CWI - Is the wage indicator raising the wages?

The meeting discussed the impact of the wage indicators and its relationship to the previous target of empowering people, explicitly women. In the current mission statement the wording is more neutral, for strategic reasons, says Kea Tijdens. The Dutch confederation of trade unions FNV was one of the original founders of the project.
The information "narrows the bandwith", as one of the participants said. More information on wages might lift wages, but that is not the mission of the project. The meeting formally adopted the mission statement.
The aim for 2008: expanding the project from 17 to 25 countries, covering all the large economies of the world.
Discussion: how to introduce a quality aspect, how comparable are developing countries and can they be included in the system. Including "non-wage" income should be a part of the information in the wage indicator, says Kea Tijdens. Both China and India start limited operation, China focusing on the Shanghai-area and India at the IT-sector.

CWI - Cross border wage comparison

In a globalizing world the question how to compare wages between countries is becoming increasingly an issue, for researchers, companies and governments. Prof. Kea Tijdens addressed the conference of the International Wage Indicator today research that makes those comparisons possible.
She described a whole set of running and upcoming research proposals based on the datasets that are provided by the Wage Indicator. About eight projects passed the revue, including a proposal for funding for the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Netherlands for developing a website in China. I proposed to send already my account number, but that was a bit too early, unfortunately.

Beckham, heading the soccer VIP's

CWI - The mixed success of the VIP-paycheck

Earlier this year the Wage Indicator introduced a playful element to its sites by introducing first the VIP-paycheck and later the VIP soccer check, allowing people to see what celebrities earn.
Mixed assesments different countries gave on efforts by the Wage Indicator for increasing the traffic to the surveys on their sites. While figures in the Netherlands and other sites showed a huge increase in traffic, that was mainly triggered off by their cooperation with MSN, who had put the link on their main pages.
India, who does not yet have a good media partner, failed to see such an increase.
Other countries, notably Brazil and Argentina actually reported negative reactions, that caused Brazil even to take the feature off the site.
Belgium tried to localize the feature and capitalized on an ongoing political debate in the country on the income of CEO's. The US and China did not use the feature yet, but would see huge advantages.

Marc de Vries

CWI - Building coalitions is key, Monster

Building this kind of coalitions is key for success, said co-founder and director Northern Europe of Monster Marc de Vries today at the conference of the Wage Indicator in Amsterdam. Monster is one of the members of the Wage Indicator Foundation that is responsible for the international project. He compared the wage indicator to the development that the online job-search company went through in the 12 years time of its existence.
"I see so many similarities," he said. "For us working in a coalition with universities gives so much added value, they can do research we would never be able to do."

Agnes Jongerius

CWI - Inclusiveness wage indicator key for success, FNV

"When we would have claimed exclusiveness for the wage indicator, it would not have the success it is having now," said Agnes Jongerius, chairwoman of the FNV, the largest confederation of trade unions in the Netherlands and co-founder of the Wage Indicator in a celebratory message at the ongoing conference.
"I do not see the complete world here yet, but that seems a matter of time," she said.
"If we would have claimed exclusivity, it would be appealing so much to the public as it does now," she added. "The wage indicator has become a household name in the Netherlands and can also have the same success in your countries." Now the wage indicator is not only including companies and competing trade unions, but might also include in the future employers' organizations.

prof. Paul van der Heijden

CWI - Capturing the black spot - UvA

The rector prof. Paul F. van der Heijden of the University of Amsterdam called the Wage Indicator today an excellent way to cover black spots that have been overseen by traditional ways of collecting wage information. "That traditional research could not compare between countries, missed the labor force in the informal sector. Webbased surveys can capture much better household characteristics."

Wiemer Salverda

CWI - "A very successful undertaking", AIAS

At the most official part of the ongoing international conference of the Wage Indicator, Wiemer Salverda, the head of AIAS, the department of the University of Amsterdam that co-founded the project, praised it today as a "very successful undertaking" and a model project in offering a public service.
"Statistical offices are often slow, do not compare wages from different countries and are very costly to use. The Wage Indicator offers a very valid and cheap alternative," he said.

Rob van Tulder

CWI - Multinationals' strategy under scrutiny

Part of the Wage Indicator Project is an effort to look into the international wage policies of multinational companies. Professor Rob van Tulder of Scope explained how he wants to include questions on the larger multinational into the wage indicator of the 17 countries involved to get an idea whether those companies are doing what they are saying. "It allows us to compare wages over the borders, a methodological very tough problem," he told the conference.
Otherwise today delegates from different countries showed they often rather new wage indicator sites and discussed solulutions for the problems they experienced.

Beckham

CWI - Do you want to know what soccer players earn?

A nice teaser, now also available on the Chinese Wage Indicator, with information on the income of mayor soccer players.

CWI - An emerging media company

A good morning from the site of the international wage indicator conference at Bussum, the Netherlands on the first day where the non-European partners of the project start formal proceedings. With the arrival of the Brazilian team, most of the international partners have no gathered and are starting to emerge from their jetlags.
Yesterday we had our first informal meetings and dinner, exploring the new faces - although the Brazilians went right into business in dealing with the questionnaire.
One of the major achievements of this meeting already is that a budding network between the different countries is getting into place. The scientists already met earlier in the week, but now the journalists and content managers need to find their own way.
The internet is bringing down not only the geographical barriers, but also those between disciplines. The wage indicator is having a very solid academic background, but now has to develop also als a media organization, giving information to the traditional outlet, but also becoming a medium in itself. By having a very strong focus on one issue - wages - we have in theory the starting point of a very new style news organization: international network, solid information and a good network.
First, in the morning bilateral meetings take place. After country presentation, we will focus on a specific field of interest: the operations of multinational companies. More later.

internet - LA Times censors its journalists

Next time the Los Angeles Times writes about censorship on the internet in China, they can ask for expert information of their suppliers, Boing Boing reports, based on information of LA Observed. Peacefire, a website fighting censorship software, has disclosed this. The Peacefire website is not available for LA Times journalists without explicite permission.
I just wonder why those journalists did not find it out themselves.

CWI - Quiet day before the official start

Yesterdag I assisted in getting some of the international guests from Schiphol to their hotels, eating, drinking and exchanging first experiences. An amazing bunch of people running around that made good much of the day I had to spend at the airport.
Last night we had our last group coming back with the car of chief-organizer Paulien Osse. Two Korean trade unionists, two South African scientists an Argentenian journalistist (who had been 30 hours without food and had many delays because of a strike at Iberia) and myself.
The wage indicator is this typical internet project where eroding borders between groups take place in high speed. Not only geographically, but also between discplines like activists, scientists, government people and business people.
The project is also at a turning point durings its first really international meeting. The first countries (first mover the Netherlands far ahead) are turning out now scientific data-sets that could be used, and good models for that still are under negotiation. Now 17 countries work together and China and Japan, the second largest economy, are lined up for this year. Then still a dozen other countries can be lined up for this wage information systems, but then all this effort has to be put into practical use. Time to start thinking about it now.

Philip Murtaugh

labor - Former GM-chief joins SAIC

The rumor was already going around last year as GM's successful China chief Philip Murtaugh was leaving his job. But only now he officially joined his long-time Chinese partner SAIC, writes Forbes. I guess he had a contract that did not allow to join the competition for a year and - unlike a longstanding tradition in China to ignore that - he obvious decided to honor that clause.
Still a trick step, since not many foreigners have been staying in that kind of position with a Chinese state-owned company very long. Only in March the Christopher Bachran lost his position at the Jingjiang Group. If it does work out between Murtaugh and SAIC that would be a breakthrough.

The kissing business – the WTO column

(Later also at Chinabiz)
My Chinese friend arrived back from a medical conference in Nice with a group of Dutch doctors and needed some cross-cultural advice. “When we left, they started kissing me,” she said. “Have I done something wrong?”
Two questions arose to make a fair assessment of this dilemma. How often did they kiss? And where from the Netherlands were they from?

The answers were right. They were mostly from the southern parts of Holland where I was born and they kissed three times. That is just about right: one kiss is too subtle and more than three is simply too much. Three kisses are sexually neutral, comparable to a firm handshake in other places.

As a small boy I hated the habit that was deeply embedded in our local culture. I had countless aunties and they seem to multiply each Sunday, presenting their three wet kisses each time we left church, had a family gathering or met just by accident in the street. Uncles kissed too, but they seemed less eager and certainly not that wet.
Only when I grew up, I started to appreciate those kisses, but then my aunties had become older too.
Even within the borders of a small country like the Netherlands, rules about kisses would differ. I remember the nice story of a former consul-general in Shanghai who had a bit of a reputation as a womanizer. We were born in the same city and during one of his trips he had in the coffee shop of the ministry of foreign affairs in The Hague a chat with his son. The son worked as a nurse on an ambulance and wore an impeccable white uniform. Of course they kissed when they said goodbye.
Staff of the ministry had watched the scene from their windows and reacted shocked, he recalled. “They said, our consul-general is now even doing it with men.”

Now, in China kissing was a wholly different issue and I have been studying the issue in depth. Kissing men was off-limits; here I really had to give in. But kissing women, even in our traditional sexually neutral way, seemed to be negotiable despite initial misgivings from the women involved.
It is against the Chinese tradition, was the most commonly heard argument against kissing. By then I had discovered that the argument of the Chinese tradition was something that could used against you in almost every situation. Calling in Chinese traditions is just one step in a lengthy process of negotiations.
Of course, I would agree that a certain degree of cultural sensitivity would make sense in the case where cultural values would clash. But why would my culture always be the one that has to give in? Could the Chinese not just appreciate the little bit of culture I had to bring in? Should we not have some give and take here?

Initially I was rather amazed the argument worked out. Later, it became a nice illustration of cross-cultural negotiations. It is of course a rather basic tool in any negotiation: you do not take the arguments of the other side for granted. If you do so, you will always lose the case.
So, if we meet: three polite kisses are in order; I will abstain from kissing men.

Fons Tuinstra