“…Whether either production enriches or impoverishes the world is not always clear.” This is one statement that one can never disagree with. Producers are increasingly seeing the need for cheaper costs of production while reaping in higher profits. Whatever their motivations may be, greed or otherwise, it has driven them to outsourcing their production to Third World countries where labor is abundant and thus extremely low in cost.
The people who benefit from this move are far and few between – and perhaps the only ones who stand to gain are the producers and corporations themselves. In moving production from one country to another where labor comes at a cheaper price, jobs will be lost in the former country and people will be displaced. The income that these people have depended upon their whole lives to support themselves and their families would have vanished in the blink of an eye, most of the time even before they can search for alternatives to continue making a living.
On the other hand, in the developing nations, jobs are created for their people, boosting the employment rate. However, the situation is not as rosy as the aforementioned statement puts it to be. Workers (a better choice of word would be labourers) toll for hours on end, often in dangerous settings, for pay that is way below the minimum wage. Thus ultimately, this employment does nothing to improve the lives of the people of these developing nations, where producers set up their production plants. The producers see themselves as the Messiah and the savior of their employees; the labourers merely look upon their employers as exploiters. While these corporations see the jobs that they offer as the path and solution to a better life for their workers, the workers feel that what they do are confining and restricting them from fulfilling their potential, for they find what they do in their job to be mundane, repetitive, monotonous, meaningless, impersonal and degrading.
A worse-off scenario would be that of child labor. It is astonishing how major corporations such as Nike and Adidas pay children close to nothing to work in their factories, only to sell the finished products in developed nations at a price one hundred times that of the production cost. These companies may try to justify their actions by claiming that they have provided employment to these children and thus the needed extra income for their families; however, it does not take someone exceedingly bright to realize this gross exploitation. Not only are these children, to put it mildly, overworked and underpaid, they are also robbed of the chance for a proper education, simply because they spend at least 60 hours a week working at these factories. Given that child labor is so extremely widespread in some developing nations, one starts to fear for the future of the country – what would then become of the nations’ future leaders?
Many countries are still extremely resistant to the idea of worldwide free trade, and most of them have good reasons for it. For example, some nations may have industries which are still in their teething period, as a result not being as efficient as foreign producers, thus charging a higher price. Should free trade occur, products from this particular industry would be available from foreign suppliers to local consumers at a much lower price. This may in turn cause the local industry to fail. Protectionism on a government’s part also serves to protect its people from predatory pricing by foreign producers. However, one cannot deny the benefits that free trade can bring about. With the abolishment or great reduction of taxes, tariffs, and other forms of trade barriers, the volume of import and exports worldwide will then greatly increase, bringing about widespread economic growth, for example.
However, I find that this is a faraway ideal. There are certain factors which stand in the way of free trade, which seem to be here to stay. First of all, there are certain resources which are not as mobile as we would like them to be, such as labor, or particularly cheap labor. Secondly, governments often impose embargoes upon a certain nation for political reasons, which almost certainly will not be done away with for the sake of free trade. Also, one has to consider the fact that the advocating of free trade may have certain moral or environmental implications.
Free trade and labour
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