In 2012, a Chinese student studying in the U.S. wrote a letter that was later shared by David Pogue in Business Insider. He described how his aunt had worked for several years in what Americans might call a “sweatshop”:

“It was hard work. Long hours, small wage, poor working conditions. Do you know what my aunt did before she worked in one of these factories? She was a prostitute.”

The student emphasized that, despite the difficult conditions, the factory job was a step up—it provided safety, legality, and stability she had never known before.

This story raises a profound moral question: Does an improvement from desperation make an exploitative system justifiable?

Let’s explore why this tension sits at the heart of modern global capitalism.

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Better Than Nothing Isn’t the Same as Fair

A factory job may lift someone out of desperation. But an improvement from rock bottom does not equal justice.

The woman in this story is performing the same labor as someone assembling parts in Michigan. She’s not less intelligent or less valuable. She’s just on the wrong side of a global wage arbitrage system.

Corporations don’t pay her less because she’s worth less—they pay her less because they can.

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What Is Exploitation?

Exploitation occurs when value is extracted from someone without fair compensation.

You can have:

• Exploitative jobs that are better than the alternative, and
• Exploitative systems that improve people’s lives short-term

But the core question is: Who captures the surplus value?

In this case, it’s not the woman. Her labor adds real value to a global supply chain, but she sees only a sliver of it. The rest flows upward:

• To multinational corporations
• To shareholders
• To high-income consumers paying less for products made with underpaid labor

This is exploitation by design—not an accident, but a business model.

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Does “Choice” Make It Ethical?

Many people argue:

“Well, she chose the job.”

But choice under coercion of circumstance isn’t freedom. If the only options are wage slavery or something worse, the system isn’t ethical—it’s merely tolerable.

Asking someone to be grateful for a better form of poverty is morally hollow.

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So What Can Be Done?

This is where technologies like Bitcoin offer potential.

No, Bitcoin doesn’t magically fix global labor markets. But it creates an escape hatch:

• A way to store value in a neutral system not subject to local currency collapse
• A method of payment that bypasses middlemen
• A step toward economic sovereignty

It lets workers keep more of what they earn. And that alone makes it powerful.

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Final Thought

A factory job may save someone from a worse fate. But if it pays unfairly, concentrates profits far away, and denies workers ownership of what they build—it’s still exploitation.

We can be grateful for progress while demanding more. Dignity requires more than survival.

And we don’t have to wait for permission to build something better.