For 30 years Vincent A. Gallagher has researched dangerous environments throughout Latin America for the World Bank, the United Nations International Labor Organization, and others. He received the Peace and Justice Educators Award from the Romero Center in Camden, New Jersey, where he lectures on the violence of globalization. In this hard-hitting and enlightening paperback, he presents a cogent overview of the pain and loss experienced by poverty-stricken people around the globe who are paying the consequences for the low prices enjoyed by first-world consumers. Behind all this suffering are political and economic structures that solidify injustice. He examines:

• "how the structural adjustment policies imposed on poor countries by the international lenders force poor children to leave school to live and work on the streets, in the garbage dumps, in factories, or in the sex trade.

• "how sexual abuse and harassment of young women in the clothing industries in the Third World is related to the price of clothes.

• "how asbestos, banned in developing countries but sold by multinational corporations in Latin America, is causing asbestosis and cancer among millions of workers and the public in Latin America.

• "how our investments in retirement plans and mutual funds support companies that exploit the most desperate workers and supply arms and tobacco that wreak havoc on the poor."

You won't learn about any of these things in the media. Gallagher condemns the neocolonialism systems that recruit the most desperate workers and abuse them in manifold ways. He challenges us to take personal responsibility for the untold hardship suffered by those who labor to bring us our food, clothing, and almost all our consumer goods. Gallagher explains how programs of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank really work, and he charts the horrific story of the uses of slaves in the global economy. Some estimates put the number between 27 and 200 million people.

The True Cost of Low Prices by Vincent A. Gallagher is a book that needs to be studied and prayed over.