Looking for input: Sweatshop made products

[L4E_WakaMol-King]

Hi everyone! Sorry for my long absence... it's exam time . Anyway, I'm having a bit of a moral conflict, and would welcome input from anyone.

My best friend and I are making Jedi robes for the debut of the 3rd Star Wars movie (are we dorks or what?). We're making all the cloths ourselves, but we're going to need to buy the boots online. The only affordable boots I can find are "made in China." This means, more likely than not, that they are made by labor that is grossly underpayed and mistreated.

So here's my dilema: If I buy these boots, am I encouraging sweatshop labor?

This has been a dilema of mine for a long time... after all, most cloths you find today are made in sweatshops. I don't think a boycot is quite the answer. I don't want to take those jobs away from the people that need them, but I don't want to encourage their abuse either.

Well, any and all reflections are welcome. Thanks my brothers and sister!

[rgrove]

My wife and I have struggled with the same issue in the past. We deplore the gov't in that nation to our core... If we could adopt every poor baby girl born over there tomorrow we would. It's getting very hard to hold fast to not purchase goods made there, though. It's much harder for us now than it was ten years ago, for example. An extraordinary amount of stuff is made in China now. Some of it's quite unique as you've found out. And every day that goes by makes it harder. For instance, A Chinese company just finalized the purchase of all of IBM's home computer business. It's now instantly the third largest computer manufacturer in the world and the Chinese gov't is an investor in the company.

All that being said, what we do is make every effort to keep from buying what we know to be Chinese made products. But if we don't feel like we have a viable choice, we will compromise and make the purchase.

Yours In Christ,
Ron