The good news is, Bangladesh or Vietnam will now start to get rich enough for basic health and education.
The other good news is, that shouldn't result in a lot of US jobs being lost, as the consumer market is now bigger (with Chinese consumers starting to add to demand) and the supply of cheap labor won't increase by 300 million in 10 years (like it did when China opened up).
I am in bangladesh and I am often sad to see people bring bangladesh garments industry as a example of exploiting poor people. While I am sure there are some exploitation going on, bangladesh is much much better off with the existence of the garments sector and poorly paid workers, considering the alternative.
Bangladesh garments sectors amount to 80% of their export business. It employs mostly poor village women who was house wife before, or house maids or beggars or seasonal work; all of which paid even less money than the garments industry does. Which is why, there are less people available for house maids, or seasonal farming work.
Garments workers who goes on strike for higher wage are the minority, because they somehow figured out the game that if they make enough noise and if the media picks it up the garments owner will be forced to raise the wage; even when they are well above the minimum wage for garments set up the government.
Seriously no one is forcing anyone to work at lower wage.
- There is a minimum wage set for garments workers, which might not be up to western standard, but people in bangladesh do quite good with it.
- There is no lack of garments work available in BD, if they don't like the wage or the working condition they can always go work somewhere else.
- While there exists poor working environments in the some garments, overwhelming most of them (from my personal experience) has pretty good standards with safe environment.
The other good news is, that shouldn't result in a lot of US jobs being lost, as the consumer market is now bigger (with Chinese consumers starting to add to demand) and the supply of cheap labor won't increase by 300 million in 10 years (like it did when China opened up).