[On ethical clothing purchases]: But these items are designed by someone who cares deeply about her work and takes pride in her craftsmanship... considering this, these pieces are not at all expensive. I can email the person who is making them, we can discuss color swatches, she can change length or a sleeve shape or the neckline if I ask her to. The interaction with the person who makes your clothes is important: it gets one thinking about the practices in mass manufactured clothing, and the human rights and environmental abuses become more difficult to ignore.
And I get the usual argument of "$50 bucks will buy me 10 shirts in Walmart/Target," I really do. I'd be a liar if I said that I don't own any ethically suspect pieces myself. And it takes experiences like this for me to realize that I like knowing where my clothes come from. I like knowing they were not made using child labor or that the manufacturer didn't completely ignore local environmental laws. It's the issue of price and cost, really: every cheap piece of clothing has a cost associated with it. Ten bucks is the price, but what is the cost in lost jobs in the US, in the exploited workers overseas, in the environmental damage -- herbicide pollution from cheap cotton production, eutrophication of lakes, desertification, salinization of soils... This is the sort of thing we all are paying for -- be it in increased medical cost, or lost wages, or decreased bargaining power as international conglomerates continue to increase their political influence. They call it externalization: for every sweatshop they build, they are the ones getting the profit, and we are left with splitting the cost and thinking that we somehow got the better of the bargain...
And I get the usual argument of "$50 bucks will buy me 10 shirts in Walmart/Target," I really do. I'd be a liar if I said that I don't own any ethically suspect pieces myself. And it takes experiences like this for me to realize that I like knowing where my clothes come from. I like knowing they were not made using child labor or that the manufacturer didn't completely ignore local environmental laws. It's the issue of price and cost, really: every cheap piece of clothing has a cost associated with it. Ten bucks is the price, but what is the cost in lost jobs in the US, in the exploited workers overseas, in the environmental damage -- herbicide pollution from cheap cotton production, eutrophication of lakes, desertification, salinization of soils... This is the sort of thing we all are paying for -- be it in increased medical cost, or lost wages, or decreased bargaining power as international conglomerates continue to increase their political influence. They call it externalization: for every sweatshop they build, they are the ones getting the profit, and we are left with splitting the cost and thinking that we somehow got the better of the bargain...
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