Last week in Uzbekistan, hundreds of thousands of people, including children, were forced from their jobs and schools and into the cotton fields, where they’ll spend the next few weeks picking the crop under hot, unsanitary, and often hazardous conditions for little to no pay. It’s an issue that doesn’t gain the same amount of attention or notoriety as sweatshop exploitation in Bangladesh and Cambodia, but it’s something that happens, nevertheless. Cotton is in our clothes, our linens, and even our currency, so it only stands to reason that Uzbek cotton is, too, according to Anti-Slavery International, a London-based human-rights organization that created a two-minute animated video explaining what amounts to government-sponsored forced labor.
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