Child labor is bad, but so it exploiting adults. They work those unfortunate souls in east and south asia, 6-12s, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. No retirement, no workers compensation, unemployment, few safety precautions, few guards against toxins, the waste of these companies is dumped into the ditch behind the factory poisoning the entire watershed.

A great mass of these workers are not even citizens of the city where they live. It’s not like the US but like Europe used to be, you had to be accepted into a guild or have connections to get residency in a city, and China is still like that.

In the Great Leap Forward, they decided to sell the working population to western corporations, to garner our technology, willingly handed over, their factories built for them by western capital, to undercut labor and environmental costs in the west.

In the process they needed a mass of exploitable workers larger than their cities, as the majority (as I understand it,) still lived on small holding farms. They had a decent life, and some interesting and intelligent designs like bio-digesters for excrement and waste that they drew methane off of to heat and cook. But they were forced out, hundreds of millions, and thrown into the industrial meat grinder.

Threw into cities they had little to no connection to, and weren’t citizens in. On a word from their employer or whomever they can be thrown out of town, or beat up by the cops, or fined, etc, for even being in the cities they aren’t residents in, illegal immigrants in their own country, working 6-12s for starvation wages

We fund this system with every piece of electronic junk we buy now. The joke is on us too because the race to the bottom was in both labor and environmental standards, and quality. Every corner has long been cut, every penny of cost shaved, and more that could not be cut without affecting functionality being cut as well. So it breaks, Maybe right away. Everything is garbage, and once quality products are now defective since 2021, like best buy electronics, and the evidence of which suppressed on search engines, the only results being the help forums hosted by the manufacturers of those defective products like their sandisk mp3 players, of which I had 3 fail in that year alone due to bad soldered joints and a software glitch, no trauma from my end. Best buy refused to make good on their garbage products, were rude about it on the phone too in their automated 1-800 number bullshit.