What if the choice as a consumer is between two products, one of which costs 20% more than the other but gives employees a better life? It's a somewhat hypothe

What if the choice as a consumer is between two products, one of which costs 20% more than the other but gives employees a better life? It's a somewhat hypothetical question because markets will usually push the more expensive manufacturer into a market niche with fairly heavy marketing costs to sell their ethical USP. The trouble is that prices don't necessarily price everything in; you don't know how much misery you're buying when you hand over your cash. Child labour, sweatshops, corrupt resource extraction in despotic regimes - real externalities disappear when you only compare on price. People agitate to change the game, since the market is inefficient at solving this problem. Either they lobby to pass labour standards laws, or they unionize. The trouble then becomes arbitrage: unscrupulous employers don't want their negative externalities priced in, so they switch to labour elsewhere, taking advantage of beggar-thy-neighbour strategies employed by other regions and countries. As long as there is free trade to anywhere with lower standards of life and labour, work will tend to migrate towards it. The risk is that competitive regional strategies will keep labour oppressed. The alternative is regional and international pacts, much like the EU, that try to prevent this kind of arbitrage and "regulatory dumping". Of course nothing is perfect. Unions can themselves be corrupt, politicians can be captured by labour action groups, and consumers can suffer. Regional and international pacts can use their mechanisms that enforce fair competition to favour local businesses over remote businesses, or entrench monopolies. There's no panacea.