> Businesses want to pay as little as possible, but are in competition with each other for labour who want as much as possible, so it doesn’t feel like it’s merely “at the expense of” workers to me (that said: trade union effectiveness is not a constant)
Right, but that labor comes from abroad and is plentiful. The US manager who exports jobs overseas is reward handsomely for saving the company money precisely because it means laying off the more expensive US labor. So rich get richer and poor get poorer, by design.
> Also, while freedom of movement for workers is clearly less than freedom of movement for businesses and goods — and the difference favours businesses over workers — I’m not clear how much of that is anti-migrant sentiment rather than globalisation.
As far as I can tell, we're not talking about migrants, we're talking about outsourcing jobs overseas.
> Regarding slavery: you’re right, that isn’t what I mean. I am of the opinion that forced labour in USA prisons counts as slavery, and I oppose this unequivocally and do not expect its immediate and permanent termination to cause any problems for the slave-prisoners.
Granted (or at least I'm not particularly interested in opening up a debate about whether prisoner labor is meaningfully 'slavery'), but how does foreign slave labor compare with domestic slave labor i.e., pre-abolition American slavery. Why is it wrong for people to say "abolishing slavery [in the US] would be bad for slaves" but not wrong to say "abolishing slavery in China would be bad for [Chinese] slaves"?
> When it comes to “mere” poor working conditions and low pay, that’s when it gets more complicated, because that’s when shutting down the relevant business can have non-zero negative consequences for the workers.
Pro-slavery Americans used to argue that slavery provided slaves with room and board, and that abolishing slavery would deprive them that. That's certainly a "non-zero negative consequence" argument, so how does the globalized slavery case differ?
> And, as you say, even then I would prefer to uplift the conditions rather than shrug and say it’s just how things are. Likewise a carbon tax on imports.
However, you can't do these things (taxing pollution or poor working conditions) without making it harder for e.g. China to compete with other labor, which in practice means moving jobs out of China and the "non-zero negative consequences" for the Chinese worker (it's economically infeasible for China to pay its workers better and keep the west's business--the whole reason so much stuff is "Made In China" is because the prices of Chinese products are artificially low because of slavery and pollution).