How “Everyday Low Prices” Hurt Us All

June 4, 2013 By David Griesing 2 Comments

Our expectation that we’ll always pay less for consumer products has an impact on the people in the supply chain who bring us those products—and it’s not a good one.

I’m talking about those who mine the metals in your cell phone, pick the cotton in your socks, process the rubber in your running shoes. It’s the workers in places like Indonesia or Peru who put your toaster together, stick the pins in your dress shirt so it looks good in its package, or pack the parts you’ll assemble into an IKEA bookcase. Finally, it’s the American sales clerks, service managers, stock boys and checkout girls who get the final product into your hands.

To bring you “everyday low prices,” the people in these supply chains are paid “as little as their labor markets will bear” so that the factory owners, shippers and ultimately the stores you shop in can make a profit when you open up your wallet. With fewer dollars to go around and cutthroat competition between the on-line and bricks&mortar stores, every link in the consumer product supply chain is squeezed. This includes workers along the arc of production—including those in America.

How is our addiction to cheap stuff making the work that many of our neighbors do everyday a losing proposition—and why should we care?

At one level, this is how capitalism is supposed to operate. Workers trade their labor for wages, and the owners figure out how to make a profit after the labor and other costs of doing business are covered. In competitive markets, this means that there is constant pressure to produce as cheaply as possible. Manufacturers flee the US for cheaper labor in Mexico or Bangladesh, and as wages rise in those places, to even poorer countries with “surplus workers” for hire. American factories close because it costs so much less to make your shirt or toaster somewhere else.

But millions of Americans still staff the big box stores where you’ll likely buy that shirt or toaster this year. Over the years, we have grown accustomed to “the cheap foreign labor dividend” that enables us to pay less and less when we go shopping for consumer products. But there are only so many savings to be realized from cheap labor abroad. At some point, full-time American workers in this supply chain also get squeezed, often to the point where they can no longer live on the money they earn.

There are “acceptable” and “unacceptable” efficiencies in capitalism.

For example, you can’t make shoddy merchandise because it won’t sell in most markets. Child labor, sweatshops, safety and health risks, damage to the environment are also unacceptable (at least when it comes to making something in the U.S.). But what happens when all of the “acceptable” efficiencies have been obtained, and only “unacceptable” ones remain?

When it comes to many of our consumer products, we have already crossed that divide today—and our expectations as consumers have a lot to do with it.

Wal-Mart was a revolutionary company because it mastered the art of selling products to consumers more efficiently than they had ever been sold before. As discussed in a recent Atlantic article by Jordan Weissmann, it paid its workers so little that they had no alternative but to shop at discount stores. . . like Wal-Mart. However, it didn’t end there. Many full-time jobs at Wal-Mart and other big box stores barely take a family of three over the federal poverty line. These retailers are simply not paying most of their workers enough to live on, what we call “a living wage.”

Ultimately, this all comes back to consumers. We are the ones who choose where to take our business. And for the most part, Americans have chosen cheap.

It’s hard to blame middle class families for making that decision—not a lot of people have the extra cash to make a political statement out of where they buy paper towels and diapers. But it’s led to cycle of [worker] impoverishment….

Economists have considered what it would cost to break this cycle, and it turns out that the cost to us would come pretty cheap. Weissmann cites a study by UC-Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education suggesting that it would cost the average shopper only $12.49 more a year if Wal-Mart paid its workers a living wage.

So the questions remain: what’s to be done about the human cost of everyday low prices? And why should any of us care?

Most of us will voice our opposition to merchants paying full-time American workers less than a living wage, but our abstract moral concerns are trumped—almost every single time—by the consumer product we want and the low price we want to pay for it. So even if a wave of the wand could make it happen, would our behavior change if the trade offs were more explicit to us as consumers?

Such as a sign you see before entering the big box store that says: “Be willing to pay a little more so that the workers here can get a paycheck they can live on.”
The checkout girl wearing a badge that says: “Your addiction to everyday low prices means I can’t support my family.”
Would realizing that the person harmed is standing in front of you be enough to get you to shop at the mom & pop store that charges more so it can pay its employees fairly?
Would coming face-to-face with the social cost of consumer economics lead you to add a few bucks to your checkout bill, like a “tip,” for the “Big Box Employee Living Wage Fund”?

At the very least, the realities of our addiction to low prices and its human costs need to become more personal as close to the point of purchase as possible. That said, while there is always hope that the situation could change someday, there’s hardly cause for optimism if the consciousness raising goes no further than this.

What’s also needed is an understanding of why changing this value proposition in our consumer driven economy is important to you and the value of your work?

When some workers in your community are treated like property, it is easier for your employer to treat you that way—an economic instead of a human resource, little more than a cog in a wheel. As more and more full time, middle class jobs are lost to “the knowledge economy,” and more work is assigned on a part-time, piecemeal basis, it will become harder for any of us to make a living wage. Self-interest may lead us to start demanding that every single full time worker in America is making enough to live on.

It is also about community. The consumer product workforce is comprised of your family members and neighbors and people you see all the time. They don’t or can’t “move on” to better jobs, because increasingly those “better” jobs are unavailable. As an increasingly permanent part of our way of life, they are connected to you and to me, and have a face.

As we put our economy back together, there is an opportunity to rebuild our communities around the work that each and every person in it does. But communities where every worker is appropriately valued will never be possible until we confront our addiction to consumer prices that are lower than they have to be.

A version of this post also appeared on Marc Gunther’s Business & Sustainability Blog, where it provoked a range of comments.

Who Bears the Cost of Low Prices?

May 9, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

Our work impacts the world around us. It’s what we take from it, such as the raw materials or energy needed to produce our products or services. The work we do can benefit or burden our suppliers, our business partners, the community at large and the environment.

Our consumption of other people’s products and services also affects the world around us—although these impacts are harder to appreciate or take responsibility for. By buying their cotton shirts or bananas, sneakers or iPads, we sanction (tacitly and often unwittingly) what providers of our consumer products and services are taking or giving back in the course of providing us with the things we want.

Part of finding fulfillment in the work we do is being conscious of its various impacts, even proud of them. When our work is bringing the world closer to the way we think it should be, it accomplishes something important to us. What we do at work becomes part of a web of interconnections that is fitting, “as it should be,” from our vantage point.

When we’re thoughtful about the consequences of our own work, it becomes harder to ignore the impacts of the work that produces the things that we buy everyday. The recent factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than a 1000 people is a case in point. In the global marketplace where we shop today, we could all be wearing articles of clothing produced under dangerous conditions like this.

What responsibility do any of us have for the consequences of work that we support with our purchases—particularly when it all goes so terribly wrong?

Benetton is one retailer that kept their prices low in a highly competitive clothing market by making some of its garments in that devastated factory outside Dacca.

benetton-sentenced-to-death-small-20143 — Benetton ad opposing the death penalty

The factory Benetton used was a deathtrap like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York was a deathtrap. But when the Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146 garment workers in 1911, Americans responded to the carnage more out of kinship with the workers than because of anything they gained from the products that were being made there. It was empathy that fueled the rallying cry for worker safety a century ago.

Our forebears were “close enough” to see what this tragedy had to do with them and to understand what had gone so terribly wrong. It was their proximity, the smell of death and familiarity with faces that drove the efforts at reform that followed.

Half a world and a cultural divide away in Bangladesh, it is not so much the abstraction of their shared humanity that ties us to the victims in this collapsed factory, but the fact that the clothes they made were ending up on shelves at a mall near you. This is the overlap of their lives on ours that helps us to internalize the impact of their deaths. Wendell Berry describes the emotional calculus this way:

To hear of a thousand deaths in war is terrible, and we ‘know’ that it is. But as it registers on our hearts, it is not more terrible than one death fully imagined.

These clothes that we know and could have purchased are what tie our imaginations to those who died producing them. If ours (and Benetton’s) endless pursuit of “lower prices” contributed to the tragedy, what should any of us do about it?

It is often difficult enough to comprehend the impacts of our own work, let alone the far-flung impacts of the work that others do to produce all the things we consume. (Did slave laborers pick your bananas? Did children make your sneakers? Is your diamond ring financing brutality in a conflict zone?) The drive for more localized supply chains and to consume more local products comes, in part, from wanting to be close enough to their various impacts so that we are can “imagine” the consequences and make the responsible decisions that need to be made about them. Local is more comprehensible and manageable than global.

There are no easy answers here. But the difficulty of understanding the harsh realities around much of our consumption does not mean that we have no responsibility for them. This tragedy allows us to pause and consider what they should be.

As for Benetton, it has announced that it will make funds available to aid the victims of this factory collapse. For a company that has long used provocative advertising to promote its views on conscience-tugging issues like racism and the death penalty, this is hardly surprising. What I’m waiting for is the Benetton ad that helps us to calculate the terrible costs that are being incurred so that consumers like us–a half a world away–can keep paying the lowest possible price.

Habits of Living

April 21, 2013 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

To have been thrust, as we’ve been over the past seven days, onto the streets and into the neighborhoods of Boston, is to be reminded of the web of interconnections that make up a community. We all have that web, which we’ve taken from our earliest memories and experiences into the work we do and the lives we live. It’s the web we find ourselves leaning back into and relying upon during a week like this.

These “ways of seeing the world” or “habits of living” put startling events into a meaningful context so that we can begin to understand them. They tell us when we can count on the authorities trying to protect us. They bring us out to the street to applaud and cheer them because of our relief and their success.

These ways of seeing the world shaped our initial reactions to the carnage that turned a finish line into a triage unit. “Repugnance” a word that Leon Kass has used to describe this kind of disregard for life and community, springs from “a sort of deep moral intuition.” What is acceptable as well as what offends us at the most basic levels, comes from how we saw our parents and cousins, neighbors and teachers respond to what they thought the world should and shouldn’t look like all those years ago. We learned from what we saw them do.

It is where conscience and character first come alive.

So I paid attention to novelist Denis Lehane (who wrote so beautifully about Boston in Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone) when he spoke about how he was trapped at home while the streets outside his home were a blur of sirens and mobilzations. He talked about trying to protect his 4-year old daughter who was alarmed every time she heard the “pop, pop, pop” from that endlessly replayed gun battle from the night before. So while the storyteller in Lehane needed to know what was happening, he kept turning off the screens and squawk boxes to protect her. One of his habits of living was to guard his child from the realities of the world while he still could, despite all the things he so desperately needed to know.

These habits were evident in those who went from on-lookers of the Boston Marathon to rushing towards the explosions to see if they could help. They were evident in the cups of coffee and peanut butter & jelly sandwiches thrust into the hands of responders who hadn’t taken a minute to think about how tired and hungry they were.

These habits were evident in the capabilities that were shared at the most critical moments (“he needs a tourniquet”) or from the journalism teacher who found himself tweeting in the middle of the Watertown shootout and later said “I kept stopping myself, because the world just didn’t need to know about that.” These habits are about discretion and propriety too.

All of us are embarrassed by the smallness of the towns where we grew up, of the communities that looked out for us, or over our shoulders, back then. When we leave our nests thinking we’ve escaped, we bring the ways of making sense of the world and the role we need to play in it along with us. They help us to reach back to our most basic decencies in times that are troubling as well as in all those other times. These habits of living give rise to the responsibilities we all share for the world we inhabit.

As the cameras rolled past the row houses of Watertown, with all their green trash cans out and the trees beginning to bud, we found ourselves thrust into a web of mutual responsibilities. It is where what’s best and truest about life can usually be found.

Your Past’s Role in Future Work

February 21, 2013 By David Griesing 1 Comment

I read a remarkable story today.

Pirated copies of the movie Argo are being viewed on TVs, laptops and at internet cafes across Iran, riveting almost everyone’s attention there on a shared history that has been difficult to recall with any clarity given the hardship of those intervening years.

What’s remarkable is that millions of Iranians seem to be using a Hollywood movie to come to terms with their past so they can stake a better claim to their future.

Presenting truths that can set you free always has its consequences. It will certainly provide a more reverential cast to Argo’s Oscar buzz this weekend. It may also prove to be far more worrisome to Iran’s current leadership than all the Israeli bombers, economic sanctions, and stuxnet computer viruses that can be hurled at them. However, Argo’s apparent truth serum in not just for countries that are intent on managing the hearts & minds of their citizens.

A deep dive into personal history can also bring with it the clarity of truth-telling when it helps us recall valuable information about ourselves that we can build upon today to make a better tomorrow. Argo’s impact on hearts & minds in Iran today provides a sense of the “kinds of truths” that are worth rediscovering, both collectively and personally.

Argo is a true story about a fake movie whose filming enabled several diplomats to escape from Tehran during the hostage crisis that engulfed the American Embassy in 1979. The film also captures some of the thuggish violence that characterized the early days of Iran’s revolution.

As depicted in Argo, today’s Iran didn’t arise the way state propaganda says it did. The land of ayatollahs and nuclear threats results, at least in part, from the fact that the thugs have been an essential ingredient in Iran’s revolution all along. The emergence of a new brand of religiously sanctioned violence is what Iranians are learning about in their past. Only it can explain the continued violence and hardship they are experiencing in their lives today—and what’s to be done about it.

The irony is that thuggish violence wasn’t the point of Argo. It merely provided a backdrop for the comically successful rescue of several endangered foreigners. On the other hand, perhaps it was the incidental portrayal of violence and zealotry—its matter-of-factness in a story that was really about something else—that has enabled Argo to strike a collective nerve among Iranians today. This is how.

Even more elemental than their current suffering is the fact that the Iranian people are, at their core, hospitable to strangers. From this perspective, the act of turning diplomatic guests into terrified hostages is now being recognized by many Iranians as the pivotal incident when things took a terrible turn for the worse in their country. A woman named Shohreh explains it this way:

Violence entered our [recent] politics with the takeover of the American Embassy. Our leaders figured they could interact with the world with aggression and eventually this trickled down to the way they deal with their own people.

The people of Iran will eventually build a future for themselves that is better than anything their leaders are providing today. Their future will be shaped by several factors, but perhaps none will be as important as reconnecting with their own basic hospitality.

In much the same way, we are hardwired to traits like “hospitality” or “curiosity” in our own personal histories. (For me, the sense of “gratitude” was particularly important.) Whenever we reach a fork in the road and need to make consequential life and work choices, reconnecting to our most basic impulses exerts a powerful influence. Of course, this is even more so when our experience over the intervening years has obscured what we were “most like” when we started out.

In his Shift: How to Reinvent Your Business, Your Career, and Your Personal Brand, branding master Peter Arnell uses a vivid image to describe how the past can propel the future vision we have for ourselves when we decide to make a change.

[C]reate a story line about yourself that you want to perpetuate. . . Wire it into your personal DNA. It should carry the energy and excitement of the ongoing change you want to make in your life. Like DNA, it needs to be coded in a way that is simple and strong and won’t unravel at the first hit of challenge or trouble.

You succeed by hardwiring your game plan for the future into basic information about you that’s been there all along. When done right, it has the simplicity and the strength of DNA.

As we tune into the Oscars this weekend and see the cheering section for Argo, it is worth stepping back to consider some of the remarkable ways that the past can influence the future when we make the effort to tell our best stories.

A Holiday Present Worth Asking For

December 22, 2012 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

The path to fulfilling, purposeful work is hard to walk alone.

Too often, even the smartest, seemingly most accomplished people don’t know how “to get out of their own way” to figure out what they should really be doing with their lives. The push towards clarity usually needs to come from the outside. Who that someone is, of course, is everything.

Most of my work has been inauthentic. I studied things, took jobs because of what others told me I should be doing with myself. I can’t believe that at this age I’m still living somebody else’s version of my life! The lens that looks beyond the here & now is unfocused. I squint, but still can’t see what I’m aiming for. I can’t see past my day-to-day to a more satisfying future. Well of course you can’t. Because you’ll never be able to see clearly through the fog of, say, a parent’s vision for you, through eyes that have always played an outsized role in what you think and feel about the world around you.

So the helpful holiday present I’m recommending may seem, at first, to come from exactly the wrong direction. While a skillful stranger with none of the presumptions you grew up with can provide the catalyst for rethinking your life’s work, you’re probably going “home for the holidays” in a couple of days. As incredible as it may sound, you might also find someone there who can help you out with this.

I’m relying solely on anecdotal evidence mind you, but in my family and in nearly every family I know anything about, it seems that similarities in personality and perspective skip a generation. Now admittedly, some of it may be due to the concerted efforts of daughters not to become their mothers, sons their fathers, and so on, but I think it goes much deeper than this. That great aunt, great uncle or grandfather may have a lot more in common with you than any of the others around the holiday table, and this family member has a present with your name on it.

All you have to do is retrieve it.

What richer or more familiar repositories of stories, life lessons and family traditions are there than the older relatives you’ll be spending time with in coming days? I’d start with the one you always connected with most naturally, because you’ll cover more territory when your conversation with them starts to roll. And roll it will.

As in other situations, you can help your luck along here by thinking beforehand about what you’d like to find out from them, and then doing a little research so you know more about his life or her career when they were your age. You might be surprised at how someone with similar wiring confronted hurdles like the ones you’re facing. You also might be surprised by how much you’ll learn about yourself when you start tapping into all that accumulated wisdom.

What’s less surprising is how few of us ever get around to asking.

Karl Pillemer, who teaches courses on human development at Cornell, wanted to do something about that, while also preserving some of what was being lost. He is the guiding force behind the Legacy Project, whose website and YouTube channel provide access to life lessons collected from hundreds of older adults on topics ranging from marriage and parenting to their careers.

In his own life and work, Professor Pillemer has also come to appreciate the personal benefits that are realized on both sides of the Q & A, and certainly on the answering side. In a recent interview, he offered this simple advice:

Ask them for their life stories, but try to tap their life’s wisdom. If you ask a person for advice, it empowers them. It honors a person’s life experience.

Who helped you along the way? What mistakes did you make? How did you make ends meet? Did you ever want to settle for less? Why didn’t you?

With the holiday season upon us, and New Year’s resolutions ahead, being home for the holidays may provide you with an unexpected opportunity to think productively about the future direction of your life and work. But the present won’t be given to you unless you ask someone for it.