dave, just began reading this thread and have a couple of points to make through personal experience. Cheap labour does not always mean low costs, often the inefficiencies meant costs were anything but low, and the quality anything but high. But when you bring education and skills training to the third world you create a new tier of people whose skills allow them to be paid higher wages, creating a middle class if you like. Where the advantage is for their employer is generally they have a far better work ethic than their counterparts in the developed world. In Indonesia for example, there are more people classed as middle class than the entire population of Australia, yet we consider Indonesia to be third world. The wages many of these people receive is comparable to what their equivalent would receive in Australia. I know of Indonesians educated here in Australia, with residency visas, who prefer to work in Indonesia because they actually can make more money there. So whilst we hear of very low wages in various countries we import goods from, it is not neccessarily so that those people who are actually producing the high quality goods we buy are being paid those low wages.
