[barry-cotter]

Do you have any concept of how much more productive people are in developed countries than undeveloped? Unskilled labour in the US gets paid a lot more than ten times what it does in Haiti. Investing in the third world is what you do because you can’t get labour in places you already know too do business in, where you’d want to live.

[dontlaugh]

Wage differences for the same job have almost nothing to do with productivity and almost everything to do with the rate of exploitation.

[barry-cotter]

How is this supposed to work? There’s an awful lot to exploit in Ireland or the US and pretty much nothing in Cuba, even less in Haiti. In between in Vietnam, Thailand or China. Is your model that the Irish/US elites are more benevolent and Vietnamese ones less?

[dontlaugh]

Workers in Germany, Romanian and Vietnam doing the same job at similar productivity are paid very different wages. You can see this quite clearly in German companies that open factories in poorer countries to extract higher profits.

Capitalists pay the lowest wages they can get away with. While they exploit all workers (by appropriating as profits much of the value created by those workers), they exploit the workers in the poorer countries far more than those in the rich countries.

They can get away with this largely because the poor countries are underdeveloped (and are often kept that way on purpose). Workers in those countries have fewer options, thus can be exploited more.