My “true intentions” are only to shed some light on what may have been overlooked. In both of my comments I at least implied concern over the “race to the bottom” mechanism. I think that perhaps there should be a sort of “ratchet”, but this (unfortunately) has to be somewhat timid, avoiding a threshold where it starts to cause more losses than it avoids. Because, as sad as it is, salaries represent costs to businesses, and may have impact on prices, which in turn represent costs for the people as a whole. So it’s not a matter of just arbitrarily raising prices and expecting that everyone would be better of, if they’re not hindered by greedy evil neoliberals.

Speaking of “them”, I won’t intend to be their evangelist, I don’t buy the basic notion that we should basically deregulate and relax that everything will be fine, I have my concerns with the power of big business and their misbehavior, and much more. However, I don’t see such damage made by neoliberalism in South America, one might (and many people do) argue just in the opposite direction, that the more neoliberal, the better of tends to be the population, which holds for pretty much everywhere in the world. Chile is the most neoliberal country in SA, and has the higher HDI. The same goes for African countries, sometimes with astounding examples and counter-examples, like Botswana and Zimbabwe. (An analogue pairing in SA could be Chile and Venezuela).

I want to stress that I’m not some radical libertarian or whatever, I’m in the extreme middle ground, where everyone says I’m on their extreme opposite and try to guess my “hidden agendas”, as if I were some meaningful player on world’s economy ,or at least the useful pawn of some sinister player.

If I had no other option, that would be better than die of starvation. I would not assume that by simply refusing this salary, someone would offer me a better deal. I can’t feed on sunlight.

I do not outright oppose this sort of thing, though, but, in this case at least, it was a dumb move. As I said, we can’t expect that they will just raise salaries if there are those willing to work for a lower cost somewhere else. As a federal, within-country, regulation against the depression in wages, though, maybe it could work, since the outsourcing would be less of an option for most businesses.

It has to be done with extreme caution even then, because a similar logic prevails: the salary money does not come out of nowhere, we can’t expect that salaries could be raised without effect on production costs, which will tend to make things more expensive (to keep up with the costs) and generate unemployment (to cut costs for those on a smaller budget). So, it may be often a choice between a large amount of people with jobs and less-than-ideal salaries, and a smaller amount of people with “ideal” salaries, and more unemployed people, with no salary at all. I bet that to these, the less-than-ideal salary was a more ideal situation than having no salary at all.