Yesterday, Jim wrote about the donation to the World of Good community development and fair trade organization that has come out of our profit from the sale of sweatshop-free t-shirts with irregular designs. Then, as a reminder of why organizations like World of Good are important, we got a report from Human Rights Watch.
The report reveals that Philip Morris, the giant tobacco corporation, has been buying cheap tobacco from sources that use children for forced labor, “in virtual bondage”. “We were like slaves,” says the mother in one family trapped in this system of forced labor.
Fair trade networks and community development organizations give workers alternatives to the sweatshops and abusive farm networks that exploit extreme poverty and lax labor laws outside of the United States. When you buy fair trade and sweatshop-free goods, you keep money out of the slave labor networks. When you go to a store looking to buy something at low low prices, you’re helping the abuses continue…
…and when you buy Philip Morris cigarettes, you also get massive tumors filling up your lungs with vile black nasty gunk before you die. In cases like that, good ethics becomes a little more easy.
Yeah – just keep shipping those jobs to third world countries and this is what you get: forced and child labor, abuses of human rights, monopolistic business practices, environmental degradation, military dictatorships, no rule of law (like where we’re going here), terrible living and working conditions, and on and on.
Oh, but the bottom line is all important!