The end of cheap, exploitable proletariat labor is likely in the foreseeable future. Really.
In 1988 an article in Scientific American predicted "The End of Cheap Oil" within about 20 years. It doesn't seem many people believed it at the time.
About thirty years ago the UN estimated that world population would peak or almost quit growing around 2050, at around 12 billion souls. That estimate has been revised several times, and it's now down to about 8.9 to 9.85 billion, possibly fewer, and possibly sooner. Here are a few recent estimates:
http://www.vaughns-1-pagers.com/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://geography.about.com/...
The first night I made it to Netroots Nation (Thursday), I sat at a table with two ladies about my age, 60, and this subject came up. When we were born, about 1950, world population was about 2.55 billion. In the mid 1960's when Tom Lehrer sang "We Will All Go Together When We Go" (a 'survival hymn' about nuclear holocaust) his line about "nearly three billion hunks of well done steak" was a bit out of date. In 1965 the world was up to 3.3 billion, according to that last reference.
By now, we're up to 6.8 billion. We sixty year old folks have lived through the fastest period of human population growth that the world will probably ever see -- not just in percentage, but in absolute numbers. Since we were born, world population has grown by about 4.25 billion. It isn't expected to grow by another 4 billion for centuries, if ever.
Toward the beginning of the industrial revolution, Karl Marx saw some of the immediate economic effects and made some gloomy predictions. For a good while, indeed, as labor became more productive it may, perversely, have become cheaper. (If you double your work force's productivity, you could afford to pay twice as much, but you might choose in stead to pay less and less until half your employees quit. At that point you're producing as much, but with less than half the labor cost.)
That perverse effect can keep happening as long as there's plenty of cheap, non-union labor available. But we can see the end of the era of cheap labor, I think. In 1988, I read an article in Scientific American, "THE END OF CHEAP OIL"by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère.
http://dieoff.org/...
They predicted world oil production would begin an unavoidable decline 'before 2010', and that around the same time if not before, the price of oil would go way up. In 1988, people had trouble believing it.
If the supply of labor 'peaks' in a similar way, perhaps the end of cheap labor will come about the same time as the peak. Growth in the labor supply probably lags the growth in the population by about 20 years. Using the figures from the third reference above, it seems population growth may have peaked about 1975 to 1980, or perhaps hit a plateau then. We have yet to see a distinct slowing of growth, but I have faith it's coming soon. With a flattened peak in population growth, and with people living and probably being able to work longer, the potential labor supply might plateau about when people born in 1980 leave the labor force. Those folks will be 70 years old in 2050. We wouldn't expect population or the labor force to trail off, the way oil production almost surely will. Labor is a renewable resource. But even if the labor force is still growing at a moderate rate in 2050, it's reasonable to hope that economic growth will have been faster, which should mean more and better jobs.
Are we seeing the end of cheap labor yet? I think there are some early signs of it. Remember the 1992 presidential debates, when Ross Perot was talking about the "great sucking sound" of jobs moving to Mexico because of the North American Free Trade Agreement? Mexico no longer has low cost labor, more like medium cost. How about China and India? Maybe, but the labels in my new shirts say they're from Sri Lanka, or Bangla Desh, or Nepal. It seems the clothing manufacturers are going to the ends of the earth to find the very cheapest labor. The economies of those two giants, India and China, are growing like gangbusters. When they reach the point of being medium cost labor markets, there won't be any more huge pools of really cheap labor to exploit. Somewhere along that path, labor and unions will gain the upper hand in wage negotiations. Then most of the world's population will climb into the middle class. Hopefully, the gap between rich and poor nations will shrink.
So when will the majority of people in the world make it to the middle class? I've thrown around the date 2050 a lot in this diary, so I'll guess it will be by then, maybe sooner. I'll be very lucky to live to see it, but I think my sons will get to.