Hong Kong companies subcontract with low-wage factories across the border, while Hong Kong people routinely cross the border to save money on everything from vegetables to funeral plots.

Compulsory education ends after ninth grade, and most youths then hop a train or bus to the swelling cities to eke out a living at a low-wage factory or construction site.

The United States and the European Community have repeatedly used dumping penalties against highly efficient factories in Japan and low-wage factories elsewhere in Asia.

More than 500 union members demonstrated yesterday in front of The Gap's flagship store on Fifth Avenue to denounce its use of low-wage factories overseas.

But they were invariably of high quality, often manufactured by American companies with low-wage factories here to serve the American market.

Mr. Sachs, who has visited low-wage factories around the world, is opposed to child or prisoner labor and other outright abuses.

Rural America, with its enticing vistas of fields, forests, buttes and mountains and its unenticing economy of failing farms, depleted mines and low-wage factories, hemorrhaged population throughout the 1980's.

Last year, after her students wrote a play on Nike's and Disney's low-wage factories, the school refused to let them perform it.

High school students have demonstrated at Disney's Mickey-filled emporiums over the company's use of low-wage factories in China and Haiti.

His idea for a global company - with shoes designed in the United States, manufactured in low-wage factories in Asia, then sold worldwide - has been remarkably consistent.