That's actually a point worth discussing. Because here's one thing that should be obvious, but apparently many people are unaware of: if you work for a large, multi-national company, you are almost certainly affected by location-based pay. GitLab is not an outlier here, but well within the norm for a company that has subsidiaries in different countries.

The main difference with GitLab is that a) they are completely remote, b) they are called "GitLab" in every country instead of creating subsidiaries with different names, and c) they have made the "mistake" of making the payment differences entirely transparent. They were absolutely not forced to do that, but they did it nevertheless, and they should be applauded for that.

A while ago there was a thread about cheap African labor, and some Africans showed up in the thread and explained that what we (westerners) consider ‘cheap’ is actually still a lot more than the local salaries, so it gives them a lot more social mobility.

Western countries do that to each other and within themselves. Maybe it’s not the west or countries it’s people.

That is a valid point, but the article compares Netherlands wages to US wages, these countries do not have a history of exploiting each other.