By Frank Sennett

Buying clothing from Wal-Mart might not leave you with blood on your hands, but it could put some on your pants.

That's the most surprising lesson U.S. consumers have learned so far from the International Labor Rights Fund's ongoing effort to bring foreign factory workers stateside to see the products of their sweat and, yes, blood on Wal-Mart racks.

During the third such surreal shopping trip she's organized, the ILRF's Trina Tocco escorted Nicaraguan factory worker Damaris Meza to a Kansas City, Mo., Wal-Mart. Meza soon checked a pair of jeans for blood stains.

You see, her factory doesn't provide adequate gloves for the fabric cutters and seamstresses. It's cheaper to have Meza send bloody clothing out for a quick wash before shipping it from the land of low wages to the land of low prices.

After reading about Meza's job in The Pitch, a Kansas City weekly, it gnawed at me – especially since Spokane is a Wal-Mart growth market. So I called Tocco to find out more.

"You guys are having a site fight, right?" she asked brightly even though it was after 8 p.m. in Washington, D.C. Tocco then proceeded to dispel two common misperceptions. The first one should give Wal-Mart shoppers pause. The second might give people on both sides of the issue common ground.

Folks who pooh-pooh mistreatment of these factory workers often claim low wages – it would take these women a week's pay to buy a pair of their pants at retail – are no big deal because it's so cheap to live in the Third World. "But even with the cost-of-living adjustment, they're making about 50 to 60 percent of what they need to make to fill their bread basket – meet the needs of housing, clothing, education and food," Tocco says. So let's not hear that argument around here anymore.

But surprisingly, the young activist doesn't suggest we stop hunting for bargains under the watchful eyes of a certain smiley face. "I don't want anyone to feel ashamed that they shop at Wal-Mart," she says. "The reality is that working-class people in the U.S. don't have a whole lot of options. They're going to go to what's the cheapest."

Instead of a boycott, Tocco recommends taking the following steps to improve global labor practices:

1. Next time you shop at Wal-Mart, tell a manager you're concerned about the company's labor practices here and abroad. "It's more powerful when that message comes directly from their consumers," she says. Visitors to the ILRF's laborrights.org site also can send the retailer an e-mail about the issue.

2. Every year, pledge to buy one fair-trade certified product and one item made in a union shop or worker-owned cooperative. For outlets, go to transfairusa.org, sweatshopwatch.org and unionlabel.org. Even diehard Wal-Mart shoppers should vote with their wallets for humane labor practices.

After all, it's not every day you get a chance to scrub a stain from your conscience.