The wages paid by first-world companies in third-world countries seem preposterously low by American standards, but they are often more than what those same workers would earn working for a locally owned enterprise. The Vietnamese who work for Nike may not earn what an American worker earns, or even what a Filipino worker earns, but if the government of Vietnam, or America, decided to force Nike to ignore the value placed on labor by the local market and pay more, Nike would simply leave, and the Vietnamese would get nothing at all. Countries - and workers - at the bottom of the economic food chain have no competitive advantage other than cheap labor, so that's what they have to sell. It is by no means a dead-end route: Taiwan and Korea started out this way, and look where they are now.
The primary restraint on third world development today is not the big bad multinational corporations, but the regressive policies of third world governments, many of which are mired in socialist or neo-feudal inefficiency, sometimes both. There is very little the US can do to stop third world governments from crippling their own economies through corruption, protectionism, cronyism, etc. |
