Agreed. And companies would do it too if they didn't also need us to buy their products.
It's basically what has happened to manufacturing. Offshore factories are making products at literal slave wages and they get to sell to Americans for higher prices.
The wages are slave wages to the first world economies, but not to the developing world.
China for example has seen a massive decrease in the percentage of the population living below the poverty line as they’ve become the largest manufacturer.
At the end of the day these people are choosing to leave their farms to work in these factories because it enriches them. I’m not saying they’re great jobs, especially to us, but it’s not slavery.
I know of this rationalization, but I don't agree it makes things ok.
Look at the Foxconn debacle where employees were committing suicide and strikes for better conditions were met with violence. It doesn't matter if their wages are technically slightly higher than the prevailing local wages. If you look at their quality of life, it's deplorable. Health care? Clean water? Safe homes? Paid sick leave? Work-life balance? Disability protection? Retirement plans? Do workers in China not deserve those things?
Why aren't first world business paying first world wages no matter where their workers are? They know they extract profits at the cost of human dignity for their workers. They know that offshoring jobs allows them to ignore American labor laws. It's not ethical. But as long as it happens somewhere else we can pretend it's not our problem.
The idea that you can fire a collective of workers for unionizing if they’re “subcontractors” or fire an individual worker immediately without oversight if they’re “gig workers” is disgusting and inefficient with the externalities pushed onto the poor.
I don’t see mass unemployment in areas with higher prices on labor, although I do see higher prices. The thing is when the working classes have more money in their pockets they spend more on these services. When we systemically exploit the poor all the money ends up concentrated in the pockets of multi millionaire monopolist criminals who proceed to use ten peoples labour to maintain their massive garden or whatever. Any efforts to remedy such inequality after the fact costs far more than preventing it from happening in the first place.