One of the consequences of President Clinton’s granting China Most Favored Nation status and allowing them to become a member of the World Trade Organization is that China took over production of consumer goods previously made in the USA. As a result, the consumer products you buy that are “Made in China” may be made by slave labor.
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In today’s economy, many consumers are faced with endless choices about where their products come from. But behind every “Made in USA” label lies a much larger story — one that touches American jobs, national security, small businesses, and the strength of our supply chain. Supporting American manufacturing and buying American-made products isn’t just a patriotic gesture; it’s a decision with powerful ripple effects for workers, communities, and the nation as a whole.
As global supply chain disruptions, skills gaps, and trade imbalances continue to dominate the headlines, consumers, policymakers, manufacturers, and small business owners are reevaluating the true cost of offshoring and the significant benefits of reshoring and insourcing. Now more than ever, buying Made in America can fuel sustainable economic growth and restore our country’s manufacturing backbone. Read more
Have you ever considered where your clothes come from? No, not the brand name, but the workers who stitched together your outfit at a tremendously small wage. Fast fashion brands like H&M, Nordstrom, GAP, and Forever 21 depend on vastly underpaid workers (as little as $4/hour) to make clothing at alarming rates to meet consumer demand.
Swedish fashion chain H&M worked with clothing factories in Myanmar where children as young as 14 toiled for more than 12 hours a day, according to a book being published in Sweden next week. Read more
It’s hard to think of an issue that you would less like your company to be associated with than modern slavery. Yet last November Nestlé, the world’s largest foodmaker and one of the most recognisable household brands, went public with the news it had found forced labour in its supply chains in Thailand and that its customers were buying products tainted with the blood and sweat of poor, unpaid and abused migrant workers. Read more
President Obama signed into law Wednesday a provision banning the import of good made by child and forced labor. Read more
In the week before Valentine’s Day, United Technologies expressed its love for its devoted Indiana employees, workers whose labor had kept the corporation profitable, by informing 2,100 of them at two facilities that it was shipping their factories, their jobs, their communities’ resources to Mexico. Read more
Fast Fashion – a term used to describe cheap and affordable clothes which are the result of catwalk designs moving into stores in the fastest possible way in order to respond to the latest trends. Read more
Costco Wholesale Corp. customer sued the retailer on allegations that it knowingly sold frozen prawns that were the product of slave labor. Read more
Slave labor forced to work for no pay for years at a time under threat of extreme violence are being used in Asia in the production of seafood sold by major US, British and other European retailers, the Guardian can reveal. Read more
Some of the most popular American corporations are importing shrimp at super-cheap prices from Thailand, where migrant workers are in slavery, like in Nazi Germany, being tortured while they work for no pay 20 hours a day. How much shrimp is being imported that’s processed by slaves, including child slaves? Walmart and Costco are contributing to the chaos, buying and selling shrimp exported from Thailand every year, and it’s slave-labor shrimp at “rock bottom” cost. No wonder Walmart and Costco are such “successful” businesses. What else are they buying that’s made by slaves who are tortured mentally and physically while working 20-hour days for zero pay? Wine, maybe?
Forced labor takes different forms, including debt bondage, trafficking and other forms of modern slavery. The victims are the most vulnerable – women and girls forced into prostitution, migrants trapped in debt bondage, and sweatshop or farm workers kept there by clearly illegal tactics and paid little or nothing. Read more
(ILO News) – Forced labor in the private economy generates US$ 150 billion in illegal profits per year, about three times more than previously estimated, according to a new report from the International Labor Organization (ILO). Read more
At first the (slaves) men filtered in by twos and threes, hearing whispers of a possible rescue. Read more
