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You are here: Home / Archives for Benetton

What We Don’t Know Can’t Change Us

May 15, 2013 By David Griesing 3 Comments

Even with a death toll that now exceeds 1100 from the clothing factory collapse in Bangladesh, it is far from clear that consumers of “fast fashion” are pausing before they make a beeline for the cash registers. Sure they feel bad about what happened and don’t want to support sweatshops in unsafe factories—at least in theory. But when the trade-off is foregoing the trendy jeans or sweater that will make them look good, desire overwhelms hesitation every time for most shoppers. Two studies seem to prove it.

At least some of it is because the concrete trumps the abstract nearly every time. What does this shirt or those shorts that I’m holding in my hands have to do with a thousand deaths I can’t even imagine in someplace called Bangladesh? What we don’t know simply doesn’t “hurt us enough” to make us change our behavior.

Thinking about how work can be more fulfilling starts with your own work. Are you proud of how it’s done, of what it accomplishes?  It’s thinking that gets us wondering about whether our own consumption of energy or food or “fast fashion” has a dehumanizing impact on other’s people’s work. (“Do unto others. . . .”) But our wondering will never be enough as long as the “dehumanizing effects” are just platitudes or abstractions at odds with our convenience, our vanity, or the thrill of a bargain. In other words, it takes more information.

It’s a fact that women are literally dying to make “fast fashion” in one place so that women in another place can enjoy it. Women comprise 90% of the workers making clothes in Bangladesh. No other industry in that country (or in many others) absorbs as many female workers with little education or skill.  Poor women make, rich women take.

Walmart label “Made in Bangladesh”/Photo: International Labor Rights Forum
Walmart label “Made in Bangladesh”/Photo: International Labor Rights Forum

 

Per capita income in Bangladesh is currently $850, while in the clothing sector it is almost half that: $456 a year or $38 a month. Not surprisingly, the Rana Plaza factory collapse has prompted talk about raising the minimum wage in this sector, but even without better pay Bangladeshi women will continue to make these clothes for the simple fact that no other jobs are available. Most of these women left male-dominated villages, where they had few opportunities to support themselves, for seven days of work, 8 to 12 hours a day, at clothing factories in the cities. Still, they barely make enough to live.

This week, a Wall Street Journal article quotes one woman who was injured in the factory collapse:

Sometimes I have to borrow to get to the next payday.  But in the village I’d have to starve.

No alternative, no living wage, but she went on to say:

I’ll go back to work as soon as I get better. Not all buildings will collapse.

The “fast fashion” industry is built on indentured servitude, not so different than slavery. That is what it is: with outlets at a mall near you.

There have been some changes this week, like Western retailers signing on to finance safety audits and to pull their work from factories that don’t pass them. However, real progress will only come when we (as consumers) are more aware of the harmful effects of our consumption. Like the drug trade, as long as there is unfettered demand the supply will continue, much as it is today.

The “fettering” of our demand begins with knowledge about the consequences of our actions. In one of the studies referenced above, it is not surprising that shoppers interested in more expensive items (better educated, with better jobs themselves?) were also better at imagining the consequences of their purchases, and willing to pay more for a “sweatshop free” label.

As Jedediah Purdy noted in For Common Things, it is essential for us to grasp the often complex interconnections between what we buy here and what happens over there. To do so, we need:

an educated imagination, able not only to understand general principles through local efforts, but also to perceive local events as they are caught up in much larger schemes of production, exchange, and political and economic power.

It’s not just simply “getting as much as possible of a good thing” like low prices, “when in fact we are choosing where and whom to sacrifice for it.”

If understanding requires education, then maybe what the “fast fashion” retailers need to be doing is educating, both in their advertising (why I mentioned Benetton’s ads in my last post), and at the point of purchase. It could be pictures of women making clothes for other women.  It could be pictures of women who died in 2013 making clothes like these. It could be asking shoppers:  would you be willing to pay 10 cents more so that these women who are making your clothes could take home “a living wage”?

“Fast fashion” retailers need to start believing, as Sy Syms once said, that “an educated customer is our best customer.” Change in this industry will only come with improved customer knowledge.

Almost everyone can learn, when someone steps up to teach.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning Tagged With: Bangladesh factory collapse, Benetton, conscious capitalism, consumer responsibility, consumption, knowledge, Walmart

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.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: Benetton, buy local, consumer responsibility, consumption, global markets, impacts of work, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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