Bangladesh's textile industry video.

[hutch--]

Jobs shifted offshore to exploit very cheap labour in 3rd world countries.

[Henry Hall]

They must have had a clean-up and told people they were allowed to talk on that day. I didn't quite catch what the $70 was: per week? (unlikely), per month? Per year?

I saw some twerp on a blog linked from C&T 'tutoring' someone about how this industry was good for the people of Bangladesh, otherwise they'd be even poorer. The kind of argument someone like John Bolton would often come out with before being destroyed by someone with more sense and brains.

In one sense it's true that, just like in Manchester in the 1840s, people migrate from agricultural work to this work because it actually pays (marginally) more. Then it develops and legislation eventually allows the workers to demand higher wages. Before long the bonanza is over. By that time all those newly unemployed people, whose jobs have been outsourced to even cheaper places, are divorced from other industries and the useful jobs they once did. It's actually de-skilling as the skills become essentially useless economically for the region, just like the thousands of ex-sewing machine operator all over England experienced.
That's already happening in the East as these operations hopped from China and India into Bangladesh and Vietnam/Cambodia. In 20 years it'll be 'developing parts of Africa' making the piles of cheap clothes. In Africa governments are often able to be bribed by big business to bully their own populace into accepting bad conditions (like Shell in Nigeria...who remembers Ken Saro-wiwa these days?)

Some liars on TV will say it has 'skilled the workforce', and enriched the country enough for people to 'start small businesses' and all the usual pipe-dream drivel poured out on this subject to justify the miserable, wasteful models of development favoured by the World Bank, IMF and WTO. All at the bidding of its financial masters, with 75% of people in the so-called developed world nodding along because they are clueless about the ugly economic reality.

It's 14 years since Joseph Stiglitz (nobel prize for economics, Clinton first-term economic advisor) trashed the global victorian-style capitalistanomics of his former employer the World Bank as wrong-headed, but it made no dent until the 2008 crash (and even then only a small one).

[Schneiderfrei]

Now I'm looking for the like button

[hutch--]

There is an approach for situations like this where there is a disconnect between the consumer in a 1st world country and an exploited person working in slave labour conditions in a 3rd world country. It has been the basic "Ethical Product" style of designation which allows you to tell a 1st world consumer that the kid who stitched the collar on your designer label garment was killed when a building collapsed some weeks later or that the lady who packaged the designer label product is trying to feed 3 kids on a pittance after working 14 hours a day.

Its much the same brain as "Blood Diamonds" where the lovely expensive diamond necklace bought by some millionaire for his mistress just funded X number of AK47s that are used by child soldiers to kill their own family and anyone else that the "Konis"of the world want dead.

Connecting the ugliness of exploitation is in part the way to reduce it but you will be fighting against massive corporations that source in the 3rd world and sell in the 1st world and if they fund their Lear jets, Porsches and Chalets over the dead bodies of the poverty stricken, who cares ?