Whether the purchase is a $9.96 Kathie Lee Gifford blouse at Wal-Mart or a $99 pair of Air Jordans, there is no no guarantee the celebrity-endorsed product wasn't made in a sweatshop.
And if eliminating unhealthy, underpaying factories is considered tough in this country, imagine the task in underdeveloped countries like Honduras, where workers sew both Gifford's line for Wal-Mart and Jaclyn Smith clothes for Kmart.In Indonesia, labor activists complain that employees work 65-hour weeks to meet production quotas for Nike shoes and clothing, endorsed by dozens of celebrities including Michael Jordan.
"There's a lot of forced overtime; there's a lot of mistreatment and physical punishment," said Jeff Ballinger, who has documented conditions at the Nike plants. When workers protest, they are fired or questioned by the military, he said.
Nike, Kmart and the celebrities deny the charges. But many activists wonder how celebrities can earn so many millions from the products with their name on it without knowing about the abuses.
Gifford, for example, says she receives a percentage of the sales and gives 10 percent of that to charity - more than $1 million last year. That would imply more than $10 million as her share of Wal-Mart sales.
"When you're making that sort of money," said labor activist Charles Kernaghan, "you better ask some serious questions about the conditions under which this clothing is produced."
Revelations this year that New York City employees worked 60-hour weeks to make blouses for Gifford, and Hondurans worked for 31 cents an hour to make pants for her clothing line, focused national attention on sweatshop abuses.
"The problem of sweatshops is a national disgrace," U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said.
More than half of the country's 22,000 cutting and sewing shops in the garment industry pay below minimum wage, he said, and more than a third threaten employee health and safety. Many pay weeks and months late.
Gifford has since joined the anti-sweatshop crusade, but labor activists say the problem doesn't end with her.
Kernaghan, director of the National Labor Committee, says workers at the Seolim factory in Baracoa, Honduras, work up to 75 hours a week to meet production quotas for Smith's Kmart line.
The employees are searched as they enter the plant and routinely denied overtime and vacation pay, he said. Workers as young as 13 are screamed at and threatened, Kernaghan said, and some 15-year-olds pack garments "16 hours a day on their feet during the busy season."
Smith, who starred in the 1970s TV show "Charlie's Angels," called Kernaghan's allegations "totally untrue.