Playing Devil's advocate: it wasn't the cruise companies who created the unfairness; they are just performing arbitrage. Eliminating it won't eliminate the unfairness; in fact, it might make it worse.

If you force them to pay a decent wage, then the workers from developing countries will lose their competitive advantage, losing the jobs to local workers. This means the money remains concentrated in developed countries, instead of raising the wages in developing countries (as it's been happening in e.g. China).

Regardless, demand for cruises is not extremely elastic. Make them more expensive and there will be fewer of them as people make alternative vacation plans. Thus fewer opportunities for poor workers. Not to mention, those workers' competitive advantage is their willingness to work for the lower rates. Take that away, and the lines will start hiring closer to home.

Then there are such questions as where did they get the ships built? At what rates? What type of paint is used? Where does the metal come from?

But even saying that some cruise liner magically appeared from some virgin source of capital - it is somewhat disingenuous to imply that choosing to employ people at what could be considered slave wages is anything but exploitation? It might be called arbitrage if the differences in wages where slight -- but they're not, are they?

I'm sure they got the money from obscenely well paid bankers. What's your point?

But even saying that some cruise liner magically appeared from some virgin source of capital - it is somewhat disingenuous to imply that choosing to employ people at what could be considered slave wages is anything but exploitation? It might be called arbitrage if the differences in wages where slight -- but they're not, are they?

Being arbitrage doesn't prevent it from being exploitative. Bu my point is that this aesthetic approach to public policy is terrible, because it tries to treat the ugly symptom, while making the underlying problem worse.

Yes, they are making a lot of money by exploiting the wage difference. But prohibiting that doesn't solve the problem, which is that some people are poor enough to accept such low wages. If you forbid it, the poor will remain poor just as well.

Now if you take the capitalist approach, the system is working: by performing the arbitrage, the poor people will have employment, more money to spend, etc (e.g. wage rises in China).

If you take, say, a marxist approach, the problem is the core of the system, and small adjustments won't solve it; you need a revolution which will bring real change.

In any case, my point is that these patches are trying to solve the wrong problem, and are not only ineffective but actively harmful to those who we're trying to help.

When, at any point in human history, has the world ever approached anything resembling "fair". The reduction in poverty and increase in quality of life in western countries has all come at the exploitation and subjegation of people in poorer countries. Certainly we've shifted the massive inequality from local to global, but just because you don't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Put another way, until we find some infinite, inexpensive source of energy and material resources, no one will live in relative comfort without many more being exploited. That is the way of the world

However, in our current state, we're seeing the repercussions of this type of shift in western countries: vast unemployment. To me this means we just have way too many people alive now. Clearly that isn't a quickly solvable problem (unless you are a genocidal maniac or something...), and so greatly reducing the birthing rates over coming generations (which hasn't really even been approached yet) is the only solution.

A much smaller global population, with largely technologically optimized labor, is the only solution that really would allow most of that population to live comfortable lives in relative luxury.

So you can see how I would view any argument about what needs to be done in the short term as moot, as in my mind it would just be a waste of effort

If we can overcome resource and energy scarcity, I don't see why we couldn't support an arbitrarily large population comfortably. Unemployment is not a reason to downsize the population, it just means we're outgrowing or current economic system.