Falling through the GAP - children enslaved for designer clothing?

Did you see what they were saying on Anderson Cooper 360 this morning? It seems that kids were making intricately embroidered children's blouses to be sold at GAP stores. You can read the full articles on the police raided sweatshop in New Delhi by visiting any of the news articles I have linked to below. I'm just sickened by the defense that the man responsible for bringing the children to Delhi, Sheikh Mubidul, gave when he was questioned about whether he thought it was wrong to condemn children as young as 8 to a life of labor. His response according to the Telegraph was: "They have no food to eat, so they must work. What else can they do?"

I have to wonder if the guy was double ending that comment and was withholding food from the children if they did not work. At least three of the children had told Bhuwan Ribhu, a Delhi lawyer and activist with the Indian branch of Global March Against Child Labour, that they were not being paid anything for the work they were doing.

The most sickening part to me? In the news article I heard this morning GAP was saying that the clothes that had come from that supplier were now destroyed so would not be being sold in their stores. Why not find a way to sell the things to help the children that made them get some payment for their enslavement? Or give the shirts to those children? Use the money from the shirts to raise money to help stop such things? There are a lot of things that I think could have been done with those shirts other than destroy them. Send them to Save The Children to help clothe children in need. But to think of all of the hard work that those children put into those things in that sweat shop being for nothing... that saddens me.

You can find more on this issue at the following news articles or by searching through your preferred search engine. My search criteria was "gap sweatshop"

ABC News 7 - San Francisco
Express India - Indian Express Newspapers

And the last thing I have to say on this for this post? I find it horrifying that to get those results I had to sort out ones on this same subject that date back to July of 2004 - The End of Gap Sweatshops? - apparently it was not. The article starts out with the following:

"When I decided to join Gap Inc. in the fall of 2002," writes Paul Presser, President and CEO of the clothing giant behind the Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic brands, "one of the first things my teenage daughter asked was, 'Doesn't Gap use sweatshops?'"

Yes, Virginia, Gap does use sweat shops.