"Capital can flow freely, but labour is in shackles world-wide. If you don’t see a very specific political subtext here (being sold to the voting masses on the back of crude xenophobia and racism), let me be more explicit: labour wants to migrate where working conditions and pay are best. Capital wants to invest for growth where working conditions and pay are worst. By penning us (the labour) in, capital can maintain, for a while, the wage imbalances that maximize profit. (Take raw material. Process as cheaply as possible. Sell for as much as possible.) In the long term, it’s unsustainable — labour in the high-cost developed world is taking a hammering due to being uncompetitive, and wages will be forced down until it is competitive, while labour costs in the developing world are skyrocketing. It’ll end when American and EU wages meet in the middle with Chinese and Indian wages … unless American, EU, Chinese, and Indian wage-earners are forced to recalibrate their expectations against the DRC or Somalia. If you don’t think this affects you, if you don’t think you’re on the same side of the barricades as the sweatshop workers in Bangladesh and the marine biologists in Toronto, you’re deluded; unless you’ve got a seven-digit trust fund to dine out on, the tidal flow of globalized capital is running against your class interests. Welcome to the future that globalized capitalism has bought for us…"

- Charlie Stross (via azspot)