Global Closet Project

Everyday when we open our closets and choosing between our favorite clothes, have we ever give any thoughts about where these beautiful garments come from and how they were made? Yes, most of us care about where they were made in, since some think that somewhat represents the quality. And no, majority of people don't see how their wardrobes relate to words such as sweat, blood, barbed wired factory, armed guards and WOMEN. Every time when we go to a Wal-mart, how can we tell if the toys we are about to purchase for our kids were made by children forced to work until midnight 7 days a week, or in a sweatshop by female workers who get paid less than 20Ñž an hour? The sad fact is we can't. Women in these sweatshops are all inside this global closet.

A sweatshop is a factory, where people work for a very small wage, producing a variety of products such as clothes, toys, shoes, and other consumer goods. The term connotes a factory in which the workers are kept in a harsh environment with inadequate ventilation, and workers may sometimes be abused physically, mentally, or sexually, subjected to long hours, harsh or unsafe conditions, and the like. Sweatshops often fail to pay a living wage. Our everyday favorite brand names are mostly produced in large sweatshops in other nations such as China, Philippines, Bangladesh, Macao, etc. Those huge corporate companies do not want you to know how their products were made. So they hide their productions behind factories like prison with locked gates, barbed wire and armed guards. Many corporations refuse to release the list and addresses of the factories they use around the world to make the goods we purchase. Yet, to shop with our conscience, it is our right to know in which countries and factories, under what human rights conditions, and at what wages the products we purchase are made.

Let's look at Wal-mart--the world's largest retailer. It's also the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. It employs over 1.7 million workers worldwide. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year, which is almost equivalent to the size of Belgium or Sweden's Gross Domestic Product. And that means what Wal-mart purchases and retails have the most power to shape manufactures industry. Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers to increase its gross sales. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its more than 26,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from socks to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas. And this has directly increased the demand from sweatshops and slave factories all over the world.

In 2004 federal judge in San Francisco granted class-action status to a sex-discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores, the nation's largest employer. Women make up more than 70% of Wal-Mart's (nyse: WMT - news - people ) hourly workforce but less than one-third of its store management. The case, which now covers as many as 1.6 million current and former female Wal-Mart employees, can be decided en masse because it is based on a statistical analysis

that shows Wal-Mart paid female workers less and gave them fewer promotions than men. Most Walmart empolyees are temporary workers,