[Astrocat]

My girlfriend used to work for 40p an hour in Moscow. It sounds pretty poor, doesn't it?

For a zero-cost-to-maintain job in Moscow, that sounds about right I would say.

I had a penpal who earned about 10p an hour in a Cantonese sweatshop.

But 10p is probably loads in Canton, right ?
It wasn't.

He was constantly stressed out by being unable to afford basic clothing or simple food. I eventually had to stop writing to him because it became painfully obvious that he wasn't really interested in me at all, and was so desperate that he was mainly just trying to get money from me through various methods.

China's financial growth is astonishing at the moment.

China's economy is in the same state as Japan's economy a couple of decades ago .... on a superficial level it looks great, but I'm not sure whether it will be long before the bubble bursts.
I don't know how much you know about bubble-economies, but I don't view the 'screw the long term, let's focus on the sort-term' approach to be a good thing.

OK, I think that we are in fact saying the same thing, just in different ways. I am saying you can't change capitalism, you are saying change people's buying habits instead... they aren't mutually exclusive and I completely agree with you.

I don't have to believe that the fair trade movement can abolish capitalism (or imperialism, for that matter) , in order to campaign in favour of free trade and make that a worthwhile endeavour.

I am saying that I think UK law ought to be altered in order to make UK companies more responsible for their behaviour in foreign countries.

I advocate that governments have a duty to those who they claim to protect and ought to instate their own responsibly-assessed minimum wages.

I am saying that the typical excuses thrown out by supermarkets to excuse their behaviour are ill-founded..... they will not go bust if they sell more fair-trade produce, their hands are not tied, it is not all the middlemens' responsibility rather than their own.

I feel that the supermarket approach of choosing to put down roots in a country which has no minimum wage, or where the minimum wage is clearly not high enough - then declaring "we are an ethical corporation who take great care to comply with all local minimum wage requirements" ... is morally and ethically meaningless, other than in a negative way.

They are not vulnerably controlled by consumerist demands..... rather more, they dictate to consumers what they are allowed to buy from the stores.

They know that they are destroying economies in many countries, and their claims that they are doing the opposite are so far entirely unfounded, from what I can tell. Whenever i ask any of them to provide evidence, mysteriously i never hear back from them..... which i certainly would if they were able to back up their claims !

I have asked supermarkets many questions about this sort of thing, giving them ample opportunity to defend themselves backed up with factual evidence. Please feign surprise when i express that so far, they have been nearly completely unable to do so.

Perhaps if they held themselves accountable for their actions, rather than taking the 'run away and pretend you don't hear the question if you don't like it' approach, they would seem a lot less dodgy, even if they still were unable to give any weight to their claims to be ethically motivated corporations.

If the people aren't happy with it, then they have their own governments to look after their interests, the same as we do

this is begging the question again - this is exactly the point of dispute, right now.

The point about Fair Trade is that it is intended to protect people whose governments have no problem with them being exploited , manipulated, controlled, killed and driven into poverty by dominant organisations.
For example, companies such as ASDA know how desperately in debt the African government is, and make good use of it by utilising bribery in order to gain extra power in that country.

As a comparison, imagine the mafia man who lends a tenner to a desperate woman. The woman is in dire poverty and will be evicted, along with her child, if she can not pay her rent by that afternoon - so in desparation, she takes him up on the offer. To that extent, her consequent predicament is her own doing. But.... the mafia man is fully aware of her situation. He knows that she can't pay him back quickly : indeed, that is precisely why he made the offer in the first place because he had his eyes on the profit he could get out of the deal. Now that the woman is in debt and can't pay him back, her world is his plaything and he can demand all sorts of stuff.

Now, let's examine the kid there..... because the kid is a metaphor for workers, while the mother is a metaphor for a country's government.

It may well be that the mafia man progresses on to saying stuff like "I need a drug-runner. Your kid is 13, which old enough for that. If your kid delivers this kilo of cocaine to ten addresses, then I won't break your legs. I'll also give him a fiver for his trouble." .... then, that kid is in a situation where they are pretty much compelled to do the work. They are being paid, but only a tiny amount compared to the going rate for drug-runners.

If the mafia man keeps , say, 20 families in that situation and that is how they do business....

Then who is most to blame, there ?

The kids, the mothers, or the mafia men ?

I would say the mafia men, but going by what you have said already you would say it was the mother's and kids' faults.

And that, is simply a difference of interpretation of morality.

This is a very abstract conversation and it doesn't really make sense to talk unless we have a very specific situation

I didn;t think that mentioning specific examples was necessary, since you have read the reports i posted already and they contain many individual examples of the kid which i mentioned. I don;t see why you view that as abstract, since the information I was talking about is all there already.