It’s time companies we support support fair labor. Made in the USA—or as close as possible to wherever we’re at—everything we buy should be ethical, fair, from beginning to end—or we shouldn’t buy it. Count yourself a feminist? Count yourself a fair human being? Read on…

Via MacLean’s:

Before last week, Loblaw’s Joe Fresh was known mostly as a hot spot for cheap, stylish clothing. Few customers likely cared how the clothes were made. That all changed with the deadly…

…According to a 2011 report by the consulting firm O’Rourke Group Partners, a generic $14 polo shirt sold in Canada and made in Bangladesh actually costs a retailer only $5.67. To get prices that low, workers see just 12 cents a shirt, or two per cent of the wholesale cost. That’s one of the lowest rates in the world—about half of what a worker in a Chinese factory might make—and a major reason for the explosion of Bangladesh’s garment industry, worth $19 billion last year, up from $380 million in 1985. The country’s 5,400 factories employ four million people, mostly women, who cut and stitch shirts and pants that make up 80 per cent of the country’s total exports...read the rest at MacLean’s.

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For more on elephant: Stuff Mindful People Like: Fair Labor Shoes.

Are TOMS Shoes made in Third World, in uncertified fair labor factories? Hope not.

Amazing: Radiohead v Child Labor. Green Consumers v Made in Asia.