Billionaire Slammed After Musing About Workers Paid $2 a Day
Nothing ignites controversy like having one of the world’s richest women tell her fellow Australians that they need to cut labor costs in order to compete with Africans who are “willing to work for less than $2 a day.”
Georgina “Gina” Rinehart, who the BBC says earns about $600 a second from the mining company she inherited, says in a video she posted on the website of the Sydney Mining Club that Australia is just too costly for businesses such as hers and that she worries “for this country’s future” because it’s so much less expensive to mine and manufacture elsewhere.
“Business as usual will not do,” she says, in the pitch for lower taxes and creation of a special economic zone.
Her comments, especially the reference to “$2 a day,” led Australian Greens Party leader Sen. Christine Milne to call Rinhart the “epitome of the greed and the abuse of the environment that has become such a characteristic of the mining industry in Australia,” according to News.Com.Au.