Why You Can’t Trust “Made in China”: Hidden Slave Labor

I’m not in the mood to be sued today, so I’m not going to name names… but there are a fair number of print-on-demand shops out there that sell inexpensive shirts made in China. Some of them even use “flexible sourcing” arrangements in which they change the sourcing of shirts based on price and availability of items due to events such as… labor unrest.

Here’s one reason (out of this news just this week) why buying shirts made in China is a bad idea:

Authorities in southern China’s Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had made several arrests and had already “rescued” more than 100 children from factories in the city of Dongguan, one of the country’s largest manufacturing centers for electronics and consumer goods sold around the world. The officials said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, almost slavelike conditions for minimal pay.

The children, mostly between the ages of 13 and 15, were often tricked or kidnapped by employment agencies in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province called Liangshan and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were sometimes forced to work 300 hours a month, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media. The legal working age in China is 16.

…

Last August, Beijing revoked the license of a factory accused of using child labor to produce Olympic merchandise. Several other suppliers were also punished for labor law violations.

But experts say rising costs of labor, energy and raw material, and labor shortages in some parts of southern China have forced some factory owners to cut costs or find new sources of cheap labor, including child labor.

Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, have been accused in recent years of using child labor and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws. Experts say the labor problems discovered in Dongguan are not uncommon.

“The Liangshan child labor case is quite typical,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.”

You just can’t trust that what you buy from China isn’t made in deplorable conditions. When you have a choice, making the non-China choice is entirely reasonable. If you think that’s unfair to China, why don’t you ask China instead what it’s going to do to meet your ethical demands as a customer?

That brings us to the other reason why you should avoid buying shirts made in China: there are alternatives. Skreened, for instance, sells only sweatshop-free shirts made in Los Angeles by American Apparel. That’s a significant ethical commitment by Skreened, which certainly could make more money selling shirts made by kids in slave labor conditions. We also negotiated a special agreement with Zazzle to be able to sell USA union-made t-shirts — and only those kind of t-shirts — on our webshop. We hope Zazzle extends this privilege to everyone soon.

If you are buying shirts, consider these options. If you’re designing shirts to sell online, please consider them too. You don’t have to be part of the chain of inhumanity.