Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Who sews your t-shirt?

This week I took advantage of pre-Christmas sales to pick up a couple of cheap "travel t-shirts" -- the mostly polyester kind that squash well, wash well and keep their shape unto death, no matter what I do to them.

The particular items are imports from Vietnam, but they could easily have come from Bangaldesh or Columbia. This video shares a little about the lives of women who make such things.

"I imagine the people who are going to use the T-shirt are people are from the United States. Gringos. Fat people. Because the shirts that we make are immense.


PEOPLE: Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt (Part III) from NPR on Vimeo.

3 comments:

Rain Trueax said...

It's a tough one as whenever you buy clothing, the labels say all of it is made somewhere else and that somewhere is all around the world. What is going on was here when factories first began to turn into sweatshops and before unions. I wish I saw solutions to poverty as it is very depressing to imagine how it is for some people-- not just in Bangladesh.

Unknown said...

The plus sizes are disproportionately for "people of color"; in the developed world, the poor are more likely to be obese than those with money/education.

janinsanfran said...

Stan -- so true. Plus even if we are "thin," we're usually much taller than most people in the world because we and our parents enjoyed better nutrition.