Would You Pay More for T-Shirts Not from Sweat Shops?

Would you be willing to pay a few bucks extra for a t-shirt for your favorite sports teams? Of course not, right. You'd want to pay the lowest possible price.

If you own a store, would you want to find the cheapest manufacturer or one that charges a few dollars more for the same product? I would assume that you would want the cheapest possible price for that particular product. If the quality of two identical products is the same, why would you willingly pay more for it?

One sports garment manufacturer is gambling that you will pay more. The higher price apparently goes to pay a living wage, not to line the pockets of the owners. They pay their employees more than other, similar companies in the region.

The company is Knights Apparel, and it operates in the Dominican Republic. Here are the first few lines of an article by Steven Greenhouse. It appeared in the July 16, 2010, edition of the New York Times. Click here to read the full article online.

SITTING in her tiny living room here, Santa Castillo beams about the new house that she and her husband are building directly behind the wooden shack where they now live.

The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.

Ms. Castillo had long dreamed of a bigger, sturdier house, but three months ago something happened that finally made it possible: she landed a job at one of the world’s most unusual garment factories. Industry experts say it is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage” — in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers — and allows workers to join a union without a fight.

“We never had the opportunity to make wages like this before,” says Ms. Castillo, a soft-spoken woman who earns $500 a month. “I feel blessed.”

The factory is a high-minded experiment, a response to appeals from myriad university officials and student activists that the garment industry stop using poverty-wage sweatshops. It has 120 employees and is owned by Knights Apparel, a privately held company based in Spartanburg, S.C., that is the leading supplier of college-logo apparel to American universities, according to the Collegiate Licensing Company.


Perhaps this is a naive concept. Maybe it flies in the face of free market enterprise. But will it work? Are Americans increasingly sensitive to the need for social justice around the globe? And if so, are they willing to put their money where their mouth is? It's not easy to determine the answers to such questions.

The ultimate test, I suppose, is quite simple. Will Knights Apparel succeed? Or will low-cost alternatives destroy their bottom line? In the U.S., this is the ultimate question.

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