The True Cost

Gr 10 Up—This advocacy documentary addresses the true cost of the ever-cheaper clothing merchandise offered to Americans. Fast fashion, clothing designs made quickly and cheaply to mass-market retailers, results in increasing degradation to those who work in the garment industries of the poorest nations of the world. Salaries of less than $3 per day, environmental catastrophes, chemical poisoning, child labor, and unsafe working conditions are among the major problems besetting the millions of people, mostly women, who make clothing. Andrew Morgan, the writer and director of this eye-opening work, is an investigative journalist who aims to make consumers aware of the human cost of their cheap jeans. This wide-ranging film covers a Texas organic cotton farmer and the owner of a fair trade garment business, as well as apologists for the industry who feel that work in a sweat shop, no matter the conditions, is better than no work at all. But the heart of the film is in seeing the actual conditions in Bangladesh and Cambodia. Some of the footage, particularly of a factory collapse in Bangladesh that took 1,000 lives, is shocking and disturbing. The information presented is thought provoking, and the director clearly argues that the problem lies with capitalism, consumerism, and the profit-at-all-cost mentality, though Morgan gives little in the way of solutions other than rejecting the cheap fashion offered.