Made in Bangladesh

My Calgary Flames hat is Made in Bangladesh! Read about the dilemma that sweatshop conscious shoppers face:

My father came back a couple of weeks ago with a suitcase full of presents from Bangladesh. We were in the living room and he unpacked scores and scores of colorful saris and shalwar kameezes. He then reached into suitcase number two and pulled out a stack of plastic wrapped T-shirts. "I got these from your uncle's factory," he said with pride in his voice. "They export these to Europe! They even export to Wal-mart!"

I hesitated. My dad was so proud that his Bangladeshi relatives owned clothing factories in Bangladesh. You could hear it in his voice because as far as Bangladeshi standards are concerned, they had made it because they were exporting to Wal-Mart.

I didn't know what to say, really, to my dad about that. In my Western frame of mind, I would never be caught dead in a Wal-Mart, I save up money to purchase sweat-shop free clothes from American Apparel, and think that Kathy Gifford was bad when her line of clothing was discovered to be made by children. But looking at it from my dad's point of view, these were his family members that pulled themselves up by the bootstraps from the village to owning a large factory in the big city of Dhaka. They own property. They export to Europe. They have huge contracts with Wal-Mart. They are khubi boro loak, "very big people................"