturbing escalation (assuming the perpetrators are indeed Uighur terrorists) in tensions involving Uighurs and the state, in terms of both the victims (innocent civilians), the place (train station) and the location (another province). The suddenness and the body count seems to have stunned the authorities and people enough that for now, there’s actually been some sort of reasonable approach to coping with the tragedy and a lack of calls for revenge or repression.

Ukraine had been going through a crazy set of events where its Russia-leaning former president was forced from power by mass protests in the capital. Suddenly this was upstaged by an even crazier development where Russia decided enough was enough and sent in troops, supported by local pro-Russian militia, to seize government and military installations all across the Crimea, an autonomous coastal region which has a lot of Russian speakers and houses a Russian naval base. Besides occupying the Crimea, Russia might move on further into Ukraine, which will almost certainly trigger war with Ukraine, and by extension the US and maybe the European Union.

In Beijing, no violence and turmoil, but the weather has been terrible lately, to the point where day after day seems to be apocalyptic gray and hazy from morning till evening and the PM2.5 reading (which measures the amount of polluted particles less than 2.5mm in the air that can get into your bloodstream) has soared to over 400. The weather has been bad before, in the past half-year I’ve been here, but only say one or a few days per week. For the past two weeks, it seems like it’s been continuous. This was one week ago and it hasn’t gotten much better.