Companies in the United States and Canada are now importing more than 1.3 billion garments a year from China, which is about four garments for every man, woman and child in the two countries. They are sold for nearly $9 billion. Annual imports of footwear, toys arid sporting goods from China total about $15 billion.

The vast majority of the four million apparel workers in China are young women: rural migrants who are unaware of their legal rights and have never heard of U.S. or Canadian corporate codes of conduct Workers can be fired for even talking about factory conditions, and there are no independent human rights or labour organizations to give them protection.

American and Canadian companies are exploiting the vulnerability of these Chinese workers, acting in ways that lower work standards, slash wages, eliminate benefits, impose forced overtime, deny legal work contracts, and tolerate widespread arbitrary firings.

Conditions in Chinese factories producing garments and other goods for export to North America include forced overtime, 60_to_96_hour work weeks, 10_to_15_hour shifts, six to seven days a week, for wages of 13 to 28 cents an hour without benefits. Migrant workers are housed in cramped dorms and fed a thin rice gruel. These are the conditions under which many thousands of young Chinese workers (mostly female) were forced to produce toys including the popular Furby doll for children in the U.S. and Canada last Christmas. 

Well known labels on garments manufactured in China under these working conditions include Ralph Lauren (12_to_15_hour shifts, 23c an hour), Kathie Lee/Wal-Mart (12_hour shifts, seven days a week, 13c an hour), Liz Claiborne (66 hours a week, 25c an hour), K_ Mart (70 hours a week, 28c an hour), Ann Taylor (7 am to midnight, seven days a week, 14c an hour), and The Esprit Group (7:30 am to midnight, seven days a week, 13c an hour). The major apparel producers in China include Wal-Mart, Kmart, Liz Claiborne, Dayton_ Hudson, May Co., Federated and The Limited.

American and Canadian companies claim they are "monitoring" factory conditions in China and adhere to prevailing wage and benefit rates, but in fact these factories operate behind a veil of secrecy and are part of a growing subcontracting network in which several factories work on the same order. Without corporate disclosure, there is no way to hold corporations accountable for human and worker rights violations in China, so these abuses will continue.

Source: National Labour Committee in Support of Worker and Human Rights