Whats the chance that such values have any effect on a global marketplace driven by profits?
Well, it is legitimate to ask how goods were produced and whether the economic advantage of the Bangladeshi producer of T-shirts comes from paying average wages for that society, and providing reasonably good working conditions, or whether it comes from coercion or exploitation of children or factory conditions that are at the low-end, even by that society’s standards. I think it’s legitimate to try to put in place some monitoring mechanisms. Should Nike, for example, be required to pay workers in Indonesia a living wage or simply average societal wages? We might say that multinationals should pay at least the average wages in that society and that working conditions in their plants should be at least minimally safe and non-harmful to worker health. Here the issue is not imposing Western standards on developing countries, but enforcing regulations that exist, on paper at least, in virtually all countries. So who would regulate a Nike, and how? There’s great concern about consumer backl
