Tuesday, 7 February 2012

Exploitation of third world economies and Labour force


Because members of LEDC countries of which many are found in Afica need money more they will are more likely to agree with what MEDC's say, such as something will develop the country further when really the company is just exploiting the country for their cheap labour and cheap resources. It is in international trading where this becomes an issue, many large companies are going to small countries and taking the resources and using their workers simply because they can. Workers in these less developed countries have less working rights, for example in the UK there is a minimum wage that has to be paid workers. In some countries there is no such thing and the company pays as much or as little as they like.


illegal logging in Amazon Rainforest
Felled trees in BrazilAs recently as 2010 there have been arrests made from illegal logging in the amazon, the company doing this had fake licences and were massively undercutting competitors because they didn't have fee's to pay. This was due to the whole company not being legit. We are not exactly sure if this was a major company or not however it is still a good example of where a third world economy has been exploited for it's natural resources. To meet the law's in Brazil companies have to have documents showing their wood has come from an approved source, this is another document that was faked. This type of trading has a massive affect on international trading because for example one large company could buy this wood not knowing that it's been illegally fell, then because their prices are so cheap they will put the economy down because other legal wood sources can't match their prices. Also buying illegal wood could get a large company a bad reputation and could possibly put them out of business.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8698451.stm

Worker Exploitation
Foxconn factory workers in Shenzhen
The same form of exploitation can be applied when workers are poor and weak.   Some businesses would rather setup up businesses in countries where work labour is cheaper and would not provide a suitable working conditions or exposing workers to unsafe environments.
Apple recently with the iPad 2 have had a manufacturing disaster by blatant disregard to health and safety of the workers where there has been explosions and exposure to dangerous chemicals without the proper protection for workers to be safe. As previously mentioned Apple made workers use a harmful chemical that poisoned a large amount of workers, this is exploiting workers, In the UK if even one case of this was reported the factory could get shut down. However in this case nothing legal came from it and the factory carried on as usual, similar issues have happened at apples factories more recent;y where there has been several explosions during the production of I pad's. This again is unethical trading because materials and products clearly haven't had suffice safety research. More on this story can be found from the below link.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-ipad-and-the-human-costs-for-workers-in-china.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/970385.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/feb/04/apple-playwright-chinese-worker-abuse

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