From the Financial Times (and, as a side observation, the FT gives far better insight on a regular basis on these trends than anything you can read in the U.S. traditional press):

Bangladeshi garment workers, who make clothes for western brands such as H&M, Gap and Marks & Spencer, greeted a recent 80 per cent pay rise by rampaging angrily through the capital Dhaka burning cars and looting shops.

For the world’s lowest- paid garment workers, the increase in the minimum wage, effective from November, takes their pay from $23 to $43 (€33, £27.50) a month. It was their first pay rise for four years, a period of soaring food and fuel prices. However, the workers were enraged that Dhaka had not agreed to the $75 a month they had demanded.

"This is not enough for the survival of workers and their families," said Amirul Haque Amin, president of Bangladesh’s National Garment Workers’ Federation, which has about 23,000 members. "Living costs – including food, clothes, shelter and medical care – are going higher and higher."

....Demands for better pay across Asia reflect improving job opportunities in economies that are growing faster than their western markets.

....
In Cambodia, Phnom Penh recently raised the minimum wage by 21 per cent  – from $50 a month to $61. That was below what the more activist of Cambodia’s 273 unions demanded, although a three-day, industry-wide strike did not materialise.

Vietnam recorded 200 strikes last year by workers hit by inflation of 9 per cent. In April, for example, nearly 10,000 workers walked out of a Taiwan-owned shoe factory, demanding better pay.

In Indonesia – where powerful trade unions with millions of members play a crucial role in negotiating with employers – minimum wages, set by regional authorities, have been increasing.

In 2008, Jakarta raised the local minimum wage by 10 per cent to nearly $100 a month, although wages in the country’s remoter regions are half that.
....
"There are no industrial relations," says Mr Alam. "The whole attitude is arrogant and feudal. Owners and government think they are helping the workers. The workers are not treated like workers – they are treated like beggars."[emphasis added]

  What is going on here?

  There is a thread that connects the anger coursing throughout the globe about the entire failed economic model foisted upon the world's workers for decades. Here, people have had it with working hard for decades and seeing all that hard work--productivity has been rising for 30 years--turn into a steady stream of money into the pockets of CEOs and the richest one percent. Republicans and Democrats have supported a bankrupt economic system based on the "free market" and "free trade", leveraged buyouts that obliterate middle-class jobs and a campaign finance system that greases a knee-jerk granting of tax cuts for business before making sure that regular people can form unions to act as a counter-weight to the rapacious nature of the market.

  And what of those jobs flowing abroad? Well, the FT article shows the reality: slave labor. No surprise. Those stories have been surfacing for years--yet, despite the growing poverty around the world, we still have a bi-partisan support (including from our president) for the very so-called "free trade" policies that have bred substandard wages.

  Where this leads is not easy to tell. It is easy to talk about worldwide solidarity--and a whole lot harder to make it happen, because of cultural and language differences, the massive physical distances between one slave-wage haven and another, the inability of the poorest to have enough resources to organize on a daily basis...a whole host of reasons.

  But, it is clear--the people have had it. They cannot, and should not, put up with the siphoning of the world's wealth and resources into the hands of a few.

  From the front page of today's Financial Times ($):

Call centre workers are becoming as cheap to hire in the US as they are in India, according to the head of the country’s largest business process outsourcing company.
High unemployment levels have driven down wages for some low-skilled outsourcing services in some parts of the US, particularly among the Hispanic population.

At the same time, wages in India’s outsourcing sector have risen by 10 per cent this year and senior outsourcing managers based in the country command salaries above global averages.

"We need to be very aware [of what’s available] as people [in the US] are open to working at home and working at lower salaries than they were used to," said Mr Bhasin. "We can hire some seasoned executives with experience in the US for less money." [emphasis added]

  This is a logical step in the relentless pace to cut wages in every industry for the sake of "competitiveness" or "efficiency" or whatever other buzzword you want to grab from the endless blizzard of corporates-speak that has, sadly, infected our society.

  Mix a financial crisis created by the Goldman Sachs fools and charlatans and their ilk, with the Wall Street-driven leveraged buyout, wage-cut, job-cuts mania of the past several decades and add the foolish so-called "free trade" agenda that pushes down wages everywhere--and, presto...

  The U.S. is becoming a low-wage country.

  This is a drive for corporate profits, pure and simple, and to hell with the people. Corporations have used the recent economic crisis to toss off hundreds of thousands of workers and are preparing to run their businesses with fewer people in the future. An on-going strike in a different industry shows where we are headed--Mott's is looking to bludgeon the American Dream, despite raking in profits:

The union movement and many outsiders view the strike as a high-stakes confrontation between a company that wants to cut its labor costs, even as it is earning record profits, and workers who are determined to resist demands for wage and benefit givebacks. [emphasis added]

   The professional politicians of our own party are scratching their heads, trying to figure out why the people seem angry and ungrateful at all the efforts undertaken on behalf of the people. If they would take their hands out of the corporate lobbyists pockets and stop regurgitating the catch phrases of "free trade" and "efficiency" and "lower corporate taxes" maybe, just maybe, we could have a serious debate about the undermining of the American Dream--and how the dysfunctional and corrupt political system has aided and abetted that undermining.

  The Giving Pledge has as its goal:

The Giving Pledge is an effort to invite the wealthiest individuals and families in America to commit to giving the majority of their wealth to the philanthropic causes and charitable organizations of their choice either during their lifetime or after their death.

  Take a moment to peruse the list of billionaires. Let's see: there are the monopolists like Bill Gates who made his fortune by engaging in predatory capitalism, destroying smaller competitors for the sake of piling up profit (not to mention making the god-awful Windows products--but, admittedly, as a Mac convert, that is a disputable point).

  There is Sandy Weill. Among Weill's many achievements in life was a leading role, when he served as the CEO and chair of Citigroup, in attacking the Glass-Steagall Act. In fact, in his office, he had an etching of himself (of course) with the inscription "The Shatterer of Glass Steagall". Weill, like his fellow Glass-Steagall opponents (Robert Rubin was a leading figure in the anti-Glass-Steagall campaign, along with, among many legislators, Chuck Schumer), continue to lamely defend their role in campaigning to repeal a law that arguably, had it survived, could have prevented the financial crisis of the past several years.

  There is New York's own Mike Bloomberg. Among Bloomberg's accomplishments--having complete disregard for the people of New York's democratic decision to impose term limits on city officeholders. I happen to be against term limits--but the voters of New York City twice voted for term limits. With Bloomberg engineering the move behind the scenes (using, subtly or not so subtly, his massive wealth, as a carrot and as a stick), the self-serving City Council overturned the voters' will.

  What strikes me about the people on the list is that, with few, if any, exceptions, they are vehemently anti-union. They made their fortunes on the back of the millions of people who passed through the doors of their businesses--refusing to even take a neutral position in union representation efforts.

  As a result, collectively, they contributed to the downward slide of the American Dream--the flattening of wages, the shipping of jobs overseas because of so-called free trade agreements (I doubt there is a single individual on the list who did not support, and continues to support, so-called "free trade"), the reduction in benefits, the evisceration of real pensions (in favor of far less secure 401ks--as millions of retirees now bitterly understand).

  Now, it would be one thing if this group collectively said: you know, we now understand that the fortunes we have made came by us being Big Dogs and lording over the planet because of a system that thrived, and continues to thrive, on poverty and a whole-scale robbery of the people, that malaria and diseases that ravage hundreds of millions of people are, in essence, the logical outcome of this economic system, that the planet is in critical condition because of the system we fostered--and, so, we are turning over this money not just to build monuments to ourselves but to throw out the economic system that made us rich in favor of a system that, as our Constitution says, promotes the general welfare.

  But, that isn't what is happening.

  In fact, in one specific case, the opposite is happening. Consider Pete Peterson, a man who has been on a mission: to destroy Social Security and Medicare and is perhaps the prime funder and mover behind the entirely bogus "deficit scare." As Dean Baker writes:

Emboldened by the fact that none of them have gone to jail for their role in the financial crisis, the Wall Street gang is now gunning for Social Security and Medicare, the country’s most important safety net programs. Led by investment banker Pete Peterson, this crew is spending more than a billion dollars to convince the public that slashing these programs is the only way to protect our children and grandchildren from poverty.

  Here is what Peterson's pledge declares:

When I enjoyed a most surprising billion dollar plus windfall from the public offering of The Blackstone Group, a firm co-founded, I pondered, what should I do with all of this money?...

I am also much concerned about domestic threats that I also consider transcendent. I refer to several such threats as undeniable, unsustainable and yet, politically speaking, untouchable.  For example, our unfunded entitlement promises that so many depend upon, our ballooning debts to foreign lenders, which combined with our very low savings, leaves us very vulnerable and even threaten our national sovereignty.  Then, of course, there are our mushrooming healthcare costs that threaten to bankrupt our economy...

Given the serious political challenges and our country’s apparent reluctance to accept the required shared sacrifice, no doubt many are saying my Foundation is not only a presumptuous mission, but a foolhardy one...

  My friends, this is one of the most eye-popping, self-serving and dishonest declarations in recent times (and, indeed, there is a lot of competition for that title). Aside from the fact that it is entire nonsense that Peterson was caught by surprise by the windfall when Blackstone went private (look back at the lead up to the public offering and you can see that it was obvious he would make a killing), he is, in the guise of this Pledge, continuing to promote a dangerous and false agenda.

  First, the facts are wrong. The fiscal problems we are facing come from very identifiable problems, all fixable: an $8 trillion real estate bubble (enhanced by the Blackstone-Sandy Weill et al. construction of a trading regime that was about profits, not about economic stability), a massive employment crisis, an unwillingness to deal with the health care crisis by knee-capping the insurance and drug industries, and a give-to-the-rich tax policy that blew a hole in the government's revenues. By the way, one of the problems is NOT as Peterson likes to tell people Social Security, which is fully funded through 2039.

  Peterson, whipping up the threat of foreign enemies, also falsely connects the debt to some "national sovereignty" crisis. Nonsense. The real issue--if you even care that "foreigners" (read: multi-national companies) own U.S. assets--is the price of the dollar (which I have argued is too high--it benefits Wal-Mart and other companies exploiting cheap labor abroad but not the rest of the country), not the federal debt.

  Peterson, of course, does not mention, either in his pledge or in his public drivel about the threat to future generations, the true causes of the threat to future generations: our failure to enact a single-payer, "Medicare for All" health care system (which would have made Peterson's peers in the insurance and drug industry have to look for new work), the political leadership's cowardice in denouncing the robbery by a few of the country's wealth and a lack of spine to impose a serious progressive tax system again and, finally, the acceptance of a system that thrives and reaps profits because poverty and long-term unemployment are acceptable to those who rule our markets.

 Indeed, when Peterson talks about a reluctance to sacrifice, he is effectively saying that the people who have been robbed for 30 years should pay for the robbery, while the few people who walked off with unimaginable riches should continue to lord over us.

  This is truly trickle-down philanthropy.