These people are exploited by being paid a minimal wage, because they have no other way to survive, but to take sweatshop jobs. The Grapes of Wrath illustrates this mechanism well.
That is right, and what is the alternative? Suppose China had never opened their borders to foreign investments. What would these people do? I think I know the answer, just look at the following life expectancy graph:
The alternative is to fairly share profits with the people that make goods. This could be enforced by the legal system, as it was successfully done when slavery was banned.
The two things are entirely orthogonal. Fairness is a moral judgement. Free markets are inherently amoral (not immoral) and tend to optimize for profits (with a bias towards short-term profits). That's not good or bad, it merely is.
Raising money for poor people, except for the tax and marketing benefits, is a bad economical decision -- the benefits are at best ultra-long-term and very unpredictable. No matter what you think about the Gates Foundation, they're not doing good things for economical reasons. If its only purpose was financially benefiting Bill Gates, he should fire his financial advisors.
The free market didn't get Europe out of the Industrialisation, civil rights (and labour laws) did. Regardless of what you think about modern unions[0], they played a huge part in empowering labourers enough that they could negotiate to improve their working conditions. Without organizing in unions, striking would have been economical suicide for any individual labourer.
[0]: I personally think that unions are antiquated in most industries in Europe and North America today, especially when most of the strikes seem to involve middle-class jobs and those who are worst off often don't have any means to unionize or strike (e.g. people who work at temp agencies that are treated as free contractors legally even if they are not financially independent). But that's a different topic altogether.
Wait - average wages a decade ago were like a dollar a day. So tripling that sounds like something I guess. I'd like to see something like parity for wages doing the same work anywhere on the planet. That would be progress.
> I'd like to see something like parity for wages doing the same work anywhere on the planet
I'd like a pony.
Saying, in the year 2015, that wages should be the same anywhere on the planet is telling poor countries with no infrastructure "fuck you, got mine." Because the only reason someone opens a factory in Cambodia or China instead of South Carolina is because of the low wages. That is those countries' competitive advantage.
If a worker in Cambodia costs $10 an hour and a worker in America costs $10 an hour, there is no reason to build a factory in Cambodia. They have poorer infrastructure, little to no respect for IP, and the stuff is now a world away from its customers.
All right, have an over-worked pony and stop pretending not to know about marginal costs and prices. As long as the worker in Cambodia remains cheaper by anything over the exact cost of shipping than the one in South Carolina, rather than by orders of magnitude, his country has a comparative advantage.
It's not just shipping costs. It's also the fact that doing business in a well-functioning first-world country is much easier than doing business in a third-world country.
Also, just declaring that Cambodian workers will get $7 an hour wouldn't just magically spill money into the workers. If the market wage is $1 an hour, a bulk of that difference is going to go into pockets of the people handing out the jobs via kickbacks.
An awesome solution that doesn't work in the real world isn't an awesome solution.
Nobody's suggesting solutions. Just what they would look like if they existed. And they wouldn't look like a shift in poverty-stricken populations to a different point under the poverty line.
That's pretty mean, putting abusive words in my mouth to make a tangential point. How about, just mention that low wages have an upside to balancing economic growth, and leave me out of it?
They're being exploited, and their governments are doing nothing to stop it. You want change? It starts with those who are allowing it. Modern muckraking only goes so far.
