Wal-Mart's Shirts of Misery from Bangladesh

When you purchase a shirt in Walmart, do you ever imagine young women in Bangladesh forced to work from 7:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., seven days a week, paid just 9 cents to 20 cents an hour, who are denied health care and maternity leave; screamed at to work faster; with monitored bathroom visits; and who will be fired for daring to complain or ask for their rights?

At the Beximco factory in the Dhaka Export Processing Zone in Bangladesh, there are 1,000 workers, at least 80 percent of them young women, sewing shirts and pants for Walmart and other retailers. Beximco is a sweatshop, where human rights are systematically violated.

Walmart and its contractor Beximco do not pay the overtime premium. In fact, as we have seen, they do not even pay the legal hourly wage of 33 cents. They pay only 20 cents an hour and pay overtime at this same illegal 20-cent rate.

These workers are locked in poverty, being cheated out of over $20 a week in legal wages by the largest retailer in the world. The workers are being illegally paid just $16 for a full 80-hour workweek. For the forced 80-hour week, they should be earning at least $36.96. Surely Walmart, with $7.6 billion in annual operating profits, could afford this wage!

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Business/2006/03/06/01005.html

This is why we need to tax rich people. They're under this bizarre superstition that there's such a thing as cheap labor. There isn't. Anywhere, and this kind of mentality gives us these working conditions. At least in the US it's slightly better, but you know this would be the wet dream of the Waltons and every other rich family like them.

http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

Whatever happened to Sam Walton's "Made in America" policy? Oh yeah, never existed.

Now I know why they hate us so.

find something cute that I'd like as a spur-of-the-moment purchase, and I see that it's made in China or Bangladesh or India or many other countries, I take a second and think very hard about whether my wanting it outweighs the pain that the person who made it probably went through. Someone out there assembled it in some way -- will I support the system that exploits them? Is it worth it to me to support slave labor to have the item, whatever it is?

Almost always, the answer is no.