As yesterday’s NYT editorial notes,
the textile industry has long history of poor working conditions going
back to the Shirtwaist factory fire. Historically, it was the textile
industry that drove the earliest wave of industrialization in Europe
creating both wealth for the countries and resistance from the workers
whose jobs were displaced by power looms. Further globalization of the
industry made America a source of cotton and then innovations like the
cotton gin created a domestic textile industry.
Now that industry is gone and east coast mill towns like Brunswick, Maine, where my daughter goes
to school, have repurposed all the old brick mill buildings into coffee
shops and restaurants and bars and retail with nice views of the rivers
that once powered them. Here's a glowing NYT article about one in North Carolina just opening. Now we buy our clothes from textile factories
around the globe, usually in places at the cutting edge of the race to
the bottom, where mostly women and girls work in factories we still call
sweatshops.
Despite
the fact that this broad history is generally common knowledge, I know I
still start with price when I pick up white t-shirts. I know I’m not
alone here. Sadly, perhaps it takes disasters like this to cause change.
It feels particularly human to procrastinate, to wait until action is
unavoidable. It’s a part of our nature that feels ever more ominous as
atmospheric CO2 crosses 400 PPM for the first time in 3 million years. Yet as this article and this one note, the problems in global supply chains are extremely complex, and corporations disagree about whether to engage in change or simply retreat to safer political ground.
So,
how can we apply knowledge to behavior? How do we even know which
clothes are made ethically? How would we share that information in ways
that motivate our friends to act on it? This is the final project for
this class. Our first task is to get informed. Here are some
organizations working in this area. Start here and dig deeper. As always, and as this article notes, the solution starts where we are. Here's a another NYT article that discusses movements toward ethical clothing.
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