Sure they would. People will do almost any job, if they're paid enough.
This is why military contractors in war zones, Arctic crab fishermen, and prostitutes make a lot of money.
This is econ 101; supply and demand. You know it too. You're (presumably) not impoverished, but you'd work in diamond extraction or a clothing sweatshop, if you were paid enough.
I've always liked the idea that you should never turn down an offer or request. Instead, you should name your price. Sometimes that price might be functionally equivalent to turning down the offer, but there's always a tiny chance that someone might agree to your (probably laughably unreasonable) terms.
>This is econ 101; supply and demand. You know it too. You're (presumably) not impoverished, but you'd work in diamond extraction or a clothing sweatshop, if you were paid enough.
When I say "nobody would do it" I don't mean "regardless of any condition whatsoever". Even if there wasn't poverty involved, slaves would obviously do it too (and they were ones doing such things, historically, right until the end of the colonies -- and in fact still in several places, using various conscription schemes).
Nor did I mean "regardless of working conditions". E.g. if they make it as easy as pressing a few buttons, many would have no issue doing it, even for a low wage.
The idea is that people wouldn't do the job under the current working conditions AND wages -- if it wasn't for dire poverty. "Supply and demand" is not some contradiction to that, rather it is the very mechanism required to take advantage of dire poverty to give those wages.
And of course "supply and demand" is rarely a "natural" and "neutral" thing -- you can skew it in a thousand ways. From passing special laws to keep people down and prevent development, to killing people's farmlands to make them come to the big industrial city to find some low paying factory job to survive.
What you forget is that some jobs just cannot pay enough to make it worth for non-impoverished people. A very clear example is farm jobs in the US. If farmers had to pay real salaries, production costs would go dramatically up. So they depend on undocumented workers. This is similar for the fast food industry and so many other industries that are now operating in third world countries. For these industries, poverty is the natural resource that they depend on. If poverty ended all over the world, a lot of industries would disappear or have to change dramatically to continue existing.
>What you forget is that some jobs just cannot pay enough to make it worth for non-impoverished people.
Of course they can pay enough. Just not when there is competition from other farms using illegal immigrant labor.
You know as well as I that if all illegal immigrant labor simply disappeared, the American farming industry would not just shut down and leave everyone to starve. They'd pay as much as they needed to hire Americans, and consumers would pay as much as needed to sustain that.
If there was no other source of clothing, you'd be willing to spend crab money.
In fact, this was the case during the industrial revolution. A pair of pants would cost a full week's wages. This is why people back then owned like 2 to 4 outfits.
It's amazing how many people just can't comprehend how the world can realign so different things become 'normal'. Like, "nobody would ever pay that for clothes". What, you think they'd go naked if there was no alternative?
Yeah but you're talking about an entirely different market. Cheap clothes exist because of volume sales, if shirts suddenly costed what they arguably should, the market would shrink a LOT to compensate for the higher cost. If the $5 shirts at Walmart that parents buy their kids because it has a funny design on it suddenly costed $25, a lot of that business would no longer exist.
Minor nitpick: Prostitutes make a lot? I guess depends on which part of the world we are talking about. I hear you can get them in South Asia for as low as $5. Probably lower.
Nobody would work in the conditions needed for diamond extraction or sweatshop clothing making for example, if it wasn't for dire poverty.