It's a combination, but we certainly play a part. If there's no pressure from developed countries, then rising wages and conditions of work in one manufacturing nation will ultimately just mean making themselves less competitive. In some ways there's a lot of potential for action on our part, because the effect on final price is so minimal through even drastic increases in worker pay. To take it to absurd levels, you could increase worker pay tenfold, and only add $1 to the cost of $14 shirt [1]. So we only have to care enough to be willing to pay a tiny amount more (12c more to double wages, or spent otherwise to drastically improve working conditions), for it to be worthwhile for companies to market themselves as being decent employers.

There are various things we could do. As individuals, you could buy brands which have signed up to some sort of agreement for better treatment of workers - in the UK we have Fair Trade (the main focus is agriculture, but they do seem to do clothes as well), and also the more mainstream Ethical Trading Initiative, which some major high street shops have signed up for. As governments, I personally see no reason why we shouldn't have at least some basic worker rights built into international trade deals. It's difficult or impossible to see what things are like on the ground, but at least we could make the existence of national laws mandatory.

[1] http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/what-does-that-14-sh...

Main thing is to be aware of where your products come from, and if labour is involved, how they are treated. That's often hard to find out because the companies like to keep it hidden, but journalists can often find out.

Another thing you could do is specifically look for clothing / articles made in the US or wherever you yourself live. It'll probably be more expensive (both due to higher wages and because "Proudly made in the US" or similar phrases increase the price), but then that's kinda what you're implying should happen.

Anyway "Made in the US" isn't a guarantee for better treatment of workers, iirc there's not much of a minimum wage anymore. People working in the Amazon warehouses are probably the closest thing to the Western sweatshop (and there's a few articles about that around).

It's not that they're exploited. Cambodia's economy is just really, really inefficient. Food prices in Cambodia are really high (ep 4), higher even than in Berlin [0] by 21%, not to mention Eastern Europe (2+ times Warsaw's prices, 4x if you shop around). The sad thing is, the wages in sweatshops won't go up much. Sooner or later automation will advance to the point where even $3/day for sewing garments will be too high and they will all be fired.

[0] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...

We can begin to report common commodification and objectification of human beings.

We can use tools like Aether (http://www.getaether.net) to give power to voices that may be hushed, find known unknowns in terms of pain.

Local labour laws allow this. Who's to say if it's internal or external pressures that keep them like they are -- there are certainly locals who are also making money off this.

As for what you can do, you can sew your own clothes.