Are we to drag ourselves down to the lowest common denominator for our citizens, in countries that have already fought the hard fight for worker rights?
I find that incomprehensible.
What is the replacement for that employee safeguard then?
Interestingly, as in Scandinavia (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland don't have minimum wages either), collective bargaining agreements consensually worked on by labor unions, employers and local governments. There tends to be base sector-, industry- or trade-specific agreements. Other comments[0] indicate Amazon apparently does not care for any of these.
Except if enough people follow those "It's fine here, you are protected by the law and it's much much worse elsewhere, be happy with what get"-argumentation. Then the will probably regress because companies have a strong interest to produce cheaper than those in places where there are less regulations but they loose any interest in workers rights if there's no protesting working class. And companies interest, trough lobbying and so on, quickly becomes the governments interest.
"Better than those of every factory in China" does not necessarily mean "Acceptable for the civilized world". Whenever I have the choice to not buy from a company where the working conditions are not acceptable for the civilized world, I try to make that choice.
Yes, sadly, it's not always possible. This isn't a reason to just not care.
It's roughly on par with farming or driving a taxi.
Oil and gas workers face more danger than other miners (I guess this is mostly because of the decline of mining in general and tendency for open pit mines over other types of operations).
Fishing and logging are still tremendously dangerous, but, for instance, fisherman in Alaska average more than $20,000 a year from their off-season non fishing jobs.
Are you aware of the concept of 'Damning with faint praise'?