When someone starts to earn profits from their businesses, it’s usually a continuous one barring any sudden unforeseen circumstances. What happens then is that their business earnings will start to have a widening gap with the workers who earn a fixed pay every week or month, depending on which country we are talking about.
This is not just for the business owners. A senior manager earning RM20,000 for example, even with an increment of just 3% will be earning an extra RM600 per month and that’s RM7,200 per year. Someone working on the floor of a factory for example may earn just RM1,500 per month and even with a 10% increment which is 3 times higher, they will only earn an extra RM150 per month or RM2,700 per year.
Do we now see why the income gap will only grow larger? Unless of course everyone moves up and corporate ladder and we let the robots take over all the lower-end repetitive kind of jobs. When robots do start to come and take over though, we will have to ensure all these employees are able to move up the corporate ladder too, yeah. Else, the situation will become even worse. They (low salaried workers) do not just earn lower pay, they have no income!
Article in reuters.com Oxfam says that the world’s richest 2,153 people controlled more money than the poorest 4.6 billion combined in 2019. It also said that women around the world work 12.5 billion hours combined each day without pay or recognition. Amitabh Behar, CEO of Oxfam India cited the case of a woman called Buchu Devi in India who spends 16 to 17 hours a day doing work like fetching water after trekking 3km, cooking, preparing her children for school and working in a poorly paid job.
In comparison, he said, “And on the one hand you see the billionaires who are all assembling at Davos with their personal planes, personal jets, super rich lifestyles.” Behar said that to remedy this, governments should make sure above all that the rich pay their taxes, which should then be used to pay for amenities such as clean water, healthcare and better quality schools. Please refer for more details in the Article in reuters.com
It’s really quite scary. However, for most of the people in the world, it’s possible to do something about it. Education is usually the first step. Employment after tertiary education is the next step. This is then followed by financial awareness and management. Else, the situation will not change a lot because the richest billionaires are not going to just share their wealth with everyone just like that…
In Malaysia, it’s important to understand that ‘if we want a job, we can find a job.” Once we found a job, we can then use the salary we earned as a stepping stone. Remember yeah, “working professionals,do you love just your job? Last but not least, whatever we earn, always look to “Are we earning, saving, investing and preserving what we have? Happy understanding too and yes, I have written about this income gap a couple of times. One earlier article is this: When salary packages for CEOs become way too high I am of the opinion that once the salary hits a certain level, there’s no need to pay these CEOs ever higher because he would have been able to afford most of everything in the world already! It is his low level employees who needs more money to buy groceries to feed the family. Happy understanding.
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