Not too long ago, I was chatting with a co-worker about the poor service she’d received while shopping. Knowing the store in question to be a big-box outfit and not exactly famous for treating its employees well, I suggested that perhaps she shouldn’t have been surprised.
After all, I reasoned, if they’re not investing in their employees — if they don’t think their staff are worth more than minimum wage — then it’s not hard to understand why they wouldn’t put much effort into training them.
(This was spoken, of course, with the bitter bite of an ex-customer-service sourpuss.)
Shop somewhere else, I suggested, where they treat employees better.
She balked. “I just can’t afford it.”
The conversation ended there, because I’m not the arbiter of what another person can or can’t afford, but it reaffirmed to me that our buying habits represent not what we can or can’t do, but what we’ve chosen to do, perhaps without even thinking.
After the clothing-factory collapse at the Rana Plaza in Dhaka, Bangladesh, that killed more than 1,000 people, our attention has been drawn yet again to the ways in which our lifestyles — the ease, convenience and relative affordability of which we hold as normal — are directly linked to the conditions of other people’s lives. Factories in poor areas of other countries often place workers in conditions that we would consider unacceptable for ourselves.
This isn’t news for us; it’s the status quo. Only last November, a fire in another Dhaka factory killed at least 117 people, due to inadequate safety precautions. On May 8, seven people were killed in a similar factory fire, again in Dhaka.
You have to fight your way past the sensationalism of headlines such as “Is there blood on your shirt?” but once you do, it’s impossible to deny that as consumers, we are culpable. Our privileged position in the make-ship-sell-buy relationship means that we’re responsible for what we choose to do with our money.
Many people are arguing that the kind of structural change needed in the industry is the responsibility of the brands, not the consumers. I understand this logic, but I disagree with the “Well, it’s not my problem” fatalism that underlies it. An individual decision to avoid certain retailers might seem like a drop in the bucket, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter, and it certainly doesn’t mean that this isn’t our problem.
In 2011, at a major clothing-retailer summit in Dhaka, a proposal to bolster safety standards in the industry was rejected by the brands in attendance as being too costly. It seems as though companies don’t care until their sales take a hit. As consumers, therefore, we are crucial.
Some people have taken the tragedy in Bangladesh to mean that we should only buy Canadian. Rashed Chowdhury, a former colleague of mine, was quoted in the Globe and Mail immediately after the disaster for his nuanced perspective: “My father is Bangladeshi, and I lived there for about 10 years: I know what a tremendous benefit the garments industry has been … The last thing I’d want people in the West to do following this tragedy is to stop buying Bangladeshi clothes. The effects of such an action would fall disproportionately on the workers — who already have the lowest minimum wage in the world.”
Like all serious decisions, our way forward requires not a knee-jerk reaction, but a commitment to making ethical choices in all aspects of our lives — and that’s not hard to do. We need to take a look at our own decisions.
Some of us don’t have the luxury of choosing between cheap and ethical, but many of us do, and it has never been easier to research the stores you choose to shop at. The BBC has compiled a list of manufacturers and brands that were represented in the Rana Plaza collapse. Networks like the Clean Clothes Campaign and Labour Behind the Label provide resources for people curious about shopping more ethically.
And please, please, please pay attention to how they treat their employees. If a company chooses to pay its workers minimum wage (which in Victoria is roughly nine dollars an hour less than a living wage), chances are it’s not too interested in its contractors’ employees in Bangladesh.
