[gameshot911]

I absolutely believe we should strive to improve the lives of all living beings in the world. But purely to provide an alternative perspective and spark some lively conversation, I want to explore a different point of view:

No one is forcing these workers in China to take these jobs. The workers willingly choose to take them because they are an improvement over their status quo. The jobs pay more, and offer better benefits for them and their families, than they may be able to obtain elsewhere.

That's one of the great benefits of globalization. A factory job manufacturing cell phones may offer substandard wages in the US, but it's a big step forward for workers in a developing country. In this way both countries benefit.

Obviously everyone wants to continue to improve their lot, and a Chinese worker may BOTH realize that their factory job is better than they can attain elsewhere, AND they may suffer under poor conditions at that job. But they can always quit, and odds are someone else will immediately jump on that same job. That says a lot about the comparative quality of the opportunity. In the end these jobs, as flawed as they are, are still living millions out of even worse conditions every day across the globe.

[riskable]

It seems to me that this is a straightforward monopsony problem: The workers are already at what could be the best job they can get and yet the conditions are still terrible.

They can get a job somewhere else but it won't be as good. Better to protest/strike at their current job than go somewhere else. Especially when you consider that there's no reason why their current employer can't pay more and improve conditions other than greed.

If there was more realistic competition in the area for workers then the pay and conditions would never have gotten to this point.

[lxe]

This is a first and the simplest layer of the argument. If "just quitting" was such a great option, what's the point of the entire labor rights movement?

[atemerev]

Indeed, what’s the point?

[Isamu]

>But they can always quit

You’d think, right? But part of the unrest leading to this point were two or three waves of breakouts of employees escaping lockdowns by jumping the fences and pushing past roadblocks set up by local authorities.

Then they started pressuring locals to work there.