Dealing with Communities

In addition to setting wages, transnational corporations also regularly confront choices about where to locate facilities. This can involve uprooting production to move elsewhere. There is basically no normative work on what issues arise here. This chapter dismisses some unconvincing ways of faulting relocation decisions and explains how complaints about relocation are plausibly understood as complaints about exploitation. It proposes conditions under which relocation is exploitative and explains what policy measures may still render it all-things-considered permissible. At issue is both the decision to relocate from the corporation’s country of origin (often a choice to relocate from the developed to the developing world) and relocation between foreign countries.