What people don't realize is that, in a sense, sweatshop labor is a good thing. It is hard for us, with our lofty, first-world standards, to stomach children working 12-hour shifts under presumptively dangerous conditions. But the truth is that without jobs, these children and their families would starve. The employment opportunities offered by these manufacturers are some of the few available to people in developing nations. Until these countries are brought up to the standard of living we enoy, boycotting companies that use their labor is only [poorly] combatting a symptom--not the problem itself. The writer should use the gift cards and pray that the parents of the child that made the clothes (donated to charity or otherwise) will use the money to send the child to America.

sweatshops to send their child here. Don't we already have enough problems with unskilled underemployed non-workers?

Better for the parents to keep the child in their own country, send them to school, start new well paying businesses and raise the standard of living in their own countries.

Beyond that, there's a simple solution if she really feels she can't shop there: exchange the gift cards. There are several websites that offer gift card exchange services at a minor cut; she can trade them and get gift cards for companies she prefers to favor with her patronage.

The reason sweatshops exist is to reduce costs to you (and, obviously, to increase the margins of the manufacturers). So don't pretend that you have some kind of wonderful beneficence here. You buy the $5.99 sweatshop shirt instead of the $15.99 one because it's cheaper to you.

Really, there's likely a whole spectrum of production practices that range from the helpful to exploitative and illegal. I'm far from an expert. Someone with an international affairs background should chime in.

not everybody that works 12-hour shifts gets paid.

jburd1:

Better for the parents to keep the child in their own country, send them to school, start new well paying businesses and raise the standard of living in their own countries.

That is, of course, assuming they can do that. Many people in places cannot afford food, let alone send their children to school. And even then, many cannot continue on with school after a certain time and are forced to waste their knowledge.

Restaveks in Haiti are prime examples of countries not able to support education.