Slavery by Globalisation

When I was home in Singapore during the summer, my father and I talked about the evils of globalisation. There was one story my father mentioned, where he had befriended a Chinese national who had came to Singapore to work as a contract worker as a janitor, and was told that he (the Chinese national, not my father) was duped into coming to Singapore with promises of good money and a better life. However, it turned out that while the money the Chinese national made in Singapore would have been good back home in Hainan Island, it was insufficient for him to live comfortably in Singapore. In fact, if you take spending power into account, he probably has a much lousier life in Singapore than at back home... and he couldn't do anything about it because he signed a contract and borrowed money trying to come to Singapore.

When I heard this story, I told that something was very wrong. Everywhere people (the corporation and the governments) was extolling the virtues of globalisation, but a lot of time I keep thinking that when certain people get rich under globalisation, it was at the expense of others who had no power to fight back, or who didn't know that they could fight back.

Below is a video clip of an interview by Jon Stewart on John Bowe, who recently published a book documenting the plight of foreign workers in United States not dissimilar to the Chinese national mentioned above.