 In China, workers at a Wellco Factory who make shoes for Nike are paid 16 cents/hour ( the living wage for a small family is about 87 cents), for a 12 hour shift, 7 days a week - 84 hours per week. The workers are fined if they refuse overtime, and they’re not paid an extra rate for overtime hours.
This is the reality of globalization when big corporations are free to locate manufacturing plants in developing countries where labour is cheap, and where there are no environmental and employment standards. Developing countries then compete for the patronage of these corporations by lowering labour standards, minimum wages and workplace safety requirements. The result: horrendous working conditions, and no state oversight to make the factories change them.
Most of the World Trade Organisation's governments oppose any labour rights and environmental protections in trade agreements. They regard low wages and lax pollution control laws as major assets they compete to offer to multinational corporations.
It is the workers, who must shoulder Globalisation’s burdens. Western workers lose when factories in the West close down, and the factories are re-located overseas in search of a workforce willing to work for poverty wages. Corporate profits soar and corporate CEOs win fat cat salaries.
Globalisation exploits the poverty and desperation of the third world. while allowing large corporations to circumvent the living wages, organisation rights, and workplace safety regulations labour activists have fought long and hard for in the west.
The solution is to allow the Third World to develop their own markets within their own trade zones, and to allow them to develop their economies at their own pace. The free movement of capital from the West must be subject to government restrictions, and for the UK this can only be done by European nations working together within a European framework.
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