I understand that, but the site assumes that if you buy any product that is on their list, it was by definition produced by slaves, which is obviously not the case. Take cacao for example. Child labour does unfortunately exist within the cacao trade so that much is true, but there are 3.5 million tons of cacao produced annually in more than 20 countries all over the world (The Fair Trade association guarantees that products with their marks are produced ethically, but it does not mean that anyone who isn’t affiliated with them is a slave owner.), so it’s directly misleading to claim that every single product that uses cacao has used slave labour.
Slaves don’t get paid. Apparently I have 14, though! I live a modest lifestyle, no jewelry or tv or smartphone or fripperies, and haven’t gone clothes-shopping in years. I own 4 pairs of shoes and only 2 pairs of jeans 
As stated upthread, the word “slave” is meaningless if we use it to include “indentured servant” and “sweatshop employee.” I have a brilliant idea! Why don’t we use those terms to describe those things?
It looks like I’ve saved 46 people from a life of street prostitution. If you want to use the euphemism “slavery” to describe my noble act, them I’m fine with it.
Forget about the slaves; that app has such a beautiful UI! I loved how on the diet page, as you rotate the wheel to select your amount it animates the food falling off shelves/piling up.
I too have 29.
And I want them all here, doing things under my relentless direction and for no money.
And your response is a bit of typical Righty head-in-the-sand hand-waving about social issues.
There, now we’ve got the politics out of the way.
And, reading the website:
. . . that seems like a reasonable definition of the word ‘slave’.
Quibbling about whether or not a situation is extreme enough to ‘officially’ count as slavery shows a callousness towards the people being victimized in such circumstances.
This stuff happens even in the USA; human beings under lock and key. Not indentured servitude, but slavery. I have no doubts that there are many many more people in less bleeding-heart Leftish nations who suffer similarly, and worse.
I give up. The site is so horribly slow. I’d swear, it takes a minute for every plus or minus on the food sruvey to register.
No one else is having these problems?
I gave up after locking up on the food page. I was able to go back to it later, but it was pretty horrible to deal with.
I think that my computer slaves were slacking off. No caviar for them tonight!
I refuse to participate… it would be so depressing to know that I have so many and can’t bed the hot ones.
I scored 23, which was surprising since I have a smartphone, laptop, mp3 player and digital camera but electronics scored lowest (apart from zero on jewelry - only one piece of silver - and zero on children).
Apparently I need to cut back on ‘medicine’ - yeah right. How many more slaves will I need to produce the care to look after me when I get sick?
I tried it a couple times yesterday and had the same problem. I’ve also given up trying to make it work. Hurray for form over function (taken to a barely operable extreme.)
59 slaves working for me, mostly in China.
One thing I like is that they’re NOT telling you to cut back on anything. That’s unlikely to help anyway because in most cases the slavery is hidden and invisible even to manufacturers. Instead, they want you to pressure manufacturers to demand transparent supply chains so that the companies themselves will know whether their goods come from slavery.
Also, it would be nice if they told you what the illustrations of all those bathrrom suppliesn and makeup were. I think I clicked on soap, but for all I know it was moisturizer or something.
I work at a cobbler’s shop. We have a couple dozen customers who own, no joke, over a hundred pairs of shoes, most of them leather.
My big complaint is that there are no allowances made for things like:
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I grow nearly all my own vegetables. As an example, for at least six months of the year all my lettuce comes from my own backyard and my own labor. I haven’t bought greens for about 5 years now. So their assumptions about my eating habits are erroneous in that one area, certainly.
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The one item I have that has a precious stone in it has been passed down through my spouse’s family and the rock and metal were mined three generations ago and is hardly contributing to slavery today (though it might have in the past).
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While, yes, my leather shoes might have contributed to the problem, there is no distinction made between folks such as myself, who purchase a pair of shoes and keep them for 20-30 years (no joke, I have a pair of 33 year old boots I’m still using) and those who purchase and discard shoes much more frequently.
So, it’s an interesting exercise, thought-provoking, but the results do need to be taken with a grain of salt.
But I’m trying to simplify my life and think I could make it with just 14 handpicked good ones. If anybody would like to make an offer on the other 20, please PM me. (Substantial discount for cash.)
I wouldn’t know who to start with the pressure; my laptop is a Sony (made in Japan?), 'phone is a Samsung (S Korea?), camera is a Fuji (Japan also?), mp3 player is generic - no brand so no one to ask, I also have two other cells that are old and which I don’t use now (Nokia - probably China?).
The thing that galls me slightly is the people who protest about manufacturing processes choose to ignore the last ten years of development in emerging economies. Most of our goods are now being made in countries which were previously agriculturally-based and where GDP per capita was eye-wateringly low. Advances in these economies have brought hundreds of millions out of poverty and given them the opportunity to often choose their employer, get healthcare and buy a home.
Another point I’d like them to address is that the manufacturing processes being used now have been developed off of the back of the industrial revolution where child labor was rife, slavery was acceptable, noxious chemicals were not regulated and education was only for the rich. This happened in our forefathers’ own back yards - with their consent - to put food on bare tables and ensure there was money for healthcare (much worse back then) and education.
Give me a legitimate reason not to buy my next branded good from a particular supplier and I will let my conscience dictate the more ethical choice. I try to buy ethically-sourced coffee but I can’t stop using cotton or coal. I would’ve thought real abuse from individual manufacturers overseas can be easily transmitted via the internet with evidence gathered using cell phone technology. If that showed my Fuji camera is made using slavery I will buy the next one from someone else. Fuji knows this would be multiplied many times over in their market and so would rather it didn’t happen.
The market has decided to give most of our manufacturing jobs to the east and also decides on the employment laws used in branded goods there. It would seem to me if you wanted to buy ethically just stick to the big-name brands where reputation is more important. On that note it looks like in the future I’ll have to get all of my underpants from Calvin Klein then :rolleyes:
I bailed early on, this looked like the sort of marketing info a lot of companies would kill for (ok, enslave) for and I just got the feeling that some asswad corporate marketing director was chuckling his heart out over all this free info that naive people were giving him about their buying and lifestyle habits. I mean, I could just see them asking for my credit card number and my ATM pin number … just to confirm stuff … later on.
You start either by writing to each manufacturer - Sony, Samsung, Fuji; in the case of no brand name* the seller (Walmart, Best Buy?) - about how their products are made. They will usually respond with a form letter about how everything is fine and dandy. Then you press on how exactly they are controlling their sub- and sub-sub-manufacturers.
The next step is getting information from organisations devoted to this issue: Human right groups, Pro-Labour-groups. For clothes, there’s the Oscar Romero (a South American bishop) Clean clothes campaign to improve things in the sweatshops. For carpets, there’s the Rugmark seal. For cobbles and grave stones, there’s a certificate. For some food (and even roses from Kenia) there’s Fair trade label.
These groups do research into the conditions (often undercover); they talk with the workers as to what aims they have and how to achieve them** and distribute the information to the consumers in the West.
- usually the generic ones also have names, just less known ones.
** FIAN (Food first information and action network, a human rights agency to fight hunger through system changes) had a Flower Label Programme in the mid-90s. They collected lots of signatures from shoppers in Europe for the sellers of Roses (grown in Kenia and Colombia under horrible conditions) to implement changes and offer a certified label; now the label is on the market, and shoppers can choose between “good” and “bad” flowers. All through the campaign, they stressed that the workers didn’t want a boycott, because without the work, they would starve, but a change in working conditions. This has now come about through pressure from the consumers.
First, false dichtomoy, second, false facts, third, false motivations.
The discussion isn’t about “stopping slave labor = go back to agriculture or starving”. It’s about “working conditions and slave labour right now are terrible => therefore, lets improve the conditions”
And it’s not the last ten years. Slave labor of kids in India for rugs has been going on for decades, because Rugmark (the label that combats it) came out in the 80s or 90s. The war in the Congo has been going on for much longer, or the miners working in South America. Children were used as labour in England (in mines or factories) a 150 years back, during the industrial revolution, and 200 years back on board of Navy ships or during the times of Dickens. It just shifts perspective or place, and it only shifts because people do something about it.
And if you would get information from active 3rd world groups fighting poverty in general in places like India or South America, among other things going around rescuing child slaves and giving them education and a space to live, you’d know that the groups and the adults in those countries agree that child labour makes things worse for poor people. It’s a cycle where one adult man working in a factory can’t feed his family because the wage is too low, so his children must also work. But because children are cheaper, adults are let go from the factory owner. By activly forbidding (and enforcing) child labour, the employers are forced to offer better wages to the adults, improving the situation.
The aims of the human rights groups only cut into the benefits of the factory owners and similar - a few people making huge profits. The mass of the poor people working in sweatshops or slaving away as kidnapped villagers in a mine or whatever profits from being rescued and working in a better enviroment with better contracts and a fair wage.
So because it happened already we shouldn’t stop it? I don’t get your logic here. And you are wrong-informed if you believe for one second that people sent their children to work in factories to pay for education - children who worked didn’t have time for education, and the rich people didn’t want the poor to become educated. Educated people can work at better jobs, leaving the owners without workers, or so they feared. The children also didn’t work for healthcare, they worked for food because the wages for adults were too low. Things changed in Europe both because of Unions and when scientists found hard evidence that it wasn’t the moral deviance of the lower classes gambling and drinking their money away, but rather that the wages were lower than costs of living that lead to poverty of the proletariat, which lead to laws stopping excesses.
Those unions that fought to get rights for your (and mine) forefathers can’t be founded in 3rd world countries of today though because people who try to are being killed (by hitmen hired by the managers for example) or thrown out of the country. So the first world people, who know from experience how this works, must bring their own pressure to bear to improve things.
Why do you only “try to buy ethically-sourced coffee”? What’s there to try about buying Fair Trade seal coffee only? And only fair-trade seal chocolate/ cocoa, tea, … all food stuff with a fair trade seal.
As for cotton, there’s the Clean Clothes campaign with information, and there’s organic cotton where the manufacturers are much more open about their production cycle.
First, how many 3rd world people have video cell phones? Had ten years ago?
Second, how do you expect such a video to look like? It’s not like black people in chains being whipped like in the US South. It’s a group of black people in the Congo digging in Earth. Without context, you can’t see that they have been kidnapped by the rebel army and are mining for rare Earth mineral that ends up in the factory of Fuji, along with all other factories making cell phones or electronics.
Third, most consumers don’t give a shit if their product was made with blood from small children as long as it’s cheaper than the next one.
Have you completly missed the whole sweatshop discussion about Nike shoes? Did Nike care? They could’ve reduced their Ad/ PR budget by just 1% to pay adult workers in their factories a fair wage instead of hiring 12- and 14 year olds to work for low pay. But they know that by paying Micheal Jordan a few million, consumers will buy Nikes even if overpriced, but saying “Ethically produced” without Michael Jordan, the shoes will lie on the shelves unsold.
The only way is for consumers to actually care and show the companys that, saying “I won’t buy your products until you meet the following guidelines. And no greenwashing, really follow”.
Which is what advocacy groups are trying to do. Part of which is trying to educate consumers - like you - about the part slavery plays in their products in the first place.
Getting consumers to care, and to take action, is the next step. Then follows a recommendation which brands have responded and should be encouraged, and which are stonewalling and should be both boycotted and bombarded with letters.