The way the populations of Third World countries have become dependent on wage labor as a source of livelihood parallels what occurred in the Industrial Revolution in Europe when the creation of a dependent working class arose along with the disappearance of traditional means of livelihood. Exactly the same process is occurring in the Third World today. The introduction of multinational enterprise tends to eliminate local agriculture and traditional craft and industry, creating a dispossessed labor force and a market for unskilled labor. Skilled artisans and farmers go to work on plantations and in factories for subsistence wages exactly as they did in Europe and North America centuries before. And just like the factory owners in the Industrial Revolution who exploited this workforce, corporations continue to do so in the Third World today.
Hence, a second criticism of the multinationals: They exploit local populations, using them as wage slaves, often as a substitute for unionized Western labor. In multinational-owned Third World factories, men, women, and children sometimes work ten, twelve, or more hours for less than one dollar a day. No wonder that industry drifts from Western cities to Third World factories at an incredible rate. For example, the AFL-CIO has estimated that the United States alone loses around one million jobs every five years to these sources of cheap and exploited labor.