blue_velvet wrote:I think third world laborers need to take responsibility, organize, and demand higher wages. Government can't possibly do anything effective in this case. At present, many of those laborers are doing better than they were before thanks to outsourcing. The problem most Westerners have with it is the effect it has on the Western middle class. This goes for illegal immigrants as well. They work below minimum wage giving them an advantage in the labor market. I seriously believe that there will never be an adequate political solution to any of the world's ills. It is solely on the people to create any change world. The best thing anyone can do is give the power back to the people, and I mean that in the most literal sense.
This is very true and at the same time shows exactly the essence of one of the big problems of the worlds economy: In many third world countries, workers are not allowed to organise themselves and the same is true for illegal immigrants who work in sweatshops in the USA and the UK. And this is exactly why outsourcing is often so lucrative: because you don't have to bother with labour rights.
Because gues where companies like to outsource to? Exactly those places where laborers can't organise themselves.
That's where western governments should come in: ban every product from the market that is made by slaves, meaning people who have been stripped from their rights.
With child-pornography we also don't say that we should leave it to the invisible hand of the free market to regulate things, so why would we accept other forms of abuse?
If china then, still want's to sell their shit to us, it's very simple: give people the right to join unions that are independant from the corrupt communist party.
This measure would either solve the problem of slavery, or it would help to protect jobs in the west, or it would even do both.
The only thing is that the WTO won't allow it since the wealthy who have a finger in the pie of world politic's like to benefit from the poverty of other people.