Well, those countries are not global powers, yet. Quite a bit of the China bashing comes from the US, and that's why I brought it up. If we judge the US and a lot of the other so called world leaders by the same standard as we judge China, things don't look so rosy anymore.
I'm quite willing to bash the U.S. too, believe me. The massive corruption in their political system, the systemic militarization of their police, the wasteful social inequality are just the tip of the iceberg of internal issues. Problematic is also their pursuit of dominance by military force, their financing and arming of groups opposing legitimate democratic governments. And that's just the beginning of my issues with the U.S.
In general I'm very skeptical that prison operators should be able to "rent out" their prisoners and that companies should be able to make profit of prisoner's work. The potential for abuse is just too high. (Maybe in a country like Finland that has some reasonable ideas about reintegration of criminals, but even there I see the dangers of corruption.)
The global production chains have put workers in jeopardy of exploitation. As long as there are no legal means to force companies to take responsibility, they will not take responsibility. It doesn't matter if a company is from the U.S. from Denmark or Finland; if there's no accountability, the profit motive will overrule any ethical concerns. Because that's what these companies were created for in the first place; to turn a profit.
Here we have just one more 'externality' that companies 'socialize' in their quest to squeeze out ever more profit. In this case it's not clean water or clean air, it's the mental and physical health of fellow humans that for one reason or another have deemed disposable.
That countries and the governments - whose job it is to server all their citizens - are such willing participants in these atrocities small and large is just the bitter icing on this putrid cake.
