I'm Chinese and so is my co-founder. In fact, she grew up in China, and I lived a part of my life in semi-rural China. I know and interacted with people who worked in factories and have relatives that do these jobs.
We kind of take offense to the idea that us bringing extra work to these painters in China is "exploitation," and it's easy for a lot of comfortable Westerners to take this stance because the standard of living here is so high and we have the luxury to think about how much we'd all like to get paid.
To put your mind at ease, most of these painters have set up shop doing this regularly, and have a standardized price usually on their websites. We simply contact them, talk to them, and send them business according to their quoted prices. We don't gather a bunch of people who have nothing else to do and force them to paint because they have no other alternatives. They are already painters, and they do this as as their main specialty.
>We kind of take offense to the idea that us bringing extra work to these painters in China is "exploitation," and it's easy for a lot of comfortable Westerners to take this stance because the standard of living here is so high and we have the luxury to think about how much we'd all like to get paid.
Well, I'm not that much of a "confortable Westerner". I'm from Europe, true, but my country has been in a dire Euro-crisis condition for years.
Since that happened we see all kinds of foreign and local businesses coming to exploit the situation, offering wages that we consider insulting and near-substinence but are forced to accept for lack of options.
The only reason business say the "cost of living" in country X matters regarding to how much to pay a worker is because they can get away with it. I don't see why an American working at X is worth more than a Chinese or a Portuguese working at X. Especially with all the talk of a globalised economy.
It seems the main idea businesses take from a globalized economy is to take advantage of it NOT being globalised enough, ie. to play national economies and cheaper labour against each other.
I'd like to see a real "global economy", where everyone is paid the same.
What I meant by "comfortable Westerner" is that what you may consider insulting, they in China might be fine with. And it is presumptuous to think that they are being exploited (and ungrateful for their jobs) just because Western standards are to have supersize and excess in everything like gas guzzling Hummers, McMansions, air conditioning in every room, etc.
And someone from a developed country always has better options, so it is easy to say "they should not be taking that job" from up high. But when your main concern is your family, your child's education, and putting food on the table, any option is a good option. More so when you aren't concerned with luxury... because you can be more efficient and actually work for less when you don't waste money on extraneous living expenses.
Plus, if you truly believe in a "global economy" where everyone is paid the same, the only way to move towards that is to enable free trade and allow cheap labor to be used. Holding back on an area because the wages are "too low" in fact drives wages there even lower, so that other exploitative people will be able to exploit this imbalance.
So avoiding cheap labor doesn't make sense and causes exploitative wage reduction by artificially withholding demand, and paying more than market price doesn't make business sense. For example if I have three photographers. One charges $100/hr, the other $200/hr, and the third $300/hr. If I hire the first photographer I don't just decide to pay him $300 simply because the highest quote I received was $300. Not to mention paying market price is perfectly conducive with evening out the wages in a "global economy."
Imagine that I have some discrete, solo work that needs doing, and that it can be done anywhere in the world. (This is a best case for global work.)
Now, imagine that I can get that done for X by someone right next to me, where the transport costs will be low/zero, the transport latency will be low/zero, and I can be reasonably assured that the secondary effects of that spending will be local (when that artist spends the money on things they want to buy).
In a scenario like that, why should I pay X to someone far away, with a possible language barrier, time zone issues, certainly transport costs and latency and concerns over how much more effort it may take to do whatever training, quality control and feedback mechanisms are needed?
If it's X here and X there, I choose "here". Always. It's not racism or xenophobia; it's just the practical reality.
Businesses exist to arbitrage and combine raw materials (including labor) into finished goods and sell them at a profit. That's true whether you're a kid's lemonade stand, Starbucks, Apple or Google.
There's nothing wrong with a supplier setting whatever price they want. If I set the price of my labor too high, no one will buy it, just as if I set the price of a ton of coffee beans too high.
My belief, while there is undoubtedly some amount of exploitation in the world, is that people who are willingly selling their labor are better off, not worse off, by having extra options of where to sell that labor. If we run an employer out of a market, laborers are not better off for having that option removed.
Exploitation is far more nuanced than "working at gunpoint".
But it all has to do with ethical standards. Some are content to get the cheap labor, so they see no problem here.