What did you pay for the last T-shirt you bought? Less than a fiver? And did you mentally congratulate yourself on a nice little bargain, or pause to reflect that, once materials and margins were stripped out, whoever put the garment together must have been paid washers? Or less?
This week, the high-street cut-price store Primark got rid of three long-standing suppliers in southern India, having allegedly been alerted by the BBC's Panorama that they were using child labour. Let us charitably assume the move was unconnected to the news that a second Dispatches production featuring its Indian suppliers has also been made - although Channel 4 has delayed its screening.
The company claims that high volume, low mark-ups and slender overheads are what allows it to sell its clothing at prices that are located somewhere beneath the bargain basement. It claims, too, that more upmarket retailers are paying the same for goods but charging customers more.
Whatever the truth of the deals Primark and others do with their mostly Asian suppliers, the growth spurt of the cheap clothing market is the other side of a consumer boom that has seen conspicuous consumption at the Bolly and Bentley end of the trade. The worlds of the £1000 handbag and the six-quid jeans may seem to exist in different orbits - but in truth they are both products of a system where the filthy rich ponder ever more ingenious means of flaunting their burgeoning wealth, while the ingenuity of the poor is devoted to finding ever more economical ways of feeding and clothing their families. Dirt-cheap clothes and goods are the antithesis of the fair trade movement, but an inevitable consequence of people budgeting on incomes that leave little room for the exercising of personal conscience.
It is not the least of the ironies of the current credit squeeze that the lowest paid in the country will increasingly favour buying options destined to reinforce the paying of poverty wages on the other side of the world. Yet the stark truth is that Save the Children reckons there are now well over 200 million children from five to 17 working worldwide, many of them very young and putting in daunting hours for pitiful wages - in some cases no wages at all, if they and their siblings are bonded to employers as a result of their desperate families having resorted to money-lenders.
It's fashionable to talk of India as one of the new economic powerhouses; an Asian tiger. One prominent Labour politician openly questioned last month why we should still be giving so much aid to a country boasting a tidy number of billionaires. Perhaps because the Indian gap between rich and poor is substantially more shameful than our own, and the use of child labour still rife.
One-fifth of India's sandstone-quarry workers are children, as are one-third of those in the sex trade. All over Africa and South America, little children are still sent down mines, and they are ubiquitously employed in agriculture - a sector which, in many parts of the world, is still something of a stranger to regulation.
These children are not serving only more downmarket suppliers. A recent report fretting about the availability of fine Egyptian cotton garments also revealed the widespread use of child labour, while Save the Children reckons there are some 18,000 under-age workers in gold mines in the Philippines.
These youngsters are not just being robbed of a childhood, itself a concept barely recognised in other cultures. Too often they are exposed to hazardous conditions and toxins that wreck their health and slash their life expectancy. It is a devastating commentary, too, on Africa's seemingly endless appetite for internecine warfare that more and more aid workers are deployed to rescue and rehabilitate child soldiers from the mental as well as the physical consequences of their enforced conscription.
None of this may matter too much to those for whom manipulating commodity prices, or investing in globally successful but unscrupulous manufacturers, is all part of the daily game of turning a fatter profit. And it will inevitably not be a hot priority for those preoccupied with trying to turn out their own kids in decent clothes at prices that might keep them from the moneylenders' door. But there are a lot of us out there in the marketplace who can afford to pay fair prices and, while we're at it, demand more detail about the source of goods which we know, if we're being honest, can't be the product of a fair wage.
And if one more retailer bleats that they're only really helping out poor kids in the developing world who'd be destitute without a job, I'll personally strangle them with their own cheap tights.
