Here Doug discusses what cheap labor really means on the ground. And he means cheap labor. According to the U.S. State Department, workers in Burundi received on average 1,500 francs per day, or $1.40. Since a 12-hour day wouldn't surprise me, Doug's estimate of 20 cents per hour might even be high.
You don't need to go to Western Europe to see just how poor that is. To give an example with which Americans are familiar, production workers in Mexican maquiladoras cost US$2.64 per hour in 2006. Production workers in all Mexican manufacturing cost US$2.75. Total hourly direct pay for all employees (including benefits but not taxes and other social charges) averaged US$3.32 per hour. (That'd be 5,752 pesos per month.) Even farmworkers in the country's northern states make about US$1.50 an hour. In short, Burundi is impoverished compared to Mexico.
Anyone who spends time in Latin America can see some of the effects of cheap labor, but nothing on the scale of what Doug describes.
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