I believe in efficiency. Someone in China has just as much right to earn a living as someone in my neighborhood does. I'll happily pay whoever gives me the best deal for what I need.
The problem is that, for a lot overseas workers, they're NOT paid enough to "earn a living" and when they attempt to organize and get a living wage, they're punished by the manufacturers moving production elsewhere or the government violently cracking down on their protests. "The True Cost" is a doc that focuses on this problem in the fashion industry.
I agree that the way workers are treated in other countries can be problematic. However if I and others refuse to buy the stuff made in certain countries because of their poor working conditions, all that happens is that more of the people working under crappy conditions overseas will be out of a job entirely. Is it better to have no job than a terrible job? I'm not convinced.
First of all, the overseas are absolutely 'earning a living', and a better one than what they had before. When you make maybe $1000/yr, there's a lot of potential to be moving up, even in those outsourced manufacturing jobs.
It's unlikely that they'll have no job instead of the terrible job; it's that they'll have a worse job working on the family farm/business and making far less money. I've spent a few weeks in villages in rural Guangdong province (the one where most of China's manufacturing boom has been) talking to people who lived there. You mostly see children and elderly grandparents because everyone of young/working age has traveled to the cities a few hours away (despite it being somewhat illegal for them because of their rural hukou) to get all the 'good' manufacturing jobs. Those parents go to those high-paying jobs while their parents go out in the fields all day to work the (in this case) tea fields. The average income is maybe 10k RMB (~$1500 USD). They all have places to live, if only because they're all pretty much family. Seriously, the whole village has the same family name because women marry out of the village and men find mates outside the village to bring in. If the parents can bring in more money, then they'll be able to afford a motorcycle for the grandparents to drive the children to school 45 minutes away, so maybe they'll be the first ones in their families to be middle school graduates (average was to finish through grade 4 or 5 in these villages). The factory cities may be dirty (I've spent time there too, and they're pretty crappy), but at least people throw trash in cans. In the village, you dump your trash in the stream, and then hope that the rains wash it away before the rats become common enough that they're getting into all the food you store on the dirty floor of your house's kitchen/sole_common_room. It makes perfect sense, because the trash washes away, and then it's not your problem any more, and so who cares? Sure, they're willing to dispose of it properly, if the government will pick it up. And the government tried to, but they put a dumpster out at the main (and only paved) road, and no one has the time to be walking 15 minutes out to the edge of town every time their trash is full. So they didn't use it, and now they couldn't even if they wanted to because the government has inexplicably put a padlock on the dumpster.
But those people aren't too bummed out, because they remember when things were worse. They remember when 30 years ago Mao said that every farm town should be able to feed itself, so they had to struggle to get by planting rice in a small valley, wasting a lot of the land that they should have been using to plant tea (a much more valuable crop), and they didn't get much else to eat. Because the Iron Rice Bowl didn't really apply to them, out in the boonies. What good is a farmer who can't even feed himself? But now things are better; they even get meat! Every morning the richest guy in town drives his bright yellow subcompact hatchback out to the town 45 minutes away, and buys a portion of a pig. He puts it on a trash bag in the back of his car and drives it into town, where he sets it on a worn wooden table that sits permanently outside in the sun. There, in the early morning light, he butchers the pig in the town square. And he does good business because anything is appreciated flavor when breakfast is rice porridge with MSG cubes (NOT CROUTONS, I repeat NOT CROUTONS) every single morning. Of course, there's also dog sometimes, which isn't surprising when you consider the number of stray dogs in this town of 400. Killing the dogs is probably a good idea anyway; otherwise they'll bother the cats while the cats are trying to catch the rats. The only good the dogs do is giving the kids something to chase as an activity.
But the kids also have a nice pool to swim in. If they walk up into the hills, there's a place before the trash-dumping section of the stream where the water pools into a nice area. They used to also have basketball in the paved central square, but then people started parking in it and leaving piles of gravel there. Everyone knows it would be nice to have a place for the kids to play, but it's just too bad; after all, it's a public place, so people can do whatever you want, and you can't tell them not to. So now the kids chase each other around, over, and under the small flat-bed truck and gravel pile. Some nights (because you don't play outside in the sun when it's 95-100 degrees and oppressively humid) the truck would park
just so, and they could play with the basketball hoop.
Anyway, I don't even remember what I'm talking about, but the point is that the job being called not a "living wage" is a dream ticket out of a really crappy situation to someone, even if it's not to you. That's why people take those jobs. And yes, all of this comes from my seeing those towns and talking to the people who lived in them.
