By Jim Hightower 
Guest Commentary

Just in time for Christmas came something that Christians worldwide considered to be an abomination: crucifixes and other religious articles made in deplorable sweatshops in China. They are sold not only in America’s Christian stores – but even in churches.

A highly-respected workers’ rights group, The National Labor Committee, has documented the brutal sweatshop conditions at the Junxingye factory in Southern China. Here, young women workers – many only teenagers – are forced to toil from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., seven days a week, making Christian artifacts.

They’re paid 26-? cents an hour – less than half of China’s miserly minimum wage. Out of this meager pay, workers are docked for bad food and bunks in cramped, filthy dorms. This lowers their pay to 9 cents an hour — less than $10 a week. They get no sick days, holidays, or maternity leave and, ironically, they have no religious rights.

The National Labor Committee found crucifixes from this factory being sold at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral – for $29.95 apiece! The cathedral has now pulled these products from its gift shops, which is an essential ethical step, but barely a start. The church must use its full moral authority and enormous purchasing power to clean up China’s sweatshop factories engaged in religious commerce.

Far worse than any one gift shop is the Association for Christian Retail, a consortium of some 2,000 religious stores that do nearly $5 billion a year in sales of Christian products. Like Wal-Mart, this profitable economic entity has shifted its manufacturing en masse to China, yet it has not revealed the addresses of its factories, much less the labor conditions in them.

This is one association that should ask itself: What would Jesus do? For information, call the National Labor Committee at (212) 242-3002. 

Former Texas Agriculture Secretary Jim Hightower is a best-selling author. His Web site is www.jimhightower.com. Material courtesy of MinutemanMedia.org.