It's a Job Folks

Mardi Gras: Made in China is a documentary about the production of plastic bead necklaces at Tai Kuen Bead Factory that end up being worn at New Orleans' Mardi Gras. Anthony Kim's review, What will I get for these beads? writes of the workers supposed exploitation, then continues,

...for sixteen-year-old Qiu Biu [sic], Tai Kuen gives her a sense of belonging... She gets along with her co-workers and calls their relationship "a sisterly bond." In a different scene, several co-workers dance to a boom box in their cramped living quarters. They are laughing and chatting away.

The transition from clips of the co-workers bonding to the clips of drunken Mardi Gras patrons is one of the film's most unsettling moments. The wholesome, meaningful relationships of the girls at Tai Kuen turn the carefree Mardi Gras partying into something pathetic. It almost shifts the sympathy towards those guys on Bourbon Street that bought $1 to $20 necklaces for some quick voyeuristic pleasure or even the girls who willingly exploit themselves for some attention.

So the workers, even though exploited, have "sisterly bonds" and "wholesome, meaningful relationships", whereas the drunken revelers cannot. But it's a matter of personal choice, isn't it?

Kim concludes his review:

In effect, it is like the girls at Tai Kuen are being paid ten cents to reach over and lift up the shirts of the girls at Mardi Gras. And they really should get paid more for that.

Perhaps he'd like to open his own high-paying factory? And could he hire as many people?

The movie's website proudly quotes the conclusion of Jessica Winter's review:

Redmon's sly, engrossing documentary is an expert riposte to smug proponents of globalization. Thomas Friedman and your fellow flat-earthers! Watch this movie!

Which pretty much misses the point of globalization, as do most of the other reviews posted on the movie's website, lamenting the evils of these supposedly low wages.
As Susan M. Alexander (Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN) writes,

The documentary recounts a single case of how the consumer capitalism enjoyed in wealthy nations like the United States is built upon the labor of poorly paid workers in a less developed country. The operating principle of global capitalism is to obtain the lower costs for production. Thus, the beads, once produced in Czechoslovakia, are now manufactured in China.

But as Kim points out of one eighteen-year-old worker

She had originally aspired to become an actress, but gave up on her dream to help her family. Since they can only afford to send one child to school, she works at Tai Kuen and sends money home so that her brother may have a better future.

And the aforementioned "Qiu Biu" (whereas it's possible the factory's name is not standard pinyin, just like the [Taiwanese?] boss', that's pretty unlikely for a Chinese name.) is quoted, "If I weren’t working in the factory, I would be at home sleeping and watching TV". The fact is, globalization has given them paying jobs they wouldn't have otherwise.