Americans in support of sweatshops?

Americans are often accused of being obsessed with rugged individualism.  As a nation we pride ourselves on independence, freedom, and capitalism.  We find ourselves in a nation where the pursuit of happiness is our god given right. 

Perhaps this is why the media seems to be constantly engulfed with cries of injustice.  It seems to have become a game of who cried wolf.  The perhaps overused cliche that "you have to pick your battles" has become my rule.  

For a developing worlds class I'm taking this semester I watched the 2005 PBS documentary China Blue.  It features 17 year old Jasmine, a worker in a jeans factory in China.  She quits school and leaves her home in the rural Sichuan province of China to go to work in one of the big factory. This documentary begins with her journey to the city in search of work.  She finds a post as a thread cutter at the Lifeng factory making denim jeans. 


Jasmine and her other friends, all teenagers some as young as 14 years old live in a small concrete apartment. They have sheets that covers their beds.  They have faucets where they get water and do their laundry by hand.  And although these living conditions aren't desirable by any means they seem doable. But this is just the beginning. 

Jasmine and the girls are forced to consistently work 17 hour shifts with only a couple hours of sleep before the next shift. Often the boss delays the wages saying that he cannot pay them yet.  He talks about how all the workers want is to steal from him and complains of their unfair demands. Jasmine doesn't even get paid in time, or enough to be able to go home for one day that year.  Often they have to pin their eyes open with clothes pins late into the night.  The foreign companies they make the jeans for notify the factories when they come to inspect and the workers are forced to lie about wages, breaks, and working conditions. 

Its disgusting.  Here is a 17 year old girl who should be in school gaining an education that will shape the rest of her life instead she is forced to work to all day and late into the night and yet is not payed enough to pay for medication when she falls ill. 

One of the companies mentioned that outsources to factories in China was Levi's.  According to the Wall Street Journal in 1993 the company after learning of the despicable working conditions that Chinese laborers were being forced to endure supposedly withdrew their business in light of the "pervasive violation of human rights."  (Levi's Faced Earlier Challenge in China)

Yet five years later Levi's announced that would return to China, and then in a 2005 documentary their brand is mentioned as one of the companies supporting these anti-human rights factories where it is obvious that little positive change has occurred in the working conditions, even regarding teenagers?

An article in the Los Angeles Times in 1998 even stated, "Levi Strauss never stopped making clothes in China; its Hong Kong subsidiary continues to manufacture clothes on a contract basis at plants in neighboring Guangdong Province." (Has Levi Strauss Sold Out in China?)

China Blue reveals that the conditions remain unchanged. Big name companies such as Guess?, Levi Strauss & Co, The Limited, Inc. , Tommy Hilfiger, and Wal-mart still continue to use sweatshop to crank out profits, mean while foreign and domestic laborers living in poverty and often children, are forced to pay the price.