How do you put a sticker tag on a worker's value? And eventually the third world will unionize. Big corporations are just taking advantage of poor, uneducated people in other countries, and it sucks. Eventually service jobs over here will unionize, too, because this Walmart stuff is bulllshit.
The market decides the value of a worker through supply and demand. Obviously it would be nice if everyone considered each other to be a beautiful special snowflake that is worth millions and millions of dollars and paid them accordingly, but the truth is that most people are not skilled and are largely redundant in terms of what they can offer an employer.
The third world might unionize one day, but if you've ever been to the third world you would realize that the governments in those countries tend to be extremely oppressive and corrupt... and they also tend to squash uprisings with extreme violence. People in the US cry because they get a faceful of tear gas and a cop puts their hand on their neck-- people in China cry because they're being raped to death and their organs are being ripped out and sold on the black market.
You might argue that liberation is inevitable but on the other hand these are countries that weren't founded on the same principals that western countries like America were... and in a lot of cases they're far too unstable for civil rights to even be an issue.
I actually ran into a woman the other day who told me about a sort of spiritual practice (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong) which is in no way political but was perceived as a potential threat to the Chinese government because of its influence (and because religions actually threaten loyalty to the government), so now the practice is outlawed and the followers are 'disappearing'. All because they're practicing a kind of
yoga. How do you think a worker's rights campaign would be dealt with?? The only time that the Chinese are allowed to protest is when it's something about Japan or foreign influence... and those protests tend to be extremely heated, because they're also venting frustrations that have built up over the other things in their lives that they're helpless to change. Meanwhile in America, people are protesting the fact that they have to pay for
university (in Tanzania they actually have to pay for ALL of their education-- good luck buying that iPhone), or the fact that 'the rich' (whoever they may be) have more money than other people, or some other thing that they don't realize that nobody has an answer to, and just assume that they understand when they really don't.
I'm not saying that we don't deserve better, just that we're competing with something that would consider everything that we take for granted to be bliss. China is a HUGE problem because they just don't have the same rules and they don't place the same value on life that we do... they're willing to do whatever it takes to make themselves into the number 1 economic power in the world, and they don't give a damn about civil rights, freedoms, or the lives of individuals. If western businesses refused to play into that, then maybe we'd be onto something... but then they wouldn't be able to compete globally. Western workers would drive the prices of our goods up and someone like Samsung could easily swoop in and completely destroy Apple forever (just one example).
The only way around it is to stop buying Chinese crap and agree to pay more for domestic products (or at least something from Korea or Japan which are relatively free westernized societies)... but it's highly highly unlikely that this will happen. People get excited when they see the price tag... they don't care where it came from.
