There are no easy answers
In the reading last week, one passage from “Changing the Game” struck me. It was in context of Nike’s labor issues: “However oppressive the working conditions seemed to U.S. consumers, they offered badly needed jobs in areas of severe poverty. If Nike stopped doing business with the offending suppliers, either competitors would take over the excess capacity and gain an economic advantage without changing labor conditions, or the factories would close and the workers would be unemployed.”
So, in exporting work to developing countries, are US manufacturers exploiting cheap labor or are they brining economic development to areas of poverty? Hopefully, they have good intentions, but this article shed some light in my mind that there are no easy answers. People in US may be shocked by how little workers in developing countries get paid, but if they were paid the same as workers in the US the corporations couldn’t afford to manufacture there once shpping costs are added in. And if the corporations don’t manufacture there, then they are left with even lower paying work or no work. This doesn’t absolve US corporations from social responsibility to foreign workers - I’m know there are plenty that do indeed exploit this arangement - but we do need to consider all the factors in these situations.
