Made in America: World News with Diane Sawyer is one of the many new efforts examining how what we buy matters. Bloggers have been exploring this issue with USA shopping efforts, including our friend Sarah at Made in USA Challenge whose goal is "providing a guide for the conscious consumer."

Sarah and I recently discussed something that isn't always part of the "Buy American" message we hear: even though something is Made-in-America, it might not be sweatshop free.

Buying local is ethical, right? 

What if you lived in Florida, and you purchased locally grown tomatoes at the locally-owned grocery store. Sounds like a pretty delicious idea! Except if you consider there's a good chance those tomatoes were harvested by farmworkers earning less than $12,000 a year for backbreaking work.

That's what workers in Immokalee, Florida have been organizing to change through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Instances of outright slavery have been documented in recent years, and the farms in Florida have been labeled sweatshops, just like many industrial agricultural operations in the US.

The same goes for manufactured goods. There could be factories in your city where people are held against their will, paid pennies a day, and physically or sexually abused.

These goods might have a "Made in the USA" label, but that means nothing from a human rights perspective if they are "Made in a Sweatshop" too.

Doesn't Ethix Merch Sell USA Products? 

Yes, we do. About 20% of the time our clients request items that are only made in non-unionized American factories.

These are factories we know well, many of them small family-owned operations struggling to keep some production in the country. To the best of our knowledge none of them have ever union-busted or had sweatshop conditions. If we learned something to the contrary, we would educate our clients so they will understand why we want to sell them something different.

Unions Are the Best Solution

Sweatshops exist beyond cut-and-sew factories. Sweatshops exist for any of the hundreds of promotional products sold by businesses like ours every day.

To avoid any questions, we encourage everyone to look for the union label. It's the surest way to know that any manufactured item has sweatshop-free conditions for the person behind the sewing machine, print press, plastic injection molder, button machine, and on and on.

Unions are the best solution to sweatshops because workers deserve a voice. Workers are the best source of information about their working conditions, and they can use unions to bring fairness to their jobs. Approximately 80% of the custom merch we sell is union-made.

Please support true sweatshop-free alternatives by buying union made goods whenever possible!

Here's a song to help you remember: