Deep from the like-that's-a-surprise news archive comes a report that Wal-Mart, that bastion of low prices and lower morals, is sourcing Christmas lights, paper boxes, and other items from Chinese sweatshops, where workers endure illegal and degrading conditions. On the one hand, Wal-Mart has become to worker exploitation what Lindsay Lohan is to drunken party stories: a cliche without quite enough material to be properly covered. On the other hand, this report surfacing immediately after Wal-Mart's Black Friday specials were the subject of news reports across the country really brings this story home. It was consumers headed to Wal-Mart looking for bargain basement Christmas lights that incentivized the sweatshop factory profiteers to exploit workers in the first place.

The details of this particular story indicate that the workers weren't slaves -- they were free to leave if they wanted -- but their conditions weren't much better than those of many human trafficking victims.  For example, at one of the five factories cited as sweatshops in the report, workers manufactured goods from 7:30 a.m. until 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. the next day during periods of heavy demand. Most workers got two days per month off to rest. The base salary was around $0.65 per hour, including overtime wages which were illegally low at rates of $0.44 per hour. That's only 45% of the legal minimum in China. But paltry pay wasn't the only issue in this Wal-Mart supplier factory: there wasn't even running water in the factory's bathrooms.

The exploitation of workers in Chinese factories that supply Wal-Mart is not new news at all. Tai Guangshou, a reporter at the National Business Daily, surveyed Chinese Wal-Mart suppliers in 2007 and found that 95% of them were small and unlicensed, making them significantly more difficult to regulate. It's almost as if Wal-Mart doesn't want to be able to regulate its suppliers and keep low prices from coming at the cost of worker's freedom, rights, or health.

The bright point in this whole depressing lights saga is that Wal-Mart has increasingly responded to consumer pressure for better monitoring of supply chains over the past couple years. A couple years ago, media reports exposed Wal-Mart sales of shoes made in sweatshops by workers suffering serious human rights abuses. Consumer pressure pushed Wal-Mart's ethics department (yes, Virginia, it does exist) to work toward the offending supplier developing higher standards and create better oversight in the supply chain. Wal-Mart is not deaf to consumer criticism.  And that makes the thought of ending sweatshop labor in the production of Christmas lights a little brighter.

So think carefully about where you're buying your holiday decorations this season. And whenever possible, understand where they come from and who has made them.

Photo credit: Elite Photoart