[scarmig]

Just because it's hard to monetize and profit from concepts like the health and well-being of employees doesn't mean that we as a society should put that value at zero.

The "competitiveness of a company on the global market" isn't the be-all, end-all. The phrase itself belies your point: if we as a society wanted to, we could place tariffs equivalent to the cost of providing a humane workplace for packaging workers, while also requiring our own companies to do so. This would eliminate the competitive edge issue, while also allowing other countries to engage in free trade with us if they pass laws protecting their own laborers from workspace exploitation.

We simply choose not to, for certain values of we (read: members of the finance capital rentier class that dominates American political discourse).

[ericd]

Competitiveness is extremely important, and you highlight a way to sort of obtain that, but you can only control competitiveness in the domestic market with tariffs unless you basically oppress third worlders (how it will be viewed, anyway) by strong-arming nations to pass similar tariff laws.

The value of domestic manual labor simply isn't that high anymore except in hard-to-outsource cases, and unless we change our society to involve more wealth redistribution, those who can only perform manual labor will not enjoy a similar standard of living to those with greater leverage.

[Retric]

The US economy has no need to export anything into third world countries their economy's are simply to tiny accept much in the way of imports. In-fact we have long flooded most of them with cheap food which we lost money to create so balance of trade is even less valuable than you might think. http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/

Canada, is another story we really need to keep them happy: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c1220.html

We export half as much stuff to China: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

And Ethiopia is next to nothing: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c7740.html

[cornell532]

Move to France.

You'd find their backwards, less competitive economy to your liking.