Indeed, and by pushing the production of goods far away from the people who consume them, modern industrial capitalism makes it easier for the consumer to ignore things like this when they do happen. After all, they're happening to foreign people far away, not to people next door, people Like Us™.
Exporting production to less developed countries inarguably raises the standard of living in those countries. There is a cost in the form of increased risk from some sources; manufacturing accidents, pollution, etc. However, this is more than offset by the increase in food production, lifespan, medical care, and everything else that comes with being a production economy.
The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy" just indicates that you are from a culture that's forgotten what it takes to modernize and improve. You can't build an industrial base off nostalgic dreams of agrarianism.
It's not inarguable at all. There is a third option besides agrarian subsistence and modern industrial subsistence: global partnership an fair trade, instead of Westerners profiting from Eastern misery.
> The fact that you can sit there on your computer and say "oh, those poor foreigners would be so much better off if they just let me decide for them so I could keep them in a third-world subsistence farming economy"
Where did I say that, exactly? I welcome the opening up of economic opportunities to these populations. I just think that they deserve the same protections and pay for doing those jobs that Westerners would receive if they were the ones doing them, rather than just being pawns in a global system of labor arbitrage.
It's a bit rich to get up on a moral high horse and then declare from that elevated position that the life of a Bangladeshi worker is worth less than that of an American one. Companies aren't setting up in these countries because they are benevolent actors looking to help them develop their economies. They're setting up there because they can exploit the workers there in ways that they can't get away with doing back home anymore.
Workers in developed economies had to endure a century of bloody struggle to claw those protections into place; I would rather we construct an economy that allows this new class of workers to get them for themselves without having to suffer through that.
Nobody is claiming their lives are worth less: it's clear OP does not feel that way, and it's mean to imply otherwise. But very sadly their labor is currently worth a lot less, and regulations that try to force a change (like any other economic price floor) in that will severely reduce demand for their labor and limit their economic opportunities.
Matt Iglesias is the quintessential illustration of why US voters are flocking to politic outsiders and saying the D and R are just two sides of the same bad coin.
You can see that logic in action in this infamous 2013 essay by neoliberal pundit Matt Yglesias, arguing that "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK": http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international...