When you can use slave wages to compete against regular wages, the regular paying jobs lose.
"When you can use slave wages to compete against regular wages, the regular paying jobs lose."
You clearly have never been to Asia. A person can survive just fine on about US $300 per month; this allows them to lease a small flat, feed their family and exist. If one or two other members of the family also are working, they will save money to better their lives. This is the reason that people from Mexico and Central America sneak into the U.S. for the agricultural and manual labor in the U.S. during the Summer; the money they make (small by our standards) will allow their family to survive very well til the following Summer.
In the particular case of cars, they already were in critical condition. Several weeks ago there was a post about GM's Opel operation in Germany that wanted to shut down some plants and consolidate, in an attempt to regain profitability.
German "worker rights" laws blocked the consolidation, claiming some workers would lose jobs. They mandated that Opel keep the existing operation going, virtually guaranteeing additional losses; protecting worker's "rights" to a job, regardless of the actual economic consequences to Opel
Slave wages or not, Opel was in critical condition, terminally ill, but the Germans were only interested in the worker. This simply made it far more difficult to "compete" with a lower cost producer.
While they may be "slave wages" to you, but I'd bet the Chinese workers don't agree. Government regulations and worker's rights universally raise prices, so any economy that doesn't "overburden" corporations will win in the long run.
We, of all people should have figured that out by now. Expecting corporate altruism is unrealistic, because self-sacrifice becomes suicide if fully implemented.
It takes some very special circumstances for one to be willing to die for the sake of others, and business relationships fail to meet that qualification.
The requirement for one to make (unilateral) sacrifices for others, is anti-freedom, and is a special form of slavery.
That requirement went out of vogue with the Aztecs (ultimate altruism), and later during the Civil War (coerced altruism)