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Using the information posted by thomasz it doesn't seem plausible that the average German truck driver would make 5 times what your brother made. Assuming that your brother followed European laws and didn't drive more than the allowed hours a day, and assuming an average work week of 5 days* for both your brother and the average German truck driver, the German truck driver would have made €421,80 in 4 days of work. There are a few possible explanations to your blatantly wrong assertions here. One could be that you are simply as naive to think that a European truck driver would make €1500 for 4 days of work (if that where so I would be leaving my, in relation to the number you provided, low paying work as an IT consultant in a heart beat, €7500/month drool). Another more cynic explanation would be that you are trying to spread some poor-me-I'm-from-an-ex-communist-country-I'm-so-poor propaganda, hopefully that isn't so. The flip side to that is that the former Eastern block countries are effectively out competing European haulage companies, with the effects most visible in the countries with the highest salaries. For instance, in Sweden, most small family owned transport companies have either filed for bankruptcy or been bought by larger companies, much due to the increasing price dumping caused by Eastern European companies. And increasingly the Swedish haulage companies are hiring Eastern European drivers as contractors, as this is cheaper than hiring Swedish drivers. This, and other similar cases for instance cheap builders, cheap ship yard workers, steel workers and so on, means that many Eastern European countries may be poorer than Western European countries, but the work force have a lot of work opportunities, especially the Eastern Europeans that are in the European Union. Work opportunities that are disappearing in Western Europe. * That is, about 40h a week give or take according to work schedule in accordance to what the law says about continuous work hours and obligated rest between shifts. For instance it is possible that a truck driver can be scheduled to work 56 hours a week, the regulations are very strict in Europe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_driver#European_Union) |
I hope I'm not :) Anyway, maybe I was wrong in my multiplication by a certain factor, but you have to keep in mind that my brother (and his co-workers) only make these kind of trips every 2 weeks or so, so assuming he makes an average of 2 and half such trips per month it's around ~800 euro per month. Which is actually a pretty good salary around these parts, only that most likely most of this money is paid in some manner as to avoid taxes (there was a post from some Hungarian guy a couple of weeks ago explaining why that's the only viable solution for a small to medium company around these parts of Europe).
And regarding the "disappearance" of job opportunities for Western workers... well, something has got to give, you cannot have a free market for goods without a free market for labor. Meaning you cannot have Ikea stores in those "poor" East-European countries with no import charges attached to its merchandise without giving said East-European workers the chance to improve their lives in Ikea's host country' or Nokia's, or BMW's. Otherwise it's just old, plain economic colonialism, and that's bad.