Modern slavery & unemployment

[Baton Rouge]

This article (quoted below) is featured on http://www.2bangkok.com today. Just can't help feeling that these unemployment figures hide highly significant factors, such the high numbers of people who are more than happy to stay home watching TV and exploit the goodwill of a tolerant and hardworking relative. A prime example being the following.

The man stays at home watching TV while his wife has to work two jobs to make ends meet. Indeed, he is so damn idle that she even has to take time off work to collect the kids from school. This allows him to indulge his habit of going to the exercise gym in the afternoon, where he can pretend to be single and indulge his playboy habits. Recently, he got drunk and smacked his motorcycle into a car on his way home late at night. Now the wife has to pay a major medical bill to repair his playboy looks. Meantime, his mother and father have also moved in: -

http://www.playfuls.com/news_10_4798-Thailand-Has-Worlds-Lowest-Unemployment-Rate-Survey.html

Thailand has the lowest unemployment rate in the world and South Africa the highest, Germany's Federal Statistics Office said Thursday, quoting data from the International Labour Organization (ILO).

Unemployment in Thailand was pegged at 1.9 per cent in 2005, according to comparative data from 43 countries collated by the ILO, the German office said.

The Thais were followed by South Korea and New Zealand, which both had a jobless rate of 3.7 per cent, according to the survey.

......

The ILO classes unemployed people as those of working age who do not have paid employment or who are self-employed even though they actively seek work.

© 2006 DPA

[Scuba22]

You have to be careful with judging any international comparison. Since few organizations have the resources for direct frontline data gathering (e.g. doing a census, or collecting company financial records) globally, you often need to rely on reports gathered from local goverment agencies - the Ministry of Labor, for example. This gives you two major problems - first, the data collection and analytical methodology is unlikely to be consistent across all countries. For example, the idle man you write about would not be included in US unemployment statistics because US unemployment refers to people "actively looking for jobs", so does not include housewives, prisoers, etc. In Japan, I was told that unemployed women are totally left out, which severely understates Japanese unemplyment numbers.

The second issue is that in many countries, the capabilities of the local government agency may also be quite low, either for resource constraints or skill limitations. So you get data that may or may not actually reflect what's really going on. And now you're comparing incomparable sets of bad data.

On unemployment, there is the additional issue of quality of employment as well as quantity, that is, "underemployment", which may be a more serious issue in Thailand. It's not that hard getting a 130 B/day job digging a ditch, mixing cement, or yelling at a protest; but how is a Thai Fluid Dynamics PhD going to really use her degree? I know a handful of top-class Thai academic researchers who couldn't find anything to do that met their skill levels - all had to go abroad to challenge themselves.

Cheers,
Scuba

[ncr]

On unemployment, there is the additional issue of quality of employment as well as quantity, that is, "underemployment", which may be a more serious issue in Thailand. It's not that hard getting a 130 B/day job digging a ditch, mixing cement, or yelling at a protest.Oh yes, underemployment. That was actually the first thing that came to my mind when I read that article. A large segment of the workforce in Thailand is made up by people with low/no qualifications, earning a pittance - and much idle time on their hands, exactly because they are so cheap and therefore so numerous.

Prime example: department stores!

These are usually overstaffed to a point that the employees are obstructing the customer's way. It is not uncommon to see groups of ten sales clerks (no exaggeration) standing around or leaning over their washing machines, chatting and joking. Or you have a 7-Eleven of 35 sq.m size, and 7 staff blocking the aisles......

This is so blatantly obvious to any first-time visitor to Thailand (e.g. this is what amazed my father the most when my parents came here last year), and I am not sure if I have seen this in any other country...

Other instances of low-pay and/or 'not-much-to-do' employment (including lots of jobs that have been made obsolete or abolished for economic reasons in developed countries, or that no one would want to do anymore there):

-waiters
-bus fare collectors (these are busy, of course!)
-building "security guards" (yawn!)
-car park whistleblowers
-gas station attendants
-every office in Thailand seems to have a "mae ban" (literally: housewife) who does some cleaning, empties the trash cans, takes care of the plants, helps punching, filing and binding papers, prepares and serves coffee for visitors, and runs errands, etc.
-sales promotion girls, event models
-motorbike taxi drivers and assorted รับจ้าง (work-for-hire) guys
-not to mention government officials...... (anyone who's ever visited a Thai government department will know what I mean!)

I wonder what the unemployment figure was if these people had no jobs?

[Baton Rouge]

Not to mention what happens to middle class people who suffer some kind of disability, physical or mental. With many ordinary people they have no option other than to get out there and boogie. For example, the local guy who runs round selling icecream on a tricycle. He has no legs, and carries a medical piss-pot thingy (Jor Sor 100) with him on all occasions. But middle-class folks are often loathe to let their sons & daughters do some kind of work when they are disabled. I know of one person who was run over by a truck as a child. The truck driver ran over the guy, and then reversed over him again to try and finish him off. Both legs were amputated. The guy is highly intelligent, but is not allowed to work. Then there is the ex-soldier who was left mentally-scarred by chasing bandits around an alien forest. He also is not allowed to work by his over-protective rellies. Until recently, he had idled his days away for years. Then one day he started doing menial jobs on a building site without even being asked. He found he liked it, and eventually someone actually started paying him. Piss poor money of course, but it obviously does add to the pocket money his rellies still give him.

[Scuba22]

Government make-work programs are ubiquitous - check out how many people are manning the visa-on-arrival and immigration counters in Calcutta or Siem Reap - not actually doing anything mind you, but the 10 guys looking over the shoulders of the two guys handling the queues with 100 people in them. Even in the US, on roadway construction you see five guys standing around watching one guy dig a ditch.

But here, the private sector gets into the act too, which I find bizarre. Businesspeople seem to tend to prefer hiring armies of low paid non-workers rather than provide training, a decent salary and tough performance-related consequences (nobody gets fired, nobody gets raises - the civil service model).

When I first came to Thailand it was with a mutinational professional services company and we had global salaries for professional staff - we expected our professionals to competently work anywhere, so we paid them accordingly. Incoming monthly salary for fresh college grads was over 100,000 B/month. Nobody could believe it - parents thought it was a typo, with an extra zero. But we got excellent people, and in 3-4 years they were all heading to top US graduate schools.

On my own, I can't afford those salary levels, but I'm still paying higher than average for new college grads, and I expect a lot. Most don't deliver and leave - I've only had to actively fire one out of over 5 that have left. But the ones that respond well to a challenging environment havea great time, do great work, and can make tremendous returns since we ultimately help them set up their own businesses.

Others I talk to can't understand my business model. I've been told I pay too much, I'm too harsh, etc etc - in other words , it's not the "thai way". Personally I think that's all crap - that there are plenty of talented smart Thais prepared to be professionals, and being professional is perfectly consistent with being Thai. Maybe I'm wrong and my approach will end in disaster, but so far so good.

Cheers,

Scuba22

PS - as for people with disabilities, if anyone knows a smart ambitious english speakers who know how to use MS Office applications, I'll hire them, disabled or not.

[Baton Rouge]

Your business obviously requires highly-motivated graduates, and your high standards undoubtedly filter out those who just aren't up to snuff. But I would like to pose one question here. Do you really believe that the economic model that the world is currently working to is really that relevant to most of the world's population? With success under one's belt - the sort of success your brightest hopes undoubtedly acheive - it's all too easy to believe that you are working for the common good. I would suggest to you that the other 99% of us are far from convinced that it has much to offer. We feel that we spend hours of our time, even when idling, fulfilling someone else's dreams for them. It's a bit like being a hamster on one of those exercise wheels. It seems that we are indoctrinated with the thought that only constant activity can acheive, but when the rewards of that activity arrive they are not adequate for the amount of time put in (either working or idling) or are just too spiritually shallow to be worth a damn.

I was brought up with the WASP work ethic, but have long considered it as an unwinable game for the majority - myself included. Thus I question whether your idea of progress is suitable for me. That doesn't mean to say that I wish to deny you the right to follow your dream, but it does mean that I am skeptical of almost all the conventional career choices that are currently available. Indeed, the whole idea of a 'career' now seems a deeply-flawed one. You are right to filter out those people who will never be capable of living and fulfilling your dream, but I don't believe that your vision is really that suitable for myself or the majority of folks.

The 'Thai way' also has little to offer, unless one fancies spending the rest of one's life grayn-jaiing the status quo. I would suggest that the majority of Thai graduates would like to get away from the traditionalists - who have now tried to reinvent themselves as self-sufficientalists. But I also believe many Thais are increasingly aware that the western approach is a dice that is thoroughly loaded against them. Indeed, having been slow to adjust, they are probably going to find themselves being usurped by the Chinese at precisely the point where they seemed to be 'getting it'.

[Scuba22]

Wow, you raise a lot of important topics - globalization, the common good, capitalism-as-practiced (as opposed to capitalism-in-theory), personal aspirations of people, and my own personal business model. I think it makes sense to parse some of these topics; especially my business model vs. the common good vs. global consumer-based capitalism, as I don't think these are really comparable.

Personally, I'm interested in helping talented people reaching their potential. Both "talent" and "potential" are highly variable things, and so I've been led into various different fields - media, rural development, waste management, arts, IT, and more. The common thread is that I've always tried to work with people whose company I enjoy on projects that we felt are worthwhile. As I'm not independently wealthy, "worthwhile" for me must include an economic component - I have lost money on some efforts (primarily forays into performing arts), but I've tried to limit the losses while covering them through more profitable projects.

Are we serving the common good? I like to think so. For one thing, we're building businesses that compete based on superior products and services, that are completely transparent and maintain high levels of professionalism. To me, this is what capitalism should be - not the common perception of maximizing profits at any cost to society (Adam Smith wrote Wealth of *Nations*, not Wealth of Companies, or Wealth of People - and he writes at great length about the government's responsibility to society, especially the importance of keeping businesspeople far far away from politics; something modern "capitalists" would do well to study). I like to think that demonstrating to young graduates that you can have a comfortable life and build a successful business without corruption and government support is serving the common good. Perhaps I'm being delusional, but it does help me sleep at night.

That being said, there are a lot of aspects to what we're doing that have troubled me. The major issue I'm facing is that due to economic constraints and structural issues in Thai industry, our businesses tend to be focused on the elite of Thai society as our customer base. That's where the money is, but I must admit, providing superior goods and services to the rich and privileged is not all that fulfilling. As we build up our coffers though, we are looking more and more to upcountry businesses and I'm hoping that fairly soon we'll be able to launch projects in the countryside.

You are totally correct that my model is not appropriate for the vast majority of people, but then I'm not pretending to do anything for the vast majority. I've got my hands full attending my small staff of people who want to learn how to balance profitablity with conscience. Most of the people who didn't last with me were either uninterested in the work ethic or looking for quick riches. I'm not making a judgement on them, but they didn't really fit with what I'm trying to do, just as I don't fit with lots of other groups. I'm trying to create opportunities for people who DO want to work professionally, I can't take care of everybody, I'm just one schlub!

People need to find their own way in the world, and whatever that way is, it doesn't necessarily have to be part of the global capital world. Though the government is making a philosophical hash of it, I do think there is merit in thinking of happiness rather than consumption. There is a behavioral economics "happiness equation", H=C/D, where happiness is the ration of Consumption over Desire. In the global capital model, we tend to stress increasing consumption to improve happiness, but this ignores the desire variable. If your desire increases at a faster rate than your consumption, your overall happiness will decrease. Since we've conditioned ourselves to pump up desire in order to boost consumption, we've run into this trap. Ironically, the reverse - moving desire to zero and therfore increasing happiness to infinity - is prety much the core notion of Buddhism; but it's not exactly what you see all around you in Bangkok, where every available square cm of surface screams out to you to buy things.

But there are plenty of people who have opted out of this trap, who don't get taken in by the marketing and advertising and instead look inside themselves to understand what it is that they actually desire and want, what's really important to them. If you do that conscientiously, it's remarkably little, and it has to do with friends and family, not cars and mobile phones. If you keep that in mind, and work on the friends and family, happiness is automatic.

My circle falls into two general groups. The first is hard core global capitalists - investment bankers, businesspeople, consultants etc. The second is a gaggle of itinerant artists - musicians, dancers, theater folk, puppeteers, etc - who travel around the world doing their thing. Sometimes I have the opportunity to bring elements of each together. I've never, not once, heard from an artist that they'd prefer to be in the global capital world (though don't get me wrong, these guys are often hitting me up for funding!). On the other hand, quite few of my banker/consultant friends have dropped out or thought about it to become artists and follow their dreams.

We do get lost in the masks of personae (to use Jungian terminology) - we get caught up in the institutions of the world and think that that's all there is. For the vast majority, that's comforting- you know what you're expected to do, what the consequences are, and you act accordingly. The other side, the artistic side (and I'm using this broadly), is not a path for everyone - it's dangerous, has no guarantees, and can easily lead to total disaster. But the artist doesn't care about that, it's not the outcome that drives her, it's the process.

OK. I've written a lot - I'm a bit sick today and delerious so apologies if I'm rambling. Let's continue the conversation though - these are topics near and dear to my heart, so thanks for responding!

Cheers,

Scuba