In 1997, her clothing line turned out to be made by Hondurans working in sweatshops. Bear in mind those existed 100 years before the Kathie Lee brouhaha. Globalization enables corporations that, in their pursuit of a bigger bottom line, outsource manufacturing to the most inexpensive provider. The U.S., with its relatively high minimum wage compared to the rest of the world, is too expensive a place to hire manual labor. So, companies go abroad in search of cheap labor where the civil and human rights are way below American standards.
Companies try to ensure their workers get a fair shake by adopting principles of human rights .
The difficulty is in putting these words into practice. More often than not, the lofty, well-meaning words in a company's literature are just hot air. Take the lawsuit brought against 18 companies regarding labor conditions in Saipan. One reason for the big difference between company policy and reality is the dizzying number of contracts and subcontracts a clothing label has with its manufacturers. Just as a sentence gets all jumbled up when people play Chinese telephone, the original intent of the company to preserve human rights gets lost in the shuffle among countless subcontractors.