Certainly one of the most moving portraits of the plight of workers in the former Soviet Union is found in Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.  

I do not think it miminizes that work to suggest that one reason it is so moving is that it has its echoes in the plight of millions of workers in today’s labor camps and sweatshops around the world, whether in the Los Angeles garment industry or the textile mills of China. 

As in once-stalinist Russia, these workers toil without enforceable legal rights or trade unions to protect them. The world economy benefits from the cheap labor, but at what cost?