For limited time only in the Middle East (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This film came out in 2010 and asks one question: Why are today’s youth apparently so apathetic?
This is a good question. People today have more access than ever before to information about what is going on in the rest of the world, including the issue of people making their household goods in slave-like conditions. Why aren’t they angrier about it?
The film takes a US-centric, or at least First World-centric view of the question, using the War in Iraq as its main example, and how there wasn’t any serious organised opposition to it, however it’s more general than that. The film-makers believe today’s youth are unmotivated to get up and do much about any of the world’s ills.
It identifies two major reasons:
The first is, or was, Television which today includes any form of passive media consumption in which marketing messages are pushed at us.
So that’s not just broadcast Television but also time-wasters such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the devices on which they come to us: computer, tablet and smartphone.
The film puts the case that these forms of media all deaden our sense of outrage or motivation to effect change. For a start, they present the news in a sanitised manner. The film briefly makes this point by showing the real death of one single person in Iraq. It takes less than a second of screen time but it was a very shocking and upsetting image. You just don’t get that on TV. Then there’s the fact that the internet gives us access to *all* the world’s problems, which can be overwhelming and make any attempt to create a positive impact seem hopeless.
One interviewee commented that the mass media also keeps us in the ‘now’, whereas schooling at least gives young people a sense of history and context. But teaching, as one teacher admits in exasperation, is no match for all the colour and movement of the consumer society.
(I wonder how this would have been nuanced had the film been made just one year later, in 2011. It would be impossible to say nothing about the use of social media in the Arab Spring)
Anyway schooling brings us to the second major cause, which is Debt. Today’s bright young things get themselves into college and rack up $100,000 or more of student loan debt. Or they buy a house and sign on for a mortgage. Their options to choose something meaningful to them as a career are severely hampered thereafter. NGOs don’t pay enough. Also, the increasing demands of work make it very difficult to find the time to be involved in civic activities.
The film ends on an upbeat note; the message is, Don’t let people talk you out of trying. How true. It’s so easy to be cynical about people’s good intentions, but sometimes people with good intentions succeed in making the world better. When’s the last time cynicism did that?
[These were my comments at a screening of two documentaries,Behind the Swoosh and Tejid@s Junt@s ("Stitched Together"), held at my alma mater UTS on Thursday night. The two films are included as embedded links]
My name is Michael Walker, I am an alumnus of the UTS Law and Social Sciences schools and am now working for a union just one block from this building. I am also the author of the blog Fair For All dot org.
To begin tonight, I’ll briefly explain what Fair For All is about.
Unions, including mine, have over the last century improved living standards in this country out of sight. To earn the cost of a loaf of bread, a shop assistant of a hundred years ago had to work for two hours. Today: only about five minutes.
When you walk into a shop you don’t have to be too troubled about the working conditions of the employees … not usually anyway.
What you should be troubled about is the working conditions of the unseen people making the stuff on the shelves.
In decades past – take Darrell Lea Chocolates as an example – in decades past the workers in Darrell Lea shops were protected by the Shop Award safety net. Workers in the Darrell Lea factory in Ramsgate, which is just down the road from my house, were protected by the Factory Award safety net. Delivery drivers were covered by the Transport Industry Award.
This is still how it works in Darrell Lea. Those three awards guarantee a reasonable rate of pay and conditions of work for everyone making Darrell Lea chocolates, including rest breaks, sick leave, four weeks of annual leave, and overtime payments.
In the last thirty years or so, this has become the exception rather than the norm.
Masters opened up a very large store out near Narellan just before Christmas last year. If you walk through, you will be hard pressed to find any goods made in Australia whatsoever.
The products sold in Masters are mostly made in factories in Asia – very often by people who are not paid enough to support a family, who are docked their pay if they are sick and who are often working exposed to hazardous chemicals. Because their regular rate of pay is so low, they work long hours of overtime, often 70 or more hours per week, to provide for their families.
They do all this to make our t-shirts, our jeans, our sneakers, our phones and our iPads.
These people, who feed and clothe the world, deserve the protection of basic labour standards, regardless of where they live.
So Fair For All is my project to raise awareness about the crucial need for improvement. It’s not part of my day job; the union I work for is essentially a mutual society for the benefit of its members. It’s not an NGO and it doesn’t exist to roam around solving the world’s problems, so Fair For All is something I work on in my own time [see related post on national self-interest].
So, how do we feel about this? As consumers we are all participating in an unjust system, whether we like it or not.
We are all participating in an unjust system, whether we like it or not.
It’s true that the problem is big and complicated and has no easy solution but that’s not to say that we should throw up our hands and say that nothing can be done.
Tonight we are going to view two short films about people who have done something about it – college students in both cases. Many of you here tonight are college students and I think I can assume because you are here that you don’t need persuading about this issue and want to do something yourselves. Sit tight, we’ll come to that at the end!
Also on your seats you will find a pamphlet for the Playfair 2012 campaign [the pamphlet can be downloaded here], which has been shining a spotlight on the working conditions of sportswear makers in the lead up to the London Olympic Games. The campaign co-ordinator from the global garment and textiles union has kindly agreed to join us by Skype during the break between the films. She is actually in Geneva – fortunately it is only about 11 o’clock in the morning there!
This first film we’re going to watch, Behind the Swoosh, is about conscientious objection and the power it can have if done effectively. One athlete refused to wear the logo of a sportswear maker associated with sweatshops until it cleaned up its act, and his stand has had a large impact at his college and even on the company. Beyond that I’ll let it speak for itself.
One thing this film brings home is how tenaciously companies will fight to protect their brand. They will stare down strikes if they can but they will not allow their brand to be trashed without responding.
This is what Playfair2012 is striving to do. Playfair has the same agenda as Team Sweat: ensure that workers are:
paid enough to live on,
provided with ongoing rather than short-term employment contracts, and
allowed to establish and join trade unions without being victimised
This second film we’ll see takes a different approach altogether. It is about Alta Gracia, a former sweatshop in the Dominican Republic that has been reopened as a workplace that pays its employees a living wage and – and this is the most important bit – connected to a reliable market for ethical apparel. Alas, it’s not enough to rely on people’s goodwill to pay above-market prices, you need to supply them with something unique [see related post].
I took the liberty of touring the UTS gift shop earlier. As expected, the branded apparel is made in China. Nothing wrong with it coming from China per se, it’s just that this tells me that no one has ever pressured the university over its apparel procurement.
Ethical procurement policies are not all that difficult to have put in place, it’s been done successfully down the street at the University of Sydney. Two Victorian campuses are completely Fairtrade. Dozens of American universities source from Alta Gracia.
The jury still seems to be out on whether socially responsible investment (SRI) pays for itself or not. I’ve seen articles indicating both; it seems to depend how exactly you ask the question.
If a person wants to know that they will do ‘at least as well’ in choosing SRI it kinda suggests that they are asking the wrong question. How are you being ‘socially responsible’ if your principal concern is maximum profit? Should profit dip below expectations, what will you do? Encourage the companies in which you invest to just drop their strategies for environmental and social sustainability? It’s to approach the whole subject from the wrong angle.
Now here is the interesting thing: How many such investors are private individuals (households) and how many are institutional investors?
Individuals making such choices are not really investors in the pure sense, they are more like “investment product consumers”, making the decision to make what they consider to be an ethical purchase. No harm in that.
However ethical retail investment is not the main game and it appears to be regarded as a non-priority in the current climate, with two investment houses, Henderson Global Investors (UK) and UniCredit (Italy), retrenching their SRI research teams late last year.
If you were to list ethical choice-of-investment in order of impact, next up the list would be institutional investors divesting from ethically suspect companies and at the top would be governmental procurement policies.
Institutional-level divestment
The Government pension fund of Norway is the world’s largest fund of its kind (it is not strictly a pension, but a ‘future fund’ which holds and invests the profits of the state-run oil company). It has a policy that it will not invest money in companies that:
directly or indirectly contribute to killing, torture, deprivation of freedom or other violations of human rights in conflict situations or wars
Unlike many such policies, this one is actually implemented, by an overseeing Ethics Council. Companies from which the fund has divested money include:
The reason for this could well be the non-option for citizens to move their money elsewhere; the only outlet for concern was to push for divestment. The amount withdrawn totals about $2 billion. Suppose that change was brought about by fifty committed Norwegians; they have had a net impact of about $40 million each – considerably more than if they had each quietly switched their own investment options.
Similarly in 2007 a number of institutions, many of them church-affiliated, divested from companies doing business in Sudan.
Government procurement
Another solution is to run a campaign that governments implement a living-wage procurement policy. As the biggest purchaser, that has a huge impact. Many American city governments have implemented living wage policies though the intended beneficiaries are local Americans working in low-wage occupations. There is also a rule at the Federal level that the US Government not purchase cocoa from the Ivory Coast or cotton from Uzbekistan, lest they be supporting child labour. That list could easily be broadened…
Change has come to the world’s biggest food company!
In the last few days Nestlé has finally agreed to allow independent auditing of its cocoa supply chain and propose ‘remedial strategies’ if child labour is proven.
In stark contrast to the reassurances given by Nestlé’s suppliers in the film The Dark Side of Chocolate, the company this week admitted “We are sure that there are children working”.
Best of all, the process will be led by the multi-stakeholder Fair Labor Association which means we can expect the reporting to be free and fearless.
This is a great moment for all who’ve been involved in the chocolate campaign, notably the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF) who have pushed the issue for the last several years.
Opportunity to gain further ground – Act now!
An additional opportunity exists right now to raise standards. The United States Government has a procurement policy that prevents it from sourcing either Cote d’Ivoirian cocoa or Uzbek cotton without a ‘good faith’ certification that child labour was not involved. Bizarrely the Executive Order that makes this stipulation only applies to the raw materials and not to chocolate made out of the cocoa or T-shirts made out of the cotton. I’m not sure how often the U.S. Government has cause to order raw cocoa.
The Executive Order has come up for public comment though only until 3 December, so now is the time to remind Washington decision-makers to fully implement the intention of the policy all the way along the supply chain.
The number of responsibly-invested adviser-managed portfolios continues to grow. They have been spurred on in recent years by surveys which have found that many of these portfolios outperform the general market and in many cases are ahead of the curve, looking favourably on companies that invest in green technology (for example) many years before it became fashionable.
I have two concerns with the way people use responsible investment. The first is philosophical the second is practical.
From a moral point of view, is it really possible to sign away one’s ethical concerns into a one-size-fits-all investment option? Or do we just have blind faith that our fund managers will have similar ideas to us about what constitutes unethical corporate practices? (or even better ideas – now there’s a thought!) I just suspect that few probing questions are asked by people who tick that box, and must admit I was the same when I signed on for my retirement fund.
The second question is, do those investment funds make any kind of meaningful impact on the way corporations are governed? That is the goal surely?
Paul Hawken of Highwater Global Fund believes the answer is a resounding ‘no!’ The problem he sees is a lack of transparency from the mutual funds, who do not disclose their ratings criteria. He wishes there were more consumer bodies like America’s Consumer Reports or Australia’s Choice who could make detailed evaluations of what exactly the different responsible investment options are offering.
The good news is, one organisation is now seeking to do just this: Global Impact Investment Rating System (GIIRS) will be launching in July. As one director told Institutional Investor Magazine last week:
There’s no use in just letting companies tell their own stories, because they can always just tell the piece of the story they want, and not disclose the rest.
GIIRS is an initiative of B Labs, the same people behind B Corps which rates companies’ impact for consumers’ benefit. GIIRS evaluates companies from an investor’s point of view.
Good on them, I hope it casts some light on the murky business of evaluating what is and isn’t an ethical business practice.
“No Dirty Gold” is a project of not-for-profit group Earthworks.
Launched in 2004 it has been strikingly successful in getting jewelers and other retailers to sign on to their ‘Golden Rules’ of responsible gold mining, namely:
Respect basic human rights outlined in international conventions and law
Obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of affected communities.
Respect workers’ rights and labor standards, including safe working conditions
Ensure that operations are not located in areas of armed or militarized conflict
Ensure that projects do not force communities off their lands
Ensure that projects are not located in protected areas, fragile ecosystems, or other areas of high conservation or ecological value
Refrain from dumping mine wastes into the ocean, rivers, lakes, or streams
Ensure that projects do not contaminate water, soil, or air with sulfuric acid drainage or other toxic chemicals
Cover all costs of closing down and cleaning up mine sites
Fully disclose information about social and environmental effects of projects
Allow independent verification of the above
Big news came a couple of weeks ago when Target USA, the nation’s third largest retailer, signed on. Way to go!
Target is the 34th major retailer to pledge support.
Jewelers of America, a national association representing over 10,000 jewelry retailers, has endorsed the campaign’s long term objectives.
No Dirty Gold is the perfect example of a responsibly-conducted labour rights campaign. They aren’t letting up either; Costco is next in their sights.
See also:
Dirty Gold (7 Feb 2011) – links to HRW photo essay about the effect of the Porgera Gold Mine on the local community
I was quite unaware of this until reading up about it for this post.
Apparently the bleached jean look is nowadays attained through a process known as sandblasting, which can create exact patterns rather than the overall pre-worn look that was created through stone-washing.
The problem is this. The key ingredient in the sand is silica. When silica becomes suspended in the air during production, it can enter the lungs and cause silicosis. The recommended maximum silica component is 1% and most U.S. factories keep it at 0.5%. However in Turkey (for example) it is as high as 80%.
Silicosis has a similar effect to tuberculosis, preventing a person from breathing. There is no known cure. And it can have an onset after as little as six months in an unfavourable environment.
What a disgrace that people could stand idly by and allow that to continue! All it would take is provision of adequate safety wear.
Clean Clothes Campaign are naming and shaming the companies that either won’t commit to a ban on the practice or have announced a change but done nothing. Their worst offender list includes Benetton, Diesel, Dolce & Gabbana and Versace.
A story of successful action by a ‘coalition of concern’ of consumer groups and labour groups.
The tale begins in tragedy: last month 28 Bangladeshi workers lost their lives in a fire in their workplace. Building exits had been locked by their managers, which is not uncommon in countries with poor labour standards.
The burned-out factory floor (Image:AP)
The factory supplied fabric used by Abercrombie & Fitch, Target, JC Penney, Osh Kosh B’Gosh, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and GAP.
When news got out, the International Labor Rights Forum, an NGO, started a petition on social change website change.org calling on the clothing companies to take some responsibility by paying compensation and conducting safety audits of similar factories. 25,000 signatures were gathered.
Other groups, such as United Students Against Sweatshops, joined in.
The campaign yielded a result this week when GAP agreed to both the demands of the petition. Well done, GAP executives!
However so far none of the other companies have committed to any action so the petition is still running. You can add your voice here.
Update, Feb 9: After pressure, the other brands who source from this factory have also agreed to pay compensation (read more). Well done, readers who added your voice to this campaign.
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In an ironic twist, on the same day as the factory fire, authorities arrested Moshrefa Mishu, the leader of Bangladesh’s textile workers union. She has been agitating for implementation of the nation’s increased minimum wage. She’s still in jail now. You can petition for her release, too!
Update, May 1: She has since been released – thank you readers who added their names to the petition for her release.
The title of this post may sound paradoxical, but the facts are encouraging.
Think of how the Fairtrade label has become mainstream for coffee. Small-scale committed activism won the day against the multinationals who eventually decided that they couldn’t afford to forfeit the ‘ethical purchase’ to their competitors.
The good news is, consumers are prepared to pay more for ethical goods. Research found a 10-20% increase in demand for products with a label stating that they are
made under fair labor conditions, in a safe and healthy working environment which is free of discrimination, and where management has committed to respecting the rights and dignity of workers
The bad news, however, is that the 10-20% premium may not be enough to recoup the cost of implementing and effectively monitoring a fair labour sourcing policy in a typical company (We can perhaps infer that committed, sustained activism pushed the premium rather higher in the coffee industry).
A concerned consumer really ought to take the time to locate businesses that treat the issue of fair labour seriously. This could be done in two ways: either supporting a cottage producer who prides itself on its ethical sourcing, or, if it is a choice between two mainstream companies, researching which has the better practices. Luckily it needn’t be as hard as it sounds.
The first type of company exists if you look for it, companies such as Alta Gracia Apparel, which produces college-branded clothing in Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic. Alta Gracia pays its workers a ’living wage’; which is three and a half times the local minimum wage (see NY Times story about this initiative). The only way to meet this cost is to make their products more expensive; so ethical consumers really need to make the effort to vote with their wallet.
In the U.S. there is a fast-growing network of such companies called B Corporations (the ‘B’ stands for ‘Better’). At time of writing they have over 300 suppliers listed on their website.
The second approach, i.e. weighing pros and cons of well-known companies, is not as hard as it might be. The Guide to Ethical Supermarket Shopping profiles dozens of companies and is available in pocked-sized print form or, even more conveniently, as an iPhone app. Its evaluations are based not just on labour rights but also environmental and other standards. The guide is published in Australia but most of the profiled companies are multinationals with a presence worldwide.
