We in American and the rest of the West are the consumers of the products of child labour, slave labour, abusive conditions, flagrant polluter, and underpaid workers all imported cheaply from abroad.
Not only that but America is going into debt to buy these cheap products make for companies like Walmart. And workers in the first world struggle to find jobs in a workplace with laws designed to protect against abuses.
These are the consequences of our neoliberal trade policies which dream about the benefits of free trade, but simple move the jobs to where the workplace regulations are weak or not enforceable. Most recently the spotlight is on China's problems with child labour.
Free trade is supposed to be a panacea for many of the worlds problems. Rich countries get cheap products, and their educated, skilled workforce if free to produce more valuable good, poor countries get money to develop infrastructure, and workers in those countries get better jobs to keep them from starving and help them improve their lot in this world.
That is not how it has worked the way that the world, lead by America, has implemented it. The international system is very lasse faire and hearkens back to the robber baron days of the late 19th century in the Western World. Companies profit dramatically by moving factories to the country with the poorest people as planned, but they also move to places with no legal protection for working people. Often those countries have enough political power to engineer significant tax breaks reducing the benefit to local governments. Many first world employees are learning that the jobs they have trained for can be done less by people across the globe. In first world countries the tax base is also shrinking as companies exploit international loopholes to avoid taxes.
The consequences of international trade have been to weaken governments power over their corporate citizens at the same time that companies have incentive to show loyalty to their locale, and Unions are losing bargaining power due to competition with workers worldwide.
This issue plays out in many ways around the globe. It is central to the debate over the EU, where workers demand protections as markets become more liberalised. It leads to errant protectionism in the US as workers grumble about their factories being shipped overseas. And it leads to massive child labour in countries like China and in Africa.
The consequence is that the poorer citizens of rich countries are suffering as their jobs are taken away and offered to poor people in poor countries who have no legal or social protections against workplace abuse. Those abuses which our countries struggled for years to prevent are now be exported to the lowest bidder. On both sides of the divide the poor suffer and the international corporations profit.
There are many blessings of trade, which many of us would rather not forgo, but we must find a way to maintain trade in such a way that we do not suffer such grievous market failures. At the moment international bodies like the WTO and the World Bank are being run by the corporate offenders rather than anyone interested in fixing the problem.
In many ways I think that trade groups like the European Community are potentially steps in the right direction. They are implementing international labour standards along with eliminating tariffs, and are ensuring that benefits are going to the individual as well as the corporation. I would not be surprised to see the strengthening of European wide labour unions and they see the need to negotiation with corporations and legal bodies which span the region.
I think that the left can benefit by working together internationally to organise governments and labour to stand against international big business. The problems of corporate globalisation are best fought by global organisations. The primary goal of these efforts would be to bring home the problems of the worlds poorest labourers, to reduce the profit in exporting jobs to exploit workers.
In the short run, we should try to convince the Unions that Fair Trade is a solidarity issue not a "bleeding heart liberal" issue. At the moment the market for products which abuse workers seem more popular amongst greens and the middle class left. If unions were to join that movement it would dramatically increase demand and help more workers around the world receive good working conditions and a living wage.
More significant improvements could be make it nations were to insist on better protections for workers as part of their trade deals. This is most likely to come from EU countries first as America's fights are further to the right than that. If companies and countries had to treat their workers with dignity and grant them the rights of those in the first world in order to trade freely with the rest of the world it would improve the lot of the poorest workers and protect the hard won freedoms of worker around the world.