Quote from Yuri Laszlo :

It's the workers who pay their own wage. Economy 101 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value

Damn, I agree your good!

If you have a job offer in germany go for it but dont just move there and try to find a job.

These days the gold doesnt lie in the streets anymore either. Maybe germany is still one of the best in europe in the statistics but there are also many people who are making just a bit above the minimum so they can pay rent food and no luxury...

If you still hold down one of the better jobs you are lucky but if you need to find a new job its really not that easy anymore.

Good chances you will just find offers from employee leasing companies (earn money for nothing... sucking your blood) that will pay you like 900 Euros per month which is well... too much to die too few to live in germany.

I made like 1200 Euro with a regular contract and for the same job my employee leasing buddies got 900 Euros and many companies dont wanna pay more than this for an average job. I was in IT support and a friend of mine who worked in a different company (same job discription) made about 1800 per month.

I moved to Hungary because i know a friend who got me a job here and Budapest is great place to stay. Here i make about 900 Euro but i have a better life with this than with the 1200 Euro in germany because flat, public transport, restaurants and going out costs half or less. Supermarket is damn expensive though... and VAT is 27% !!!!!

same job in germany would pay me 2000-2500 Euro i guess.

ok dont come here if you are not a bit crazy or have a job offer from an international company because on average salary is like 400-500 Euro if at all...

Quote from Yuri Laszlo :

It's the workers who pay their own wage.

I am not sure how you are defining the word "pay". Surely you are not arguing that he literally takes money out of one of his pockets and puts in the other. If you mean that the worker earns, i.e. deserves the amount of his pay, then that is a moral judgement ... not an economic principle. Work has no economic value other than what it adds to raw resources. That value is determined by the end users and has nothing to do with the sweat and time involved in the products manufacture.

To me "pay" means that the employer gives the worker money for producing some product that the employer hopes he can sell for more than he paid. If the consumer does not buy the product and it remains in the warehouse then it is certain that the employer will eventually stop paying the worker to make that product. So I stand by my original remark that it is the customer who, in the long run, decides whether the workers efforts are of enough value to him to pay the worker for his labor.

Quote from codehound :

I am not sure how you are defining the word "pay". Surely you are not arguing that he literally takes money out of one of his pockets and puts in the other. If you mean that the worker earns, i.e. deserves the amount of his pay, then that is a moral judgement ... not an economic principle. Work has no economic value other than what it adds to raw resources. That value is determined by the end users and has nothing to do with the sweat and time involved in the products manufacture.

To me "pay" means that the employer gives the worker money for producing some product that the employer hopes he can sell for more than he paid. If the consumer does not buy the product and it remains in the warehouse then it is certain that the employer will eventually stop paying the worker to make that product. So I stand by my original remark that it is the customer who, in the long run, decides whether the workers efforts are of enough value to him to pay the worker for his labor.

The employer doesn't pay the worker to produce a product (e.g. you get paid X to produce Y number of items). The worker sells his work force for a determined period of time, during which the employer extracts the largest share of its profit through seizure of surplus-value. That will only be concretized at the sale of the product, but its not the product's face value that will affect the worker's salary, because they've already been paid (through the result of their own work) to do it.

If I'm paid to produce something that's gonna be sold for 40 dollars every 20 minutes, for six hours, six days a week, I could be paid $170.000/year and my employers still would keep the company profitable, just less profitable than its owner feel its right for their pockets.

Quote from Senninha25 :

AND YOU'RE NOT HAPPY WITH THAT??? I have a pretty good reason to rant at this, but I'd just look like a right idiot if I mentioned it because of the euro's value over here.

You could get a pretty comfortable lifestyle if you save some money and move to somewhere with lower costs than Belgium but that is still a place with good life conditions too. You still have that chance, at least.

For what i actually do i should be earning more. If i move to another country with a lower cost of living, the pay would obviously drop to.

Products here, are also more expensive then lets say hungary etc..
At the moment, there would be no way that I could live on my own. Even if i'd sell the M3.
The insurance on my 318i is 1650€ per year for me, renting a less decent appartment would be around 600-700€ for rent alone. Then u'd need to pay gas, water etc etc.. per month.. So make your calculation

Quote from Yuri Laszlo :

If I'm paid to produce something that's gonna be sold for 40 dollars every 20 minutes, for six hours, six days a week, I could be paid $170.000/year and my employers still would keep the company profitable, just less profitable than its owner feel its right for their pockets.

And if you worked in a bank, that would be 1.4mil bonus to the boss of the bank, rather than shared a little more evenly between those who really earn it! It is true, the front line worker earns the money, the corporation decides the wage based on what someone can live on rather than the profit they make. There is not a lot of incentive for the front line worker to try for more profits.

Quote from Scrabby :

Even if i'd sell the M3.

You would need double the minimum wage to own a M3 here...

Quote from Scrabby :

I'd be happy if i would earn 1390€ :/
Barely getting 1150€ atm

People earn the 1/3 of that over here.

Quote from Töki (HUN) :

People earn the 1/3 of that over here.

I can believe that, I know a Hungarian, he owns an Audi 80, he is considered wealthy! Long time no see Töki

Psysim, was that on the year 1995?

Quote from Yuri Laszlo :

... the employer extracts the largest share of its profit through seizure of surplus-value.

What does Marxist theory propose should happen in the case of deficit-value? Does Marx say that the employer should require that the worker return some of his pay to cover some of the employer's loss?

Apologizes to the original poster for going off topic. But it just makes me sad to see the young and the poor suffer because people don't understand economics. Every time that politicians have raised the minimum wage here in the US the unemployment rate among the young and poor has gone up.

Quote from Scrabby :

I'd be happy if i would earn 1390€ :/
Barely getting 1150€ atm

Dafuq? You are not happy? The minimal wage here is 298€. My parents barely earn that much. Together...

Quote from Nadeo4441 :

The minimal wage here is 298€. My parents barely earn that much. Together...

wtf, that is less than my monthly taxes alone...
either way see his post a bit below, he explains it there, if rents for average apartment are 600-700€ there, and other prices are on the level with that then i would assume that ~1100€ is surely not enough. They just have a bit different value of money over there.

edit*

Quote from Psysim :

I can believe that, I know a Hungarian, he owns an Audi 80, he is considered wealthy! Long time no see Töki

All this spouting off Marx and back-of-the-economics-textbook terms... If you are considered poor but can still afford to drive a car then you're in the right country. If not, have fun being jizzed on in the bus or whatever horrific things are happening on public transport.

Last time I took a subway was in 2003 and I got slapped by a drunk smelly hobo. That was the last time I will ever take PT.

What city was that, Mike? I've had some iffy public transport experiences, but Chicago's trains/busses were pretty good overall.

I found this article in today's newspaper, it's an analysis of how Island got over the crisis. Basically, they applied what every decent cattleman knows: if you want milk from your cows - FFS feed them!

Thanks to the strong will of their citizens (which was crucial) shown on 2010 protests, their President changed the political course and started kicking back the responsibility to those who created the global crisis in the first place - greedy banks.

It's also interesting to learn how they managed to avoid EU sanctions

The article is google-translated, but it's understandable enough to get the point. Link to the article

Quote from codehound :

What does Marxist theory propose should happen in the case of deficit-value? Does Marx say that the employer should require that the worker return some of his pay to cover some of the employer's loss?

Apologizes to the original poster for going off topic. But it just makes me sad to see the young and the poor suffer because people don't understand economics. Every time that politicians have raised the minimum wage here in the US the unemployment rate among the young and poor has gone up.

In real terms, workers on minimum wage in the US get paid less today than in 1950, while corporations have been posting record profits after record profits in the past decade. It's not how much the worker gets that's the problem, but how much their employers gets. Exxon Mobil's profit went from US$8 billion to US$45 billion between 1999-2008 and, despite no increase in minimum wages during 99 and 2007, they cut 26,000 jobs during the period.

Quote from codehound :

What does Marxist theory propose should happen in the case of deficit-value? Does Marx say that the employer should require that the worker return some of his pay to cover some of the employer's loss?

The problem with salary and economics is that people seem to tie different ideologies to it depending what works best at given moment. Marxist theories just like capitalist theories or whatever theories all mainly suck because they are based on an ideological views of the world and not on realistic view of the world.

It is also worth mentioning that on some areas the worker's salary could be almost anything because the salary expenses are not meaningful part of all costs. On some other areas the salaries define the actual costs.

The worker should never have any right to any extra profits though. If he wants those profits he could invest and take the risks with the chance of getting something back. That doesn't mean paying absolute minimums or making your workforce work on hunger limits is good.

Sure it sucks when bank managers grab tons of money for various reasons and generally get paid insane amounts for what they do. But then again that's where the hypocrisy starts. Everyone would do the exact same thing if you could define your own salary.