The True Cost

In the 1960s, 95 percent of clothing sold in the USA was actually manufactured in America. Today, that number is approximately 3 percent. Filmmaker Andrew Morgan's critical documentary isn't the only one about the scourge of Third World sweatshops churning out fashion-label items at low prices, but it has an impressive international scope. The overall portrait is damning, as Morgan visits factories outside Dhaka (capital of Bangladesh), where garment laborers toil for pennies in unsafe buildings that have killed hundreds due to collapses and fires (more than 1,200 died when a ramshackle high-rise called Rana Plaza gave way in 2013). Rarely is any of this noted with urgency by the mainstream media, and industry shills and right-wingers continue to defend this virtual slavery as providing employment for the downtrodden. Meanwhile, Morgan finds workers in Cambodia who were assassinated for requesting a living wage, and children in India who were born deformed due to pesticides used on the cotton-fiber monoculture. A few clothiers—Japan-founded People Tree, and designer Stella McCartney, among others—pursue manufacturing practices that are based on fairness and sustainability, but they seem to be heartbreakingly few in a trillion-dollar industry. Also featuring interviews with authors Lucy Siegle and Benjamin Powell, The True Cost includes a “making-of” featurette. Recommended. [Note: this is also available on home video from Amazon.com for $12.99.] Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)