I am unexperienced when it comes to such matters, but:

1. Quitting means you are no longer making money, and if that was an acceptable endgame then you likely wouldn't be employed in such conditions in the first place;

2. I find it extremely unlikely that such factory owners would have a dearth of prospective (eager, even) employees.

#1 Quitting does not mean you never look for another job or quit on the first day etc. It means when you perceive working for said factory is not worth it you do something else.

#2 Having a large labor supply suggests the job is competitive. However, even if that's the case having people constantly quit increases training costs.

The point of all of this is industrialization tends to follow a path where people move from terrible low wage jobs to more well paid work. Even China has moved past the first rung of the ladder with market forces forcing factory's to increase pay and or improve conditions. Presumably where going to run out of 3rd world countries at some point, though there is some concern robots / AI is going to end up filling that nitch possibly stranding a few countries.

You are begging the question. The reason factory workers in poor rural countries put up with no windows, ventilation, or air conditioning is that the alternative is subsistence farming. Suggesting that they quit in protest is almost cruel.

China has absolutely not moved past the first rung of this ladder. The majority of the Chinese population lives in abject rural poverty.

It's actually about a 50/50 split between rural and urban [0]. This means that the Chinese urban population nowadays is 150% of the total Chinese population in 1950[1]. So now that the facts are on the table, what is your point?

[0] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-17/china-urban-populat...

[1]http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=chinese+population

Those Chinese in abject rural poverty seem to be quite content there from what I could gather from friends and relatives that went to rural China (I stayed in the larger cities, so I'm clarifying that I haven't had first hand experiences with rural rural Chinese, only from those that moved to the city).

Most Chinese in the city (some which you may judge as living in abject poverty), are actually pretty happy with their situation. Even the homeless people seem more content than over here in Germany (I've talked to quite some of them over some baijiu at the corner of the street).

Please stop painting China a some kind of post-communist hellhole where people are starving on the streets whilst toiling away in backstreet sweatshops. You're not doing the country any justice, and you should really visit it someday.s

If you think quitting is the #1 way to fight back, you must not be familiar with labor organizing, including strikes.

Several states are openly hostile to unions and there are more than a few businesses that would simply close a branch if it were about to unionize. Also, you end up with two sets of bosses, which brings its own issues.

I've seen constant double-digit monthly turnover and that didn't do much that I could discern. Yes, it raised costs but they were relatively insensitive to that.