I once supported the management of a division of offshore contractors. In addition to my primary responsibilities of training, project management, and performance feedback for a small team within that division, I also took on occasional recurring tasks to help us understand overall performance. One example was invoice validation. I took the team’s reported work hours, compared them against their projects, and validated their monthly wage allocation.
I eventually trained a replacement as part of my transition out of the role. The new guy became outraged when he saw the hourly wages reported on the invoice. How can we pay them like that? It’s sick, it’s inhumane! This went on for almost a minute. It was true, everything he was saying, but I felt something about his thinking came up short. The offshore team’s wage was roughly one-third of the US minimum wage but it was also an offshore wage. Borders not only change laws, they also change the value of money.
A Business Bro must always crunch the numbers. I looked up statistics like the minimum wage, the cost of living, and currency conversion rates, and then converted the offshore wage into an approximate equivalent of a Boston salary. The final result didn't make anyone rich, offshore or not, but it was more than I was making at the time. Our offshore colleagues earned one-third of our minimum wage but they had far more local spending power than me.
I felt pretty good about my math. I could see the arc of history in my figures, a real life example of how capitalism enables nations to build each other up through free trade in a functioning open market. Yes, my replacement’s outrage was flawed, his reaction was certainly knee-jerk, and he should have taken into account the way things worked before his outburst. If you earn to spend, it’s not about what you earn but what you can buy.
But as I look back on this incident, I suspect there’s a flaw in my thinking, too. There’s something not quite right about the way human concerns can be written off with some figures multiplied together in a short equation. There’s a flaw in my thinking and math isn’t going to be much help in figuring it out.
