I think globalisation has been a terrible trick played on the people of the developed world.

Allowing companies to make products and to supply services like call centres in countries with no employment rights, no safety standards, no minimum wage, no job security, no employer responsibilities at all. They created a situation where companies can employ these people in preference to all the more expensive but properly protected and decently treated employees in the developed world. We should block trade or impose import tariffs on any countries that don't have the same standards as our workers. Instead of allowing them to under-cut us, we had the opportunity to significantly improve their living standards and working conditions. The EU could do this. The US could join in.

Big companies make their goods in places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Indonesia etc etc. Big companies like Marks and Spencer, Primark, all of them. And the goods are a tiny fraction of what it would cost to make it in the developed world. So all of those jobs in the developed world basically disappeared. All the wages in those industries declined. Portgual for instance, used to have a huge shoe making industry, same with Britain, Italy etc. Now it's gone. Now you get a shoe made by a 10 year old in Bangladesh working in a factory that's so unsafe that they're likely to be killed in a fire or when the entire building actually collapses on them. by employers who abuse them.

I actually wrote to my MEP's about this about 5 years ago and I was brushed off. There were regular news stories about 1000 workers being killed in factory collapses in Bangladesh for instance. One a month or something. I've not seen them mentioned in the news lately. I told the MEPs that they should impose trade restrictions with countries according to the level of working standards. Allow factory inspections and question the employees to decide if a factory is a good employer.

We allowed the big companies to undercut all of the advances in modern employment rights by allowing these companies to make everything in the 3rd world and ship it to us. Container shipping and global trade has made local workers uneconomical.

If they started making these kinds of regulations then places like vietnam would have an incentive to improve their workers employment rights. Living standards would have a reason to rise. As it is they're all in competition to offer their workers effort for the least money and in the most unsafe of conditions.

Why employ someone with 21st century employment conditions when you can employ someone with 17th century employment conditions instead.

Globalisation has been a pile of shit.

We get cheap crap in primark but it's devastated out economies because everyone's wages have gone down. Entire industries have disappeared. Whole industries have 'outsoruced'.

And they're still doing it.

/rant

But yeah, I need to go to Romania, and bulgaria, there's supposed to be really great walking trails!