Reply #19: Labor, safety and environmental standards should be a part of all [View All]

[pampango]

our trading agreements. Not so sure about wage standards. Poor countries, by definition, have workers who make much less than American workers make.

When I lived in the Third World, the international companies, by and large, paid wages that were twice what domestic firms paid, but it was still just a few dollars a day. They got the pick of the employees. Beyond labor, safety, and environmental standards, mandating anything other than a very flexible wage standard would hurt most of these countries.

A strict wage standard along the lines of having to pay $10 an hour if they wanted to export to the US, would either cause the factories to close (their only competitive advantage is lower wages - even if they pay much more than other employers in the country) or, if they stayed open, they would attract educated professionals that every country needs to function. Nurses, doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc don't make $10 an hour in most Third World countries. (When the UN establishes a permanent presence in a Third World country they know that many local professionals will quit their jobs and go to work for them, because they can make international scale wages.)