Serious World's 8 Richest Billionaires Richer Than All The Kelings Combined!

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:



A new report published by Oxfam, an international charitable organisation whose primary focus is on poverty alleviation, warns that the status of global economic inequality is far more dire than predicted.

More specifically, the report titled An Economy For The 99% estimates that just eight billionaires share the same wealth as that of the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity .

“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of so few when 1 in 10 people survive on less than $2 a day,” said Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International in a statement.

The report, released four years after the World Economic Forum identified rising economic inequality as a major threat to social stability, stacked high ranking names on the Forbes list of billionaires against data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Data Book 2016.


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“Across the world, people are being left behind,” Byanyima said. “Their wages are stagnating yet corporate bosses take home million dollar bonuses…their voices are ignored as governments sing to the tune of big business and a wealthy elite.”

To highlight the stark discrepancy between the world’s haves and have nots, the charity drew on the dire economic state of several Asian states whose workers, according to the report, are being “squeezed” to assure the wealth of the few.



Textile workers in Bangladesh earn between $0.13 and $0.45 (USD) an hour, according to reports. (Photo credit: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images).

Among them is India, whose GDP is estimated to be less than the accumulated wealth of the world’s eight richest. In Vietnam, the country's richest man earns more in a day than the poorest person earns in 10 years. More poignantly, the report claims that a Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 CEO earns as much in a year as 10,000 people in working in garment factories in Bangladesh - some of which are being subjected to poor treatment and slavery.

“While many chief executives, who are often paid in shares, have seen their incomes skyrocket, wages for ordinary workers and producers have barely increased, and in some cases have got worse,” the report said.

A report, conducted by Baptist World Aid Australia, claims that India employs almost 17 million workers (as of 2015) in the garment sector. In Bangladesh, the figure is 4.2 million. Monthly minimum wages for the industry in these countries are just $78(USD) and $71(USD) respectively, which equates to roughly $0.45 (USD) per hour.

The Independent Institute paints a bleaker picture. It claims that Bangladesh, at $0.13 (USD) an hour, has one of the smallest hourly rates for garment workers.

On the other side of the globe, according to 2015 statistics from the Department of Labor, the average hourly rate for a textile, apparel, and furnishings workers in the United States is $12.65(USD).

In contrast to both, the average compensation for a CEO of the top 350 US firms in 2013, based on research conducted by Economic Policy Institute, was $15.2 million (USD). Divide that by the accumulated yearly hours of a standard full-time 40-hour work week, and the hourly rate is roughly $7283(USD), pre-tax. This would roughly equate to the hourly rates of 16,000 employees from Bangladesh combined.

Regarding such discrepancies the Oxfam report said:

These trends towards greater inequalities of wealth and income are increasingly hardwired into our economies. Corporations and super-rich individuals both play a key role in driving these disparities…It is simple common sense that having all this money in too few hands is harmful to our society and to our future. It must be more fairly shared.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/millysti.../#583a561d7cf5


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