Outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing! Shame, shame, shame on the USA! We vote with our money at the cash register. This is called depressing US wages and displacing US workers. So don't think for a second that race-bait peddlers and white-guilt purveyors aren't trying to sell illegal immigration to American citizens under the ruse of multiculturalism!

Typical. American corporation overseas evading labor and environmental regulations, rolls in the profits--the stock market rallies, the people of America lose jobs, standard of living.

Ms Lyons...
Are you, by chance, related to a Debbie Lyons (formerly of MI/CA)?

Get your clothes from thriftstores, not the GAP!

For less than 20 dollars i can get 3 nice pairs of cotton trousers and 3 nice shirts.

I have better things to do with my money than to help the rich screw the poor and get richer while doing so.

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"The curse of poverty has no justification in our age. It is socially as cruel and blind as the practice of cannibalism at the dawn of civilization, when men
ate each other because they had not yet learned to take food from the soil or to consume the abundant animal life around them. The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Your clicks mean food and other essentials of survival for poor people... http://www.thehungersite.com

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Good source for news and information:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com

Sweatshops are consistently reported as an aberration, rather than the norm, for global apparel production. The truth is that companies like Gap and Nike won't allow their factories to be independently monitored for compliance with basic human rights. This report is therefore an informatoin leak, and merely a glimpse into the normal goings-on of the apparel supply chain, in which subontractors' profit is 'sweated' (hence the term sweatshops) from the people making the clothing.

The solution advanced by anti-sweatshop groups such as United Students Against Sweatshops and Sweatfree Communities is to have an independent monitor verify that workers rights are respected (no forced overtime, no child labor, right to form a union, etc.).

One last point--the prices you pay are not "dirt cheap," or atleast not in relation to the pennies paid to workers in the developing world. Production costs typically make up less than 5% of the retail price of the goods we buy. Most of the money you pay at the register goes in to advertising (aka propagandizing) or company stockholders (aka profit).

You can buy handmade instead of supporting companies who use exploitation to make profits.
http://www.etsy.com is one place to find clothing, art, furniture, jewelery, etc - handmade and bought directly from the artisan.

Vote with your dollars!

PS I'm a clothing designer who quit my dayjob as a computer admin, so that I can make non sweatshop fashions, by hand, so that people can have more alternatives to the mall.

For more information about what you can do to stop sweatshops and child labor abuses around the world, check out http://www.LaborRights.org! Plus, check out the "Labor is Not a Commodity" blog for updates on the latest news on GAP's labor rights abuses and similar issues: http://laborrightsblog.typepad.com/

The International Labor Rights Forum and Global Exchange put out a statement on the GAP issue here: http://www.laborrights.org/press/sweatshops/GAPchildlabor_ilrfpr_102907.pdf

Finally, thanks for bringing up the case of Firestone's use of child labor on its rubber plantation in Liberia, gandhi. For more information and to take action, check out http://www.StopFirestone.org -- and mark your calendar: November 10th is a day to take action to support Firestone workers. Keep checking the website for more information. Here is a CommonDreams article on that subject: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/12/1826/

How nice so-many here are unencumbered by the realities of life elsewhere. "Spend/buy less" and enforce a wealthy-country's affordable-standards/protections 'over-there'? If you should succeed in those efforts, you will ensure that these children are spared their slavery/drudgery -- and will instead either starve-to-death or worse (perhaps blinded by caring-parents as neo-"blind babies of Calcutta", to better-serve as underage-prostitutes for visiting-servicemen).
It's dangerous to 'enforce morality', when not considering the consequences and outcomes, and not replacing crappy present-realities with better-alternatives. Would your conscience -- as a relatively wealthy-ass who can afford new-clothing occasionally -- be assuaged if wearing only the slave-produced attire made by the lucky-few who attain the Age of Majority, if knowing that those child-workers could then not hope to ever reach-that-age?
The 'problem' is unfair distribution of wealth, not that those around these 'slaves' are immoral. Your solutions here seems to be the equivalent of "let them eat cake". Well, they have no-cake and no-bread, either...and the reason 'why' is in our-mirrors and our-wallet.
Where children must work, it is only because they-must. Don't demand that the unseemly-profitable stores (who sell you these 25-cent shirts with their 35-dollar labels) follow your-country's hiring practices -- which only your-country and similar can actually 'afford'. Instead, do something that brings-up their standards-for-living (which means bringing-down your-own -- not just 'trading' your so-called Morality for their labor/goods/resources).

Demand higher/Progressive taxation and effective Caps upon obscene-wealth. Demand less exploitation of others in the creation of that-wealth. Demand stores that will charge you more for ALL of your goods, while demonstrably paying foreign-parents enough to afford them the luxury of their Human instincts and desires to pamper and advocate for their-children -- the way you can for-yours.

Satya...youre analysis and information above is accurate. The British not only bled Bengal to feed the empire and the Industrial Revolution but also corroded and killed the Indian garment industry 200 years ago. Ofcourse none of this can justify Indian elites and Western corporations exploiting the most vulnerable in our society.

The truth is Americans can never see beyond instant gratification. We see something and we buy it without giving a hoot about where it was produced and how. As long as it is cheap and 'in' we will buy it. The raging fire of unbridled Capitalism will never stop till it consumes everything.

Can such obscenities ever be extirpated. The short ,brutal answer : no. Too many are too desperately poor in the Third World.

Children therefore end up getting hawked , and sold like chattel . Horror stories abound of children being scooped up by begging syndicates . They are then routinely mutilated and forced to beg at street corners.

Being forced to work in sweat-shops or selling their bodies ,pales in comparison with the sheer magnitude of such obscenities.

Should 'ethical 'Western business practices succeed in forcing the closure of such sweat shops - who's to say that these very same children would not be scooped up by sweat-shops in other niche businesses:

Such as churning out guns and 'dum dum' bullets (on the cheap) for the likes of murderous mercenaries viz. Blackwater.

That should have many an 'eager beaver' do-gooder British journalistic ferret licking his or her chops at the very thought of such a scoop.

Its all very well for some young Brit 'raring to go' -to to scoop like a hawk on such outrages .And then fly back to the flesh pots and the creature comforts of London .And bask in the warm glow of world wide approbation.

To them all i have to say is :put a wee bit of your money where your mouth is . You'd be surprised how far it would take some Third World family.

GAP - generally against progressives

There is a GAP in their conscience

Seriously, sweatshop slave labor in clothing manufacturing, I AM SHOCKED- SHOCKED!!

There are several companies, particularly garment industry, that are involved in slave labour and child labour. The reason for the continuation of slave labour and child labour is due to lack of awareness and opposition to this greed-based capitalism that is exploiting the poor, weak and the vulnerable.

- "Now visit the beautiful tropical islands described by disgraced House Majority Leader Tom Delay as "a perfect petri dish of capitalism." What's so perfect about Saipan and the other 13 Northern Mariana Islands? Primarily this: items produced there can carry the label "Made in USA" and be sold in the U.S. without tariffs or quotas, but the scandalously low U.S. minimum wage does not apply, and the pathetically minimal rights of immigrants and workers in the U.S. do not apply. There are no labor unions. Any worker can be terminated and deported at any time for no cause.

The workers, mostly Chinese women, sew clothing for J. Jill, Elie Tahari, Ann Taylor, Liz Claiborne, The Gap, and Ralph Lauren, among others. They pay so much money to obtain work and for shelter and food, that they can labor for a decade and still not pay it back. They serve, therefore, as indentured servants, sharing rooms and beds, lacking health care, and working extra unpaid hours for the reward of being permitted to also work paid overtime. Pregnancy is unacceptable, costs of it not covered, and amateur abortion encouraged.

The island of Saipan does great business in prostitution for Asian businessmen and American soldiers. Approximately 90 percent of the prostitutes are former Chinese garment workers. Others had been recruited for jobs like waitressing but were forced into prostitution instead.
Over the past decade, 29 bills in Congress have sought to apply a minimum wage standard and/or immigration law to the Mariana Islands or to deny use of "Made in USA" to items produced there. Every one of these bills has failed. Some have won support in the Senate but been blocked by the House Resources Committee. Others have won the support of a majority of House Members but still been killed in that same committee.

Guess who earned $11 million in fees from the Marianas government and garment manufacturers? A fellow by the name of Jack Abramoff.The chair of the House Resources Committee is Pombo. A former member of that committee who was part of a Congressional fact finding mission to the Marianas that found no facts, a man whom Abramoff called the islands' hero, is Doolittle."

- In the rubber plantation in Liberia owned by Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire Company since 1926, children work 12 to 14 hours a day. A UN Report "Human Rights in Liberia's Rubber Plantations: Tapping into Future" notes: "Although management of Firestone…stated that child labour is prohibited within …(its) concession (area), HROs (United Nations Mission in Liberia Human Rights Officers) spoke with a number of children working on …(the) plantation, aged between 10 and 14 years…Reports of child labour on Firestone plantation have also been documented in a report ("Firestone: The Mark of Slavery") by the NGO, Save My Future Foundation, in March 2005." In this plantation the workers are given unreasonably high production quota, which takes a rubber tapper at least 21 hours a day to meet the quota. This forces the workers to bring their wives and children to work in order to meet the quota, or else their already low wages will be halved.

- The United States is one of the two countries refused to sign the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 1989, an international convention for the abolition of child labour. Article 32 states: "Children have the right to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development." The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), 1989, has been ratified by 192 countries, except by the United States of America and Somalia.

Ever buy a shirt, pair of pants or shoes you never wore? I have, although this was years ago. We Americans need to learn to not buy more than we need, and stop buying name brands, especially clothing, for ego gratification. And it would be fitting if we resisted all the appeals for our buying often meaningless "crap" at Christmastime.

Cancel the orders, destroy the goods and cover the scandal.
Compassion would demand healthcare and tuition for these Tiny Tims but then the American Value is No Child Left Educated and god forbid 'socialized' medicine...

no excuse gap. you can't afford to have someone on the ground, to go directly to the factory where these clothes are manufactured, to make sure that everything is on the up and up? give me a break! what a fxxking joke. how many other companys are doing the same shit?

Apologies.

The above-linked article citing Gregory Clark was not the one I meant to link. Clark does not critique Western-style industrialization and consumption.

I was looking for an excellent scholarly article I read a while back on Bengal as the source of wealth that fueled the industrial revolution in Great Britain, but it might have been in a scholarly journal, that I can't link to here.

The parallels with exploitation in contemporary India (with Indian elites then, as now, participating in these cruel inequities) startled me.

I am having techno difficulties with CD's discussion feedback , and it didn't appear to post, and didn't show me a draft to edit.

I was surprised to see it posted now. So am offering my apologies, because Clark's orientation and outlook is not consistent with the philosophies of CD and those of most of CD readers. I did not mean to offend any of CD's readers by including it, and disagree with his orientation and conclusions myself.

And let us not forget that there will be a time when we will have to learn how to make our own clothes again. When oil runs so low that we can no longer rely on mass manufacturing of cheap clothing, and all the thrift stores are being rensacked until there is nothing left, it would make sense that we start learning how to use our hands again instead of relying on everything being made for us. As our resources get more depleted, everything is going to get a lot more expensive. Unless we go back to world wide slavery, the reality of "cheap" and easy goods is going to be history. We've been lazy and greedy long enough. We are all going to have to start working a little harder to live, and that is when we will come to the realization that we don't need all this "crap". We will learn how to make things that are most essential and practical. Extravegence will prove to be not only meaningless, but detrimental to survival.

the article says Gap has cancelled the order, as if that solves the problem. I'd like to know if Gap did anything about helping the poor slave children caught up in this mess. Did they "free" them? Did they help them home? Did they compensate them? In short did they do anything to help the most vulnerable in this sad tale? Somehow I doubt it. They cancelled the order and now these children will simply be put to work on some other order for some other company that is not so "fastidious" about their image.
Why does no one ask about the children in this report?

It is indeed very disturbing witnessing Americans, of every class, blindly living off the slave labor of overseas laborers, many whom are children, and sweatshop workers in this nation. http://www.antislavery.org/homepage/antislavery/modern.htm, http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=183&srcid=-2

Not to forget fair food on our tables, as well: http://www.ciw-online.org/

Maybe when Americans finally face their history, that this nation was based on the seizure of lands from the first people who lived here; their enslavement (especially by the Spanish and Portuguese) and genocide to a large degree, and the chattel slavery of millions of kidnapped Africans, as well as exploited endentured European laborers, and the suppression of so many subsequent labor movements, including attempts to stop the outsourcing of manufacturing, ongoing since the 1970's...

And when the British, Spanish, Dutch, and French can open their eyes more fully to how their colonies helped to start the legacies of colonial exploitation now in their current stage of neocolonialism. Maybe we can begin to stomach the ugly realities of the man-made world we're all co-creating, whether by supporting the status-quo, or trying to change.

This article with Gregory Clark commenting on how Great Britain bled Bengal to fuel the British Industrial Revolution is eye-opening: http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2007/9/29/185648/947

But slavery and exploitation goes further back than the age of imperialism, of course. I think all the commenters who point to a lack of moral vision and development as the ultimate psychological cause of exploitation are right on.

How is the fair trade movement coming along? I don't see much clothing or furniture at 10,000 Villages -- mostly knick-knacks I don't need -- although I am glad people are making a living from them. It would be great if fair trade moved into clothing and furniture more.

Anybody who was surprised by any of the contenet or learned anything new from this article has either been locked in a closet for thirty years, or has a terminal case of denial fever, a disease that is epidemic in North America and some other parts of the world.

This article simply presents one more exhibit within a long list of exhibits that demonstrate the global economic model that NAFTA and all of the other trade agreements continue to enable.

Welcome to a world run by the corporations, and for the corporations. Gap isn't alone here. There is a good documentary about how Walmart operates..."The high price of Walmart" (I think). I made my kids watch it with me so they could understand why we don't buy tons of stuff (by buying it, we are endorsing these practices).

I don't go so far as buying my clothes through Goodwill (I don't really like to spend the time picking through stuff). I do, however, buy clothes that aren't too "trendy" so I can wear them over and over and not just for the moment. Fashion is WASTEFUL! I even buy at Gap because it's generally plain...but I wear my clothes to death.

Another great practice is to buy your presents from fair trade organizations so that the people who make the product actually get a fair price for it. I do all my Christmas shopping this way (and by the way, we have really downsized what we buy...afterall, money can't buy what we really want...happiness, remember???)

Tis the season to think about this stuff...

"You're so unique! You and millions of other folks in your income bracket!"

So true!

At any rate, I agree with the rest of the posters here. And I think it's possible to live simply *and* well, one just has to be an informed consumer. And of course, consume less.

Led by advertising, many Americans have to rent warehouses to house their excess stuff.

Short of socks, shoes and underwear, we have ceased buying new clothes because of the ethics, price and simply crappy styles. We find Savers and Goodwill to be far better bargain. Too bad they are throwing the clothes these kids made away. So some other slave will have to redo them. Why not rectify the situation instead of doing some feel good cosmetic deal

Yes, I agree. And I think that we have to take a second and third look at the notion that all the mass produced stuff we buy reflects our uniqueness and individuality. ("You're so unique! You and millions of other folks in your income bracket!") I think that a lot of the insatiable demand stems from our ego problems and narcissism.

Its hilarious actually. Every now and then the 'american' conscience is re-awakened. The media capitalizes on this story. The story dies a natural death. And we are all back to square one. The classic 'karmic' cycle !

Frosty Bunny - you don't know it but I am applauding you right now. You are right. Many Americans just want as much crap as we can cram into our mouths, our cars, our closets, our houses, our existence. It's all substitutes for the emptiness in our lives. I'm part of it. Just imagine if we didn't have all this plastic and unneeded junk. We might actually stop and think about our lives. We might read a book. We might meditate on the beauty of nature. We might see our role in ruining what used to be a good place to live: the earth.

Frosty bunny:

I heartily agree with you.

We Americans are so used to our luxury (and we do live in luxury compared to everybody in the "developing" world), that we don't want to sacrifice anything. I strongly suggest that we stop buying so much crap we don't need, and spend more money on fair trade, just, quality things that we do need (fruits and vegetables from local farmers, for example).

Also, take advantage of second hand stores. So many resources go into producing new shit that we don't need, when there is so much used stuff that is perfectly fine and cheaper. I've been buying second hand clothes for years. The money goes toward local stores or charity stores like Goodwill instead of toward these awful companies that overcharge for their slave labor clothes. And it just makes more sense.

Not by a long shot. Even within that company, Banana Republic is their high end, Gap is in the middle and their Old Navy is the cheap stuff. True high end is all the designer stuff.

I thought that GAP was high end clothes.

I can't speak for Europe, but part of the solution might be for Americans to stop demanding the "right" to buy as much shit as possible for the lowest possible price. As someone who toiled in retail for years while my kids were little (am now back in college) I can attest to the insatiable demand by Americans (who can afford to pay more) to make sure that the crap they buy is as cheap as possible. This is only achievable by shaving every conceivable penny out of the production, shipping and retail costs.