Allow me to throw in with another 'lil factoid: If corporations could be trusted there would be no need for unions. For the fact that many corporations are vehemently anti-union is all one needs to know about how they have had a lot of success with getting rid of THE main obstacle toward driving wages and benefits back to the days when running sweat shops and exploiting child labor was just a normal way of doing business. Big Corp wants those days back and they're trying their best to make it happen.
people are data points on a spreadsheet when you look through the eyes of a corporate accountant. costs and benefits, a single cell of monetary value.
a data point to be manipulated.
I recognize and accept that globalization is generally good for most people, and I think it is, but it is especially great for corporations, for the entire detriment of the people. While the "First World" has made great strides in labor laws and workers' rights, most of these regulated practices have been off-shored to countries and territories that currently have no such laws.
Yes, we can pat ourselves on the back that we abolished child labor and have established minimum wages, but what does that actually matter when, only a few decades later, months-long boat travel became convenient air travel, and now those same industries are simply shuttering factories in the US and opening them in Bangladesh, Taiwan...wherever we can start deploying armies, to ply our influence, to get those old ways back. Those armies need money, and that government needs to find the fast donors to feed that money to keep themselves in power, in influence, ad infinitum. When you can control influence and trade in parts of the world that don't subscribe to your First World understanding of "proper ways to treat humans," then you are running the roost. Child labor laws are great! ...especially when you can ignore them whole-sale by expanding the reach of your beloved corporations into markets that simply aren't beholden to the same laws.
It seems that in this day and age, "opening up" imprisoned countries (let's go with Burma and DPRNK), is really just a mad rush to find another open market to exploit for labor. You can fucking see it: the corporate world
chomping at the bit to find the next pool of underfed, uneducated, inexperienced flesh bags to drain out another 10-20 years of cheap, unregulated blood and sweat--and only to increase their quarterly profits. Never long-term. Who the fuck needs to care about long-term when faceless day traders, sitting in their bedrooms and at their command consoles, two steps from their shitters where they need to empty their colostomy bags every 6 hours, are truly the ones who are determining your company's value?
Absolutely, corporations need strict and solid laws to regulate them, but this needs to be an international agreement. It's one thing to mark yourself as a proud, advanced human of the modern age that does not tolerate exploitative worker conditions, but another thing to both recognize and disallow that very same practice, as it is factually happening, for the very same products, that you buy now and your grandparents bought more than 100 years ago. The simple fact is that nothing has really changed in the end, because the planet has gotten so much smaller.
Eventually, we will reach critical mass of advanced, educated societies fighting against this consumer-driven mass-conglomerate of cheap, bullshit goods and the labor (really, it only ever is about the labor), are going to start massacring everyone else. LoL: electing mother-fucking billionaires certainly is not the way to solve this actual problem. They only describe phantom problems, to distract the masses from the billionaires' ever-increasing looting of the world trust.
At this point, I'm not sure it is wholly recoverable without serious bloodshed. Maybe I just hope I'm dead in the next 30 years, before the emaciated survivors start feeding on the radiated corpses of their families.