Video inside a “Kardashian” sweatshop garment factory with Chicken Feathers & Garlic Skin video | A travel narrative by Walt F.J. Goodridge

Click on image to watch a this video filmed by Chinese workers inside an actual garment factory/sweatshop:

“If you happen to be in the United States, you don’t have to go all the way to third world countries [or to China] to find the factories commonly referred to as ‘sweatshops.’ As recently as about 30 months ago, garment factories were operating right on US soil in….” Thus began my answer to a question posed recently on Yahoo Answers.

A visitor to the Yahoo site asked, “What do modern day sweatshops look like? The new Kardashian controversy is, in some sense, helping to turn many people’s attention to the ongoing situation that occurs all over the world.

I was able to do my own part in increasing awareness through being the “as told to” author of Chicken Feathers & Garlic Skin: Diary of a Chinese Garment Factory Girl by Chun Yu Wang… a book which has been praised as insightful and revealing even by those in positions of oversight at the time, but who had no idea of the actual conditions inside such factories.

The former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular Affairs, during the Bush administration, offered this after reading the book:

Chicken Feathers takes us inside a world that was almost impossible to understand from the outside. This book is a great public service, but a great read as well.”–David B. Cohen, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Insular Affairs

Angelo Villagomez, the Saipan Blogger, offered this:

“…It is a story that deserved to be told and shines a light on a situation that should never have been allowed on American soil.”

In doing my research for this book, I compiled and collected photographs, videos and interviews which could prove quite insightful, and even shocking to those who are now being brought into the discussion–a discussion which has been ongoing for decades.

If you’d really like to learn more, first check out Chicken Feathers and Garlic Skin

Chicken Feathers & Garlic Skin

Diary of a Chinese Garment Factory Girl on Saipan

by Chun Yu Wang and Walt F.J. Goodridge

It took a lot of courage for a 25-year-old girl from Wu Xi City in Jiang Shu province, China, who had never flown on a plane, and who had never left home before, to travel 2,000 miles to a foreign country in search of work. It took even more courage to stay once she discovered what life was really like for a factory girl on the island of Saipan in the US Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI). This is
the only first-hand account of work and life in the garment factories of Saipan.
(196 pages; 5.5″ x 8.5″; ISBN: 978-0974531342) Read more at www.saipanfactorygirl.com

Also available in Spanish

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