Confusing times in the battle for human rights and dignity in the garment industry.
Last week, A BBC report uncovered serious abuse in the supply chain of Primark, one of the UK’s biggest budget fashion brands. To cut a very long story short, it was found that children were producing Primark clothing in very poor conditions for very low pay.
Primark quickly responded that this was a problem with the supplier, who had been subcontracting work which was not allowed according to their contract. Primark cancelled further orders with the supplier.
Which you might think warranted at least half-a-cheer from the campaigners.
In fact, some of those working at the sharp end of the issue have condemned the move. Homeworkers Worldwide, one of very few organisations campaigning for the hidden mountain of people who survive on left-overs from factories, facing extremely low pay, bad conditions and other exploitation said:
Homeworkers are usually women who turn to homeworking through lack of alternatives. The income they earn, however small, is vital to their family. Instead of stopping their supply of work, companies like Primark should recognise the part homeworkers play in production and ensure that they, and all other workers, receive minimum pay and conditions.
I have limited personal experience of this, having mostly visited factories. However, I have been told by a women’s social worker in Palestine that there are a large number of women working at home to supply the factories at times when they have urgent orders. Much of the time they have nothing to do, but when there is an order, they work very long hours and receive a very low piece rate. When I visited one of these women, she told me that she needed the work to pay the bills, but that she had no control over the volume or any leverage to force higher pay.
Looking into this more, I have discovered that the exploitation of homeworkers is not just something that happens in other countries, but is a real issue in both the UK, where disenfranchised women from ethnic minorities are exploited and the USA where it often affects migrants.
As the textile industries in both our countries have collapsed, these hidden economic groups are ripe for exploitation.
In conclusion, I am not sure what the answer is. We have to be deeply ashamed of ourselves when we need to campaign cap-in-hand on behalf of the poorest people to the very corporations who are forcing down prices and causing the poverty wages in the first place. In the absence of any other work, boycotting brands might only lead to further hurting those we are trying to help.
Posted in Ethics, News Reports | 1 Comment »…. because they thought that if the kids ate the sludge amended soil, it would be less toxic than their lead contaminated soil.
I kid you not. But it was ok, the sludge was perfectly safe.
As a soil scientist (well kinda, my degrees majored in soils), I’m a bit lost for words.
For a start - what the XXXX are poor kids doing living on top of soil that is lead contaminated anyway? For second, treated sewage sludge is not untoxic. So we’re adding toxic substances onto lead contaminated soil in inner city areas. Right, of course we are. In the UK we’re not allowed to apply this stuff anywhere close to where it could be found by kids. We’re not even allowed to apply it on food crops because of the risk of contamination.
Posted in Environmentalism, Ethics | No Comments »Yesterday in the news, Eli Estrada, a landscaper in Long Beach, California, found a Bank of America money bag with $140,000 in unmarked twenty dollar bills on the ground. The bag had been lost on March 11 by Brinks Armored truck drivers. Forty year old Eli said “I think I was nuts, but I know in my gut that to keep that money would be wrong.” He turned it over to the police, and later received a $2000 reward from Brinks.
So the big question is: what would *you* do if you found that much money?
Posted in Ethics, News Reports | 8 Comments »Yesterday I ran across this story on The Point, a team blog which is associated with Prison Fellowship Ministries and Chuck Colson’s Breakpoint. Lila Rose, a student at UCLA and editor in chief of The Advocate, a student magazine of the right to life, writes:
Over the summer, The Advocate investigated the financial dealings of Planned Parenthood and made some shocking discoveries about the clinic-owning “nonprofit.” We obtained the information by having an actor call clinics across the country and pose as a donor. The actor who called, The Advocate’s advisor, communicated to them a very racist agenda—the one that Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood’s founder, had envisioned. He then asked to donate money specifically for the abortions of African-American babies in order to “lower the number of blacks in America.”
Posted in Ethics, Women's Rights | 19 Comments »
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An Ethical Epiphany
Sunday, January 20th, 2008I was wrong.
There, that wasn’t so difficult.
At university a lecturer told me that it was common for environmentalists to hold equal and opposite beliefs at the same time. Maybe I should have listened a little more carefully.
For most of my adult life, I’ve believed in the myth of fairtrade - which is the concept that poor farmers get a better price for their crops by encouraging thoughtful and good-willing consumers to pay a premium for their products. Initially I thought it was an idea which would change the world. Later I revised that to believe that it was at least doing something positive for the families who grew fairtrade products. At the same time I believed that there was something seriously wrong with world trade when the rich got everything they dreamed of whilst the poor suffered.
Over 15 years (and many, many others have been at it much longer), we wrote letters to supermarkets, held street protests, repeated various stunts to bring the public’s attention to the unfair way that the poorest farmers were treated and the good of choosing fairtrade. Eventually we persuaded the supermarkets that there was an ‘ethical’ market and that consumers would - shockingly - pay more for certain products. Suddenly ethical was mainstream.
Posted in Activism, Environmentalism, Ethics | 17 Comments »Read the rest of this news item »
Mad women
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008But the truth is that their activities are becoming harder every day. In a state in which the gods of death and money rule, in a state where the economy is flourishing while the children are hungry, where the mythological heroes are fearless murderers, where the leaders openly and publicly admit that human life is not worth a fig in their eyes, in a state that sends its sons to be killed without even bothering to invent a reason for it, in a state that imprisons millions of human beings in ghettoes and enclosures and kills them slowly, the persistent quiet voice of the Women in Black is the strongest conscientious voice of refusal.
Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan an Israeli peace activist and professor at Hebrew University. She was a founder of the Parents CircleFamilies Forum. Following the death of her 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem in September 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza speaking at a conference of the Women in Black movement last weekend.
Allowing for a little hyperbole, Dr Nurit could have been speaking about us. Our communities where young men go off to die and politicians play dice with people’s lives.
In the midst of the electioneering of 2008 (oh God can it really be that long?) please cut through the fancy words of your politicians and their greed for power. Listen out for your fiercest critics. Challenge those who seek power to explain how their agenda will help the weakest, the lowest, the most ignored, the ones whose votes count for least in the corridors in Washingon, Toyko and London.
And in time, we may even get the politicians we deserve.
Posted in Activism, Ethics, Women's Rights | 2 Comments »
Tutu on avoiding mission
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007In a recent BBC interview, the moral giant of our age, Archbishop Desmond Tutu talked about homosexuality and shame. Whilst the great and good attacked him, the little man said that if his bible doesn’t teach that God is Good then he’d rather believe his conscience than the bible.
Whilst the upheaval in the Anglican/Episcopal church is of relatively minor importance to most Christians around the world, the same discussions are being held elsewhere. It is hard not to be moved by the gentleness of Tutu and all he has been through. Everyone, whether they agree with his analysis or not, can only accept that if he errs, it is on the side of gentleness and love for the individual and their circumstances.
For me, the defining words were at the beginning of the interview. Tutu said that he felt issues of sexuality were of relatively minor significance compared to the major struggles against hunger, poverty and injustice - so the church is being sidetracked by constantly discussing it, in the process avoiding doing its mission. Of course, in typical BBC style, the interviewer then proceeded to discuss this issue for another 30 minutes.
Posted in Ethics | 3 Comments »
Priorities
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”
January 26, 1998
“This government does not torture”
October 5, 2007
Posted in Ethics, Politics, Quote for the Day | 20 Comments »
You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel
Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007Wanted to draw your attention to an article by Dr. Phil Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo is a psychologist at Stanford University who is perhaps most famous for running the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. The Stanford Prison Experiment, along with Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, which is also mentioned in the article, are both fascinating and disturbing studies which demonstrate, ala Lord of the Flies,that we are far more deeply affected by, and vulnerable to, the influence of our environments and of authority than we would like to imagine, and that this vulnerability means that any one of us could relatively quickly be led to engage in criminal and inhumane behaviours which are against our deepest held beliefs, ethics, or morals. You can watch a great 51 minute documentary which was produced about the Stanford Prison Experiment, called “Quiet Rage, The Stanford Prison Experiment” on Google Video.
Posted in Criminal Justice, Ethics, Power, Violence | 4 Comments »Read the rest of this news item »
criminal insanity
Monday, October 1st, 2007Last week, a couple of middle aged men went to a care home to meet an 85 year old lady called Jean Gambell. Soon afterwards she had a slight stroke, which it was thought may have been brought on by the reunion.
It is hardly surprising. Jean Gambell was meeting her brothers for the first time in 70 - yes that is not a typo, that is SEVENTY - years. As a teenager of 15, Jean had been incarcerated due to mental illness, as a result of her stealing a few small coins. The brothers allege that the coins were found later.
She was then in the system for an entire lifetime, losing contact with her family and by any reakoning completely wasting her life. Enough one would think, to send anyone over the edge of mental instability even if they were sane to start with. Yet the brothers found a frail old lady, who could identify them by name and showed remarkably little bitterness for her lot in life. More here.
Other than being entirely flabbergasted by the whole sorry tale, I would like to know:
- If there are other people who have been involuntarily detained for long periods of time.
- What it says about a society that it ‘loses’ the records of people in its’ care.
- What it says about us that we live in a society that can lock someone up for an entire lifetime for no crime, without remand or appeal.
- What it says about us that an 85 year old lady is sane enough to recognise relatives after 70 years, but she is not sane enough to be listened to when she is telling her story or come to that was so feeble minded at 15 that she was incarcerated on the dubious charge of stealing a few small coins.
Surely we should all be thoroughly ashamed that we live in a world where this could happen.
Posted in Doing Life, Ethics, Forgiveness, Power, What can we do? | 13 Comments »|
