CHART: How Many Sweatshops Does It Take to Make This T-Shirt?

Your clothing’s long, strange trip from Chinese cotton field to big box to dresser drawer.


This chart is part of Mother Jonesinvestigation into Walmart’s much-praised green makeover, for which reporter Andy Kroll traveled to China, the home of many of the retail giant’s manufacturers. He found that although Walmart claims to be monitoring its factories’ compliance with environmental and labor rules, its auditing system is plagued by corruption. What’s more, many factories outsource more than half their work to “shadow” factories—unregulated operations that auditors never visit at all. To read the full story, click here.

 

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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