When companies have the means

Bhagwati seems to confuse himself in the section on wages. While he talks about the economic construct of added value and the relative wages of western nation-backed sweatshops, he misses out on something very important: the only reason for a company to move the locations of the jobs it creates is because there is some kind of financial incentive to do so. What this means is that, while his notion of general protections against child labor are not illegitimate, there is no reason not to pressure western companies to use the financial portion of the incentive they get for moving their jobs to sweatshops to improve the working conditions in those same sweatshops, and to prohibit children from being forced into labor at their shops. If providing better conditions for their workers tips the balance of financial incentives in favor of moving jobs back to a country that has labor laws in place, that means that that should be done. Otherwise, companies are literally profiteering off of the suffering of their workers in third world or otherwise disadvantaged countries, which should come as no real surprise to anyone who has read much on the subject of sweatshops before.