Check out our video about ethical shopping! 

Please complete this anonymous final course evaluation survey- 

Here's the final assessment description-

Designing Change project

How might we inform and convince people that their purchases make a difference?

This question continues to echo online, most clearly perhaps in these two articles from yesterday's NYT.  This one offers and overview of the situation, and this one that discusses the 't-shirt' phase of every economy.

We're still trying to focus on the SPA community here, but whether we do that explicitly or implicitly remains uncertain.  As a part of our research, make sure you've read the empathy blogs of your classmates and researched some other sweatshop PSAs like this and this and this and somewhat comically this.  Here's one about Abercrombie and Fitch that went viral last week, although mostly for its snark. 

There are more, of course.  How will our PSA INFORM and CONVINCE?  What additional actions might we combine w/ the PSA to make an impact in the SPA community? How can we break through expectations to create something compelling?  It's a big job that requires everyone's best, final efforts. We can make a difference.  Why wait for someone else to do it? 

The shirts on our backs

On the first day of class we checked tags in our clothes, observed that most of them came from equatorial parts of the world, and considered the the implications of that fact. Last week, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Dkaha, Bangladesh, that killed over 622   (803 as of Wednesday over 900 on Thursday)  workers as of yesterday, offers one disturbing conclusion. Now, as our class ends, I hope we can design a project to share our lessons with other people both in and outside the SPA community.

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.  

Verite , patagonia,  herproject,  american apparel   ethical consumer  Forbes

clean clothes campaign , united students against sweatshops. Higg Index,   Indigenous

Here's my Kiva invitation link-  http://www.kiva.org/invitedby/john2228

Here's the team link-  http://www.kiva.org/invitedto/spa_global_voices/by/john2228

Is the world flat?

Today's NYT front page story details the efforts of millions of Chinese families who sacrifice nearly everything to get a child into and through college.  It notes the fervent belief in the power of education to move them out of poverty and into better jobs, and the brutal poverty that marks most lives in China.  Here the pictures tell the story better than any words.   

According to the US Department of Education, 18 million Americans attended post secondary institutions in 2009.  Yet China's growing college graduation rate is expected to  continue to outpace American graduation reaching 29 million by 2020 according to the OECD.  Locally, Shattuck St. Mary's school has also experienced a rise in Chinese admissions from wealthy families seeking an advantage for their students by attending American boarding schools.  One teacher there told me that the school has accepted more students than they really know what to do with.  These students need extra language instruction and struggle to assimilate with other students.  But the economics on both sides of the equation continue to increase their Chinese student population while the school struggles to meet their needs.

Some have labeled this the 'great brain race' as nations compete to create the most educated and hopefully employable population.  Yet the NYT article notes that the 'flat world' doesn't even exist within China as rural students struggle with inadequate schools and prejudicial college admissions policies.  Moreover, the article also notes that unemployment for college graduates remains very high.  For those who do graduate, proposed US immigration policy changes would allow high skill workers to emigrate to America feeding our own high tech employment needs.  In this respect, Friedman's flat world seems quite close in that many of us are competing for jobs against people from around the world. 

As we head into The White Tiger, pay attention to the descriptions of rural poverty.  In this sense, the dialogue in the novel between India and China is more than metaphorical.  The OECD predictions don't show much of a rise in Indian post-secondary education in this decade, suggesting one way the China is moving ahead in that race.