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Ethics Of International Trade Essay

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The Ethics of International Trade Playstations and petroleum. Food and furniture. Clothing and cars. International trade makes these items ready and available to the vast majority of the world, and at affordable prices despite the need to import many of these things (or their components) from other countries. International trade lets Americans buy and enjoy products that we can’t necessarily make or find for ourselves in the United States. It can stimulate the economy, create jobs, and generate new and improved products for the world market. International trade can, however, have the opposite effect if left unregulated and unchecked, harming the economy, removing jobs, and creating poor products. Even if such trade is helping the …show more content…

Why would anyone do this? Minimize costs, of course. Children don’t need to be paid as much as adults (if at all) and they are easy to influence and coerce. To the less ethical businessmen and women of the world, child labor means a cheap and tireless workforce, resulting in higher profits. A profit at the expense of the world’s youth. Gaining profit by reducing costs is a widely practiced business solution, and can be entirely useful and ethical when done in the right spirit. Reducing costs by raising worker hours or reducing worker safety is something completely different, however. Lack of care can easily escalate into downright abuse of workers. Take the shrimp industry in Southeast Asia, an industry bringing in $13 billion annually. In a recent report by the Solidarity Center, an international nonprofit organization for workers rights, some shrimp processing facilities in Thailand and Bangladesh have been run like medieval prisons. One factory raid by Thai police in September 2006 found workers who said, “if they made a mistake on the shrimp peeling line, asked for sick leave, or tried to escape, they could expect to be beaten, sexually molested, or publicly tortured.” The facility was described as “more like a fortress than a factory, with 16-foot-high barbed-wire capped walls, an armed guard force, and an extensive internal closed-circuit television system” (CNN.com). Clearly, this facility would be closed down and the owners arrested right?

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