In the year 2007, it’s amazing that Americans can still buy jeans for less than twenty dollars. But a cursory glance at Wal-Mart’s Web site reveals at least a dozen pairs for less than this price. While bargain shoppers delight, few consumers will stop to consider just how those jeans got to be so cheap. When you see the documentary China Blue, you’ll understand.

Micha Peled’s film gives us a glimpse of the high human cost that is the ultimate price paid for our cheap blue jeans. His story follows the journey of a teenage girl, Jasmine Lee, who leaves her rural home in Sichuan Province to look for work in the city (Shaxi, South China). Along with approximately 130 million other migrant workers, most of them women, Jasmine finds employment in a denim garment factory manufacturing clothes that are exported to overseas companies.

Inside the sweatshop, Jasmine and the other teenage female workers are crammed twelve in one sleeping room, and work excruciatingly long hours. They have pay withheld for the food and hot water they consume, and for merely leaving the compound. Jasmine’s first paycheck is retained as a “deposit” to prevent her from leaving the company, a practice that makes her position more like that of an indentured servant than an employee. Since the girls earn only about six cents an hour, and receive only one paycheck every two months, the viewer is left wondering if these desperate young women will actually make any profit at all.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking aspect of the film is seeing how young workers’ dreams are stifled. Jasmine, an avid writer, shows creative potential that is never given the chance to develop; her friend Orchid has been accepted to college, but cannot attend—her family can only afford to send her brother.

Peled’s personalization of the workers’ plight helps contextualize the views of the Lifeng Factory owner, Mr. Lam. Self-satisfied and proud, Mr. Lam assures the camera that his “workers have rights”—as factory employees slog into their twentieth straight hour of relentless work, in order to make manufacturing deadlines.