To convince someone like me, proposals such as Ratcheting Labor Standards must satisfy a realism test based on recollections of visits to factories, estates, and mines. I recall visiting a US multinational in a Malaysian export-processing zone. It was exposing thousands of teenage women to conditions that the manager readily admitted were causing long-term ill health. They were legal. The firm operated where independent unions were banned.
Apologists say that conditions and pay in such firms are better than in the surrounding kampongs .
Nearby, in a back street of Kuala Lumpur, I talked to a Chinese furniture maker. Men, women, and children scurried in and out of the sprawling building. The US firm had better pay and conditions, but was unnecessarily opportunistic. The Chinese businessman would have melted into the city had inspectors come after him. In both cases, what was lacking was the voice of the workers, which was needed to pressure managers to make feasible changes and to give them knowledge of what to do.