Because higher wages mean more expensive goods and customers don’t want to pay higher prices. While it would make for a simpler narrative, companies like Walmart, Gap, and H&M that have operations in Bangladesh outsource the making of their clothing lines overseas not simply because they want to exploit people on the other side of the world, but because we their customers all but force them to do it. While most of us would be appalled if we saw the working conditions and knew the wages of the people that make the clothes we wear and would no doubt shout our anger from the roof tops, our wallets tell a different story. Our wallets, or more specifically our spending habits reveal the cold hard reality that most of us just don’t give a shit about where we get our clothes, so long as we get them for cheap. Worse yet, as Tony Campolo would say, most of us in the church care more about fact that I just said “shit” than the fact that countless men, women, and children suffer and die everyday as a direct result of our lust for low, low prices. Which is why the problem of evil is hanging in our closets.
It is obvious that this writer has no clue about the complexity of the problem when they talk about low prices at the Gap. What about service workers in the US who can’t afford to pay more? What about the amounts spent on marketing and executive salaries that far exceed the cost of production?