Comments on: Peru, fair trade coffee, and minimum wage

By: Siel

Siel — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 02:55:52 +0000

Like I tell my students, think “reader-centric,” not writer-centric, when writing stuff :)

Anyway, the fallout from the Financial Times article’s continuing — I’ll do another post on it soon –

By: simon

simon — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:40:26 +0000

I was offering an alternative explanation. The assumetion in the post was the market. I just pointed out that maybe they don’t want to.

Then my “automatically assuming that they wouldnâ€™t” was in referance to the burying their heads in the sand.

Made sense to me in my twisted dyslexic Irish way anyway. :).

By: Siel

Siel — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 08:03:41 +0000

And what I’m trying to say is that none of this comes across in your “maybe like most businesses in these countries they donâ€™t want to?” comment.

By: simon

simon — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:37:57 +0000

Basically what I was trying to get at is that the Fair trade movment may be to quick to judge the lack of wages due to poor market condidtions.

That maybe workers are being exploited and the checking mechanism that the Fair trade people use to make sure that standards are being meet are not adequate.

And by simply presumming that the reason is the market, they are burying their heads in the sand on the issue.

By: Siel

Siel — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 00:34:49 +0000

simon — I did say that max could’ve made his request less sarcastically, and yes, I agree he stretches what you said a bit — though I’m not sure your pessimistically speculative question added much to the discussion. In any case, you both tend to leave unnecessarily contentious and reactive comments, so I guess it’s not surprising you’ve ticked each other off.