Zazzle is a website that allows you not only to design a buy a shirt for yourself, but also to sell the shirts you design to other people. As far back as 2006, we at Irregular Times have been asking the people who run Zazzle to let people who want to sell shirts there the ability to choose which sort of shirts they’d like to sell there. You see, Zazzle offers a lot of great ethically produced t-shirts, including designs for men, women and babies on made-in-the-USA American Apparel shirts. But they also print on a number of t-shirts that are shipped from halfway across the planet on oily, energy-wasting barges so they can be made more cheaply by workers who earn pennies. I’m happy to sell the former; I’d rather not sell the latter.

Finally, in a major ethical advance, Zazzle has granted its shirt-sellers this option:

This is a screen capture of the Zazzle design control panel. See that option below the t-shirt graphic? By selecting the option for “Made in the USA only,” you can ensure that your shirt design will only be made available on American Apparel shirts. For me, it’s not the nationalist made-in-the-USA aspect of this choice that is reassuring. It’s the presence of wage and worker protections and the ability to affirmatively inspect production conditions that American production confers.

When you click on the t-shirt image below, you’ll be taken to a Zazzle shop on which you can purchase the design on American Apparel t-shirts for men, women and the kiddos… but none of the other brands with which I am less comfortable:

I am much more inclined to work with Zazzle in the future, now that Zazzle is willing to work to accommodate the ethical concerns of people like me.

When bumper sticker, button and t-shirt corporation CafePress announced back in April that come June 1 it’d hike prices to customers and cut payments to designers, designers expressed great fury. A number of designers said they’d boycott CafePress and simply stop uploading designs to be sold as a way of punishing the corporation. But measurements of uploads to the CafePress Marketplace system showed no sign of slowing then.

When I noted this, more than one individual said Aha, Just You Wait until June 1, when the changes were scheduled to go into effect. The idea was that people would keep going up until the pay changes went into effect, and then additions to the CafePress Marketplace would drop off.

Well, June 1 is here, and the price hikes for customers and pay cuts for designers have gone into effect. Regardless, new additions to the Marketplace are proceeding apace. These are my personal observations of the statistics reported on cafepress.com’s uploading system:

On Monday, April 6 of this year between midnight and 10:13 AM, 2057 new designs were uploaded to the CafePress Marketplace.

On Monday, April 27 between midnight and 10:05 AM, 2195 new designs were uploaded to the CafePress Marketplace.

This Monday, June 1 between midnight and 9:44 AM, 2010 new designs were uploaded to the CafePress Marketplace.

If anything, one ought to expect this Monday to be slower, considering that some people are coming off a late Memorial Day-ish weekend and presumably less likely to be logging on. But the rate of uploads on these three Mondays is roughly the same. People seem to be sticking with CafePress in similar numbers; to the extent anyone is leaving CafePress in disgust, someone new seems to be arriving to take their place.

CafePress is a “print on demand” corporation. What that means, practically speaking, is that they have a set of printers in a handful of factories in the United States. The CafePress corporation uses those printers to put images made by graphic designers onto a variety of products, including bumper stickers, buttons and shirts. Because it uses printers rather than bulk silk screening, the CafePress corporation is able to print each item as it is ordered — on demand.

Up until this very morning, when CafePress sold an item with a graphic designer’s image on it, the price system for customers, designers and CafePress itself was simple and straightforward. For each product it sold, CafePress maintained for itself a certain guaranteed amount of money called a base price. When a graphic designer made an image available for sale on a CafePress product, she or he set an additional markup, a commission to be received by the designer for each sale of the image on that product. The price a customer actually paid for the product was the base price plus the commission. For example, until this morning CafePress set a base price of $3.49 for a 3×10 inch vinyl bumper sticker. We at Irregular Times set a commission of $1.16 for a Turn Off Your TV / Think For Yourself design printed on that sticker. As a customer, you’d have paid $4.65 for a bumper sticker with that design on it.

Starting today, that simple system has been replaced by something rather more complicated. From now on, how much a customer pays for a product, how much a designer is paid for the use of a design on a product, and how much CafePress pays itself depends on how the customer comes to chooses that product.

If you buy a CafePress product through a URL featuring a designer’s shop name, the system works the same way as it always did. The “shop” URL for the Turn Off Your TV bumper sticker looks like http://www.cafepress.com/irregulargoods.13734306. You might get to this “shop” URL from a Google search, or you might get to that “shop” URL from the graphic designer’s website, your you might find it on a bulletin board.

If the URL for the product starts with the name of the product type instead, then CafePress sets a different base price to pay itself and sets a different commission to pay the designer. In the case of the Turn Off Your TV bumper sticker, this different url looks like http://bumperstickers.cafepress.com/item/turn-off-your-tv-and-think-bumper-sticker/13734306. You might get to this different URL by using the little blue search box on the home page of CafePress, or you might get to it by a Google search, or you might get to that URL from somebody else’s website or bulletin board.

That’s the new system, starting today. Starting today, the CafePress corporation is putting all of its efforts into promoting this latter sort of URL and not the former. The latter sort of URL raises prices customers pay for the same products while cutting the commission graphic designers earn, down to a mandated 10 percent of the price paid by the customer. It’s confusing, and the reasons for the split are obscure, but the effects are demonstrable.

To return to our example, if you go to http://www.cafepress.com/irregulargoods.13734306 to buy the Turn Off Your TV bumper sticker, you’ll encounter the old price structure, in which you paid $4.65, Irregular Times received $1.16, and CafePress received $3.95. But if you go to http://bumperstickers.cafepress.com/item/turn-off-your-tv-and-think-bumper-sticker/13734306, you’ll pay $5.00, Irregular Times will receive $0.50, and CafePress will get $4.50.

In this shift, the base prices for items — Customer Price minus Designer Markup — are going up. The source for the old base prices is a list here. The base prices under the new system are figured as the price to the customer minus 10 percent.

Old Base Price for Bumper Stickers: $3.65… New Base Price for Bumper Stickers: $4.50

Old Base Price for 2.5 inch Buttons: $2.99… New Base Price for 2.5 inch Buttons: $3.60

Old Base Price for 1 inch Buttons: $1.49… New Base Price for 1 inch Buttons: $2.25

Old Base Price for 11×17 Posters: $4.99… New Base Price for 11×17 Posters: $7.20

Old Base Price for Round Xmas Ornaments: $5.99… New Base Price for Round Xmas Ornaments: $9.00

Old Base Price for 10 Pack Greeting Cards: $14.99… New Base Price for 10 Pack Greeting Cards: $17.20

Old Base Price for Organic Men’s American Apparel Shirt: $19.99… New Base Price for Organic Men’s American Apparel Shirt: $23.40

Old Base Price for Junior Raglan American Apparel Shirt: $17.99… New Base Price for Junior Raglan American Apparel Shirt: $21.60

Old Base Price for American Apparel Thong: $7.99… New Base Price for American Apparel Thong: $10.80

CafePress is not putting itself in a competitive price position, and its explanations for the changes do not match with observable reality. It’s typical behavior for a profit-maximizing corporation, not all that surprising.

I love the story of Spider Man, the character of Spider Man, the style of Spider Man.

I don’t love the violence of Spider Man. I hate the vigilante attitude of Spider Man, and other superheroes, who take it upon themselves to be judge, jury and executioner - laws unto themselves. We don’t need superheroes who can protect us with their exceptionalism. We need to have a society with just laws and courts, and measured, accountable enforcement.

So, when it comes to dressing my kids, I’ve decided to skip over the Spider Man tshirts that are now popular among the young ones. I’ve also decided to skip over the made-in-China shirts that abuse great power with great irresponsibility.

My alternative: Peace Spider - an edgy arachnid who, rather than taking the law into his own hands, promotes nonviolence with a little orange peace sign on his back.

I know that my son, when he goes to school in this shirt, will be promoting a more peaceful message than the superheroes do. He’ll also have a design that none of the other kids in his school are likely to have. That’s definitely something I couldn’t find at Target or Wal-Mart. Peace Spider shirts are manufactured and printed in the USA, with no sweatshop labor involved.

It’s the same school of management that passes out “Who Moved My Cheese?” to people being “let go” from their corporate jobs:

In the last week before CafePress makes drastic paycuts to shopkeepers who sell print-on-demand shirts, stickers and buttons, CafePress management has decided to hand out coupons.

The CafePress “offer” is for sellers to “Receive 20% off everything in your own shop*” when they buy their own merchandise. For a three day period, just before the pay cut goes into effect, shopkeepers have the privilege of buying their items from CafePress. The CafePress corporation’s own profit margins per item from shirts all the way down to stickers are above 100%, so even after cutting the price down 20% CafePress will still make a profit when shopkeepers get the special privilege of buying their own stuff.

Yes, take advantage of this “special offer!” to shovel more money into the CafePress corporate furnaces. Then get a pay cut from the same corporation. Next comes the part where you step up, bowl in hand, and say, “Please, sir, I want some more!”

When it comes to attacks on the Constitution, Ron Paul is all about the money this year. For the 2008 election, he tried triangulating with libertarian Republicans and liberal Democrats by criticizing the abuses of civil liberties under George W. Bush. That didn’t work out for him so well.

So, Congressman Paul has turned back to Texas politics. For his 2010 re-election campaign, in which he faces a tough Republican primary battle against Jeff Cherry. So, Paul is working to appeal to a purely Republican base now, libertarian and non-libertarian alike.

Ron Paul is no longer criticizing unconstitutional civil rights abuses, though many of those are continuing under Barack Obama, and others are being justified and defended by Congress. He’s fallen silent on those issues, silently accepting attacks against constitutional rights when they come to human rights. Those are, after all, not big campaign issues in Ron Paul’s home district in Texas.

Instead, Ron Paul has embraced whole hog the Republican anti-Socialist crusade of 2009. Representative Paul is aiming for Republican votes to help him fend off Jeff Cherry by resorting to the most base aspect of libertarian politics: The screech that Big Government is taking your money.

(Like most libertarians, Ron Paul never mentions the part about government giving you back your services and your infrastructure in return for that money.)

This year, Ron Paul is leaving higher ideals, and just promising to help people to keep a tight grip on what’s theirs. Thus, Ron Paul’s signature campaign is to audit the Federal Reserve, and then destroy it. That sounds ridiculous, and it is, but this is what Ron Paul himself proposes, in his own words: “Audit the Fed, Then End It!”

To support Ron Paul’s anti-Fed campaign, Paul’s supporters are selling the Audit the Fed tshirt you see here.

It seems like a populist message, on the face of it, and I have some sympathy for the motivation of people who want to give more scrutiny to the various forms of the government’s financial bailouts. There’s been waste. There’s been corruption. There’s been backward thinking…

… in the Federal Reserve, yes, but what I’m talking about is in the production of that Ron Paul tshirt. In order to understand the full implications of Ron Paul’s new money-only libertarianism, we need to consider where Paul’s Audit the Fed t-shirt comes from.

That tshirt is sold through Zazzle. Zazzle sells many kinds of tshirts. Some of them are made ethically, here in the USA. Others, on the other hand, are made in overseas sweatshops using outsourced labor where workers and their communities are abused. Often, in these outsourced garment contractors’ operations, people are paid a pittance, exposed to dangerous working conditions, and the surrounding area is contaminated with toxins. Money from the enterprise is often siphoned off to support autocratic governments or whatever corrupt warlord controls the area.

In order to support Ron Paul’s crusade against the Federal Reserve, Paul’s supporters are selling the Zazzle tshirts that are made by contractors with a history of sweatshop conditions. The shirt sold on RonPaul.com is not one made in the USA under ethical conditions.

That Ron Paul’s supporters are selling such products, made in questionable circumstances, says a lot about the discrepancy between what libertarianism promises and what it would actually deliver. Libertarian politicians like Ron Paul say that their anti-regulation, free-for-all policies would benefit average working people, but the truth is that those policies would strip away the protections that give working people a fair shake.

Here in the USA, it’s government regulations that prevent American workers from having to work in sweatshops, and provide at least some minimal protection to communities from toxic industrial wastes. The free market solutions Ron Paul is pushing don’t provide those protections. The free market doesn’t respect the rights of the average individual. Ron Paul’s libertarianism would take the sweatshop conditions in which RonPaul.com tshirts are made overseas, and recreate them right here in the USA.

I’m not supporting Jeff Cherry’s campaign. Cherry is as rotten as Ron Paul, only in a traditional Republican way.

My concern is to warn people who have supported Ron Paul, to begin to cast a critical eye at the reality behind the libertarian utopian promises. Look at what libertarians actually do. Look at their economic relationships with the companies that provide products and services to support Ron Paul. What you’ll find is that, underneath the populist veneer, there’s a current of economic exploitation.

For as long as we’ve been selling shirts here at Irregular Times, we’ve been committed to selling our shirts ethically. We’ve sought out partnerships with companies like Skreened, which only sell items of clothing made in the USA. We’re also pleased that CafePress is taking strong moves to offer more sweatshop-free clothes, though many of its shirts are still made in highly unethical conditions. Selling only made in the USA shirts is an important stand for us, because most clothes for sale in the USA are made outside of the USA in order to evade fair labor standards and environmental regulations.

Sweatshop clothes are cheap because they’re made at the expense of child workers, and sometimes even slave labor, in factories that spew filth that poisons the surrounding communities. Eventually, we all pay the price for the existence of these reprehensible garment mills, but many people don’t pay attention to the long term consequences, and just focus on finding whatever seems cheap at the moment.

Young girls between the ages of 9 and 12 would definitely fit into the category of people focused on finding cheap clothes. They don’t have much money to spend, after all. The people who run the women’s clothing store The Limited seem to have noticed their interest - they’ve created a whole new store focused on connecting young girls of this age (they call them “tweens”) with cheap clothes with just the sort of gaudy clothes that their young minds find stimulating.

It was the name of this store that caught my attention when I saw it: Justice. Justice? Could it be a clothing store in the mall that focused on selling ethically-made, sweatshop-free clothes? I had to know more, so in spite of the risk to my eyesight, I walked into the store, and fought my way through the ocean of bright pink and yellow, to ask for a catalog.

Sadly, there was no information about anything at all related to actual issues of justice in the catalog - only shirts with the peace symbol, sold under the slogan peace rocks! Oy. Peace doesn’t rock, actually. That’s kind of the point of peace.

I went to the website - shopjustice.com - and looked there too, and at the site of the store’s parent company, tweenbrands.com. I found absolutely nothing about justice for workers in overseas sweatshops. In fact, even in the TweenBrands code of business conduct and ethics, there is not one word about fair trade, or fair labor standards, or a living wage, or even a commitment to pay minimum wages. Justice seems quite willing to sell clothes made cheaply through the exploitation of unjust conditions. The only commitment Justice and TweenBrands make concerning selling clothes made overseas is that they will obey importation laws: “We have a strict policy of complying with all legal requirements associated with the importation of goods into the United States.”

When it comes to ethical standards, the standard followed by Justice and TweenBrands is so low as to barely be a standard at all. It seems that Justice stores are not really doing anything to battle injustice. In fact, they’re promoting injustice using the brand name Justice to make it seem otherwise, appealing to young girls’ fresh idealism even as they trash it, selling clothes for tweens that probably were made by tweens. Orwell rocks!

There are ethical alternatives. One of these alternatives actually comes with the same brand name - or nearly the same name: Justice Clothing, which only sells clothes that are made by unionized and sweatshop-free businesses. Tweens, take note: That’s what real justice looks like.

For us here at Irregular Times, selling shirts is like licking fingers: we like to know where they’ve been. We sell shirts made by American Apparel because the company is transparent and reliably regulated when it comes it its workforce and compensation practices. Most apparel producers work very hard to hide the information about their overseas factories from you, and on the odd occasion when a producer is forthcoming, what’s uncovered is not reassuring.

For some time now, Skreened has been the online t-shirt outlet offering the greatest variety in demonstrably sweatshop-free shirts — including sweat-free clothing for kids and even babies. I sing Skreened’s praises to the sky, even though the kestrels look down at me askance.

But lately, CafePress is doing its darndest to catch up. A month and a half ago, CafePress added five new American Apparel shirts to its lineup of offerings: a women’s organic shirt, a kid’s shirt, a toddler shirt, a baby shirt and a baby onesie. These are all light-colored t-shirts onto which dark-colored designs print best. Today, CafePress has gone further, introducing four new American Apparel shirts to its lineup: a black kids’ t-shirt, a black toddler’s t-shirt, a blue kids’ t-shirt and a black toddler’s t-shirt.

Pretty, pretty, pretty. And pretty ethical to boot. I’m drawn to these dark cotton t-shirts for two reasons: first, I’ve just loved the idea of kids wearing dark clothes, ever since I happened on an Edward Gorey book as an impressionable grade schooler. There’s something just so cute about morose proto-goths with apple-dumplin’ dimples. Second, as much as I love what Skreened does, they don’t yet offer the capability of printing with white on dark, Gorey-friendly garments. When they do, I will bust an internal organ with glee. But until they do, I have to give CafePress props for their innovation for the sale of ethical children’s clothing. And yeah, you betcha we’ll put them up for sale, too.

Just Another Muslim writes to the merchandise outlet CafePress regarding shopper price hikes and designer commission cuts:

I sure hope that you have considered all possibilities to go along with these changes. Because it will be your loss and too late when your best and loyal shopkeepers turn their backs on you…even though some already have rightfully and understandably. Do you know the saying “don’t burn your bridges?” Well you’ve set the bridge on fire a while ago and just let it continue to burn with us shopkeepers still running across it. And if you are a shopper at Cafepress, my advice to you is to get what you like now because it may not be there in the near future.

Just Another Muslim is one of many writing online today in blogs and forums and on twitter and facebook and e-mail (and possibly via carrier pigeon) to the effect that, DAMMIT, they’ve had enough of CafePress pushing them around, and they’re gonna take their designs somewhere else! Boycott! Walkout! Stoppage!

The thing is, I don’t see any indication that such a move is actually happening. I’ve been collecting stats on CafePress usage as a cultural barometer, and as part I’ve been measuring how many designs have been uploaded to CafePress on any particular day. On March 29, for instance, 11132 new designs had been uploaded by 8:35 PM. On April 15, 9234 new designs had been uploaded by 7:52 PM. Today, 11288 new designs had been uploaded by 8:45 PM. That’s not a stoppage. It’s not even a slowdown.

Humphrey invited Madeleine to the ball to make his mother happy, but still, he didn’t feel right about it. It all felt like a tremendous lie, to Madeleine, to his mother, but most of all, to himself.

When Humphrey began to dance the quadrille with Madeleine, he was shocked and excited to find that Maurice had joined in with a partner of his own. It had been years since those long days in the Sahara with Maurice, but the experiences they had shared there came back to him in a flash.

Unexpectedly, Humphrey heard himself saying to Madeleine, “I am going to marry that man.”

Madeleine was quite upset. This was not how she had planned for the evening to progress. “Humphrey,” she said, “you are a fool. It’s against the law for you to marry another man!”

Humphrey responded calmly, “My dear, I will make you a deal. You can ban my marriage if I can ban yours.”

There’s more than a little hyperbole out there about changes to the Terms of Service by the print-on-demand merchandiser CafePress, and some of it is more than a bit hypocritical. Buzz Edition tweets, “Artists get shafted by @cafepress Slave labor was abolished…Right?” and Lavender Liberal blogs:

If you recoil at the idea of buying a T-shirt from Wal-Mart because you know some eight-year-old Guatemalan was paid three cents to make it during a twelve-hour shift, you’ll stop buying stuff from CafePress. Including our stuff.

Another way to put it: CafePress shopkeepers are now the unwilling, un-unionized meat packers Upton Sinclair wrote about in The Jungle — and CP doesn’t care a whit how many fingers we lose in the process.

Sweatshop? Slave labor? Meat packers? Losing fingers? Perspective, people: Buzz Edition and Lavender Liberal are currently earning $6 to $10 in profit per t-shirt they sell via CafePress. The big profit margins they demand are made possible because some of the t-shirt brands they sell on are made by overseas factory workers who are paid less than $100 a month for long hours of hard physical labor putting thousands of shirts together. These shopkeepers couldn’t be bothered to limit their shirt offerings at CafePress to those brands with a demonstrable commitment to garment workers, but now that they’ll be losing some of their $5-$10 a pop markups, they’re crying “losing fingers!” and “slave labor!” Oh, cry me a river!

Look, folks, when a print-on-demand retailer like CafePress raises prices for shoppers and lowers payments to designers, it is not like the Middle Passage or the Stonewall Riots or Bull Connor turning fire hoses and dogs on kids during segregation. It is a significant change in the terms of agreement between a corporation and the designers, a change to the detriment of designers and consumers of swag. The most productive reaction to this change is to get through the gnashing of teeth and cries of “injustice!” fairly quickly, moving on to the point of considering practical alternatives.

For ethical, artistic and economic reasons, I suggest you offer your designs through Skreened.

Ethics

It is true that CafePress offers a good number of American Apparel shirts, printed here in the USA with wage and safety protections for workers. But some of the shirts CafePress offers have demonstrable ethical problems associated with their production. CafePress hides the sourcing of other shirts produced overseas for suspiciously low prices.

If you are upset that CafePress won’t be paying you as much money as it used to in compensation for your design work, then you should give some consideration to the working conditions of people who actually make the shirts your designs are printed on. As a matter of ethics, Skreened has decided to exclusively offer shirts printed by American Apparel. These are shirts of high fabric quality as well as high ethical quality, and Skreened offers dozens and dozens of combinations in color, in size and in model (including ringer tees, organic cotton, baby onesies, kids’ tees and more).

Artistic Considerations

From an artistic point of view, Cafepress never really offered you much of a canvas to work with in the first place: a mere 10 inch by 10 inch square of fabric on a t-shirt. Here’s what V. Donaghue’s classic public domain WPA image, redesigned into an anti-McCain t-shirt, looks like on CafePress’ American Apparel Organic Men’s T-Shirt:

Skreened lets designers print on an area of up to 11×17 inches, and that makes a big difference. Here’s the same image on the exact same brand American Apparel Organic Men’s T-Shirt, sold through Skreened:

Isn’t that an incredible difference? The possibilities for you to express yourself through design are so much greater with the bigger canvas offered by Skreened.

Economic Considerations

Click through on each of those shirts and you’ll see that they’re being sold for different prices, even though the shirt itself is exactly the same. American Apparel sells its organic men’s fitted t-shirt wholesale for somewhere between $5-$7 a shirt. CafePress sets its “base price” for this organic shirt at $19.99. With a markup of $1.61, we retail the above shirt at CafePress for $21.60. Indications are that CafePress will hike the retail prices of shirts like this even higher come June 1, making the shirts more unaffordable to shoppers.

Skreened, on the other hand, sets its base price for the same shirt, with the same design, with a better print area, at $17.99. That’s $2 lower than CafePress, which lets us sell the shirt on Skreened for $20.99 — a cheaper price for shoppers — while we make a $3 commission on the shirt’s sale, nearly twice the profit per shirt.

Skreened is a better ethical choice, a better artistic choice, and a better economic choice than CafePress. On top of that, while CafePress is an impersonal corporation, Skreened is an intensely personal enterprise, a small business that is built on personal interaction and with personal attention to designers and customers alike. I don’t own any stock or share in Skreened, and nobody paid me to say all this. It’s just the honest truth as I see it.

The rhetoric suggesting that CafePress is running some kind of slave plantation is really overblown, but CafePress is souring the terms by which it treats designers. If you’re looking to move to a different POD t-shirt supplier, I strongly recommend that you give Skreened a look.

CafePress may try to dress up today’s announcement with a barrel full of hand waving, a slapdash cloudiness of vocabulary and a few other mixed metaphors’ worth of dazzling PR-speak, but what their news release all boils down to is this:

1. Come June 1, the print-on-demand corporation CafePress will increase the prices shoppers pay for its shirts and other gear.
2. Come June 1, CafePress will decrease the commissions paid to the sellers who make designs available on CafePress products, especially on non-apparel items.
3. Starting now but especially after June 1, CafePress will work to undercut designers who maintain their own shops and also sell on CafePress’ “marketplace” search engine.

The result: less independence for designers who work through CafePress and a greater profit margin for the CafePress corporation.

These are strong claims, so let me back them up.

CafePress will increase prices shoppers pay.

A simple comparison of the few examples CafePress reveals in today’s announcement to designers reveals a consistent trend toward price increases. In the system CafePress works by now, CafePress sets a “base price” and a shopkeeper adds a “markup” for every item. For example, our made-in-the-USA I Am Not A Second Class Citizen T-Shirt has a base price of $21.99 (reflecting a hefty markup for CafePress above the wholesale price it pays for the shirt). We’ve added a markup of $2.51 for each shirt, and that makes the retail price for the buyer $24.50.

Here are some base prices for five items CafePress sells:

Men’s Light T-Shirt: $14.99
Women’s Zip Hoodie: $34.99
Keepsake Box: $19.99
Small Mug: $10.99
Large Poster: $17.99

In the new system, if a designer chooses to sell on a traditional static html “shop” page she or he maintains and promotes (like www.cafepress.com/irregulargoods), she or he can continue to set prices like before. But if she or he makes merchandise with his or her designs available on CafePress’s search engine and own set of dynamic web pages (what CafePress calls its “marketplace”), retail prices will be set by a central committee at CafePress (making the “marketplace” less of a real market). Designers won’t be able to set a markup — they will earn a 10% commission off the retail price instead.

Here is the new, higher retail price range CafePress mentions today for five example products:

Men’s Light T-Shirt: $20.00 - $25.00
Women’s Zip Hoodie: $35.00 - $40.00
Keepsake Box: $22.00 - $28.00
Small Mug: $12.00 - $18.00
Large Poster: $18.00 - $25.00

If shirt retail prices rise $5-$10 (as indicated by the example of the light t-shirt), then for shopkeepers like us who markup by $2.51, or even for shopkeepers like Green Gecko who markup by $4.00, the result will be a retail price increase for shoppers.

CafePress will decrease the marketplace commission paid out to designers, especially for non-apparel items.

When it comes to shirt sales, people who add a low markup won’t see much change in commission: if the retail price for a dark made-in-the-usa shirt goes up to $25, we would still see a $2.50 commission, a mere decrease of a penny. But designers like Green Gecko, who currently add a markup of $4.00 or more (look it up for yourself, you’ll see these folks are more common), will see a decrease in their commission.

The effect is much more pronounced for items with a low base price. Buttons sold through CafePress currently have a base price of $2.99, and shopkeepers usually add $1-2 in markup for their profit. (We add $0.96, but psssst… we also produce our own buttons of exactly the same size for $2.95 including shipping and handling.) If CafePress sets its no-negotiation retail price for buttons in its “marketplace” at $3.95 (you think this includes shipping and handling, by the way? Think again: delivery at the speed of first-class mail will cost you another $7.00), that gives designers a much-lower profit of 40 cents, while CafePress rakes in more profit.

CafePress will undercut designers who sell on the marketplace and on their own shop.

In its announcement, CafePress has declared its intention to stop linking to designers’ shops from the marketplace pages displaying an item. This makes no sense from the buyer’s point of view, who may want to buy similar items from the same designer. It also doesn’t help the individual designer, obviously, since as discussed above she or he stands to make more profit from his or her own shop. But it does make sense for CafePress… if it is interested in taking shoppers’ traffic away from designers’ shops and onto the price-controlled marketplace.

Designers of items that sell on both their own shops and the new marketplace will find themselves in a fix. On the one hand, bumper stickers will have to retail for $10 on the marketplace in order for designers to make as much profit per sale as before. On the other hand, if CafePress doesn’t raise the retail price of its bumper sticker exorbitantly — say, to $3.49, designers could find the marketplace version of their item out-competing the shop version of their item… and producing more profit for CafePress and less profit for the designer. The shops are undercut by the marketplace, inducing designer/shopkeepers to lower their prices on their shops, again with the result of lower profit for designers.

I’m not making a moral case here that CafePress is a bad corporation that must be spanked for its naughty behavior. Corporations are built to squeeze people — it’s not good or bad of them, because corporations have no souls. This is just what they do, and the CafePress corporation is doing what it’s doing for a reason — most likely (despite CafePress’ oblique protests to the sort-of-contrary) because its sales are way, way down and it’s looking for a way out of its own hard times. Screaming at the unfairness, the injustice of it all won’t accomplish much, because despite its VW-bus ad copy the CafePress corporation is not organized around principles of fairness or justice.

I’m making a practical case directed primarily at designers for CafePress, and here is the case’s conclusion:

If you are a designer for CafePress who is dependent on the marketplace model, then well, chum, you’re out of luck, at least until you find a way to become independent of the CafePress marketplace.

The best way to become independent is to maintain a website that has something to do with more than selling things with pictures printed on them, a website that has to do with matters you care about. People who care about the same matters but are not interested in buying things with pictures printed on them will visit your website, and they’ll talk to you, and you’ll talk back, and you’ll have a good time. People who care about the same things you do and who also want to get a thing with a picture printed on it will find you and make a purchase through links from your web page. It’s a no-pressure way of making a living connected to things you care about, and I for one really like it.

If you are a designer for CafePress who is not dependent on the marketplace model, then there’s really no more reason for you to put your product on the marketplace. It’s turned from an enabling tool to an exploitive tool, and who wants to be exploited any more than necessary?

Independent shopkeepers, consider withdrawing your products from the marketplace. The next time our kids give us an hour or two of free time, we here at Irregular Times certainly will. I don’t expect many people to follow suit, because independence is a bit scary to most people, but I do think it would be in many designers’ best interest. If enough people do follow suit, then the highly controlled marketplace CafePress has fashioned may collapse on account of its own emptiness.

For a month now, I’ve been evaluating the claim by CafePress that the Econscious brand t-shirts it sells are made produced by “sustainable organizations” in accordance with “fair trade practices.” In particular, I’m looking at production in one of the factories supplying shirts to Econscious — a factory in Lahore, Pakistan. Econscious executives have proclaimed that “Econscious can prove fair labor practices in their factories verifed by 3rd party inspectors. I suggest you remove your article until econscious is given the opportunity to respond.”

Econscious President Dale Denkensohn has been unfailingly polite to me and has sent on a variety of documents. Some of these are not relevant — for instance “fair trade” certification of the growing conditions for some seed cotton that another Econscious factory in another country buys. But some are relevant: three weeks ago, I was sent on two audit documents regarding the factory in Lahore, Pakistan. They are:

1. An STR Audit report for the winter of 2007-2008
2. Reports of pay of factory workers (unverified by the STR auditor) for the winter of 2007-2008

At the end of last week, Denkensohn sent me an additional document:

3. A GOTS audit report for the summer of 2008

I encourage you to read all three documents closely, paying attention to the scope of inspection (GOTS especially is focused on certifying the organic nature of the supply chain and does so in detail), on what the reports indicate about workers compensation (STR audit: minimum wage; GOTS audit: minimum wage plus small unspecified bonuses), and on what basis the audits’ conclusions are drawn (the factory’s official wage book, without worker interviews or other independent verification of worker compensation indicated). It is no wonder that the factory has not attained FLO certification, since that would require movement from minimum wage to a living wage that meets “basic needs” as discussed in other articles here.

The GOTS audit in particular glosses over the difference between a “minimum wage” and a “living wage,” simply declaring that factory workers “meet the Labour laws for industrial workers which according to the government are sufficient to meet basic needs.” Despite a rigorous search for any declaration by the government of Pakistan that the minimum legal wage for workers is sufficient to meet basic needs, I cannot find any. Please let me know if you can find such a reference. What I have found is an internal document by Pakistan’s Federal Bureau of Revenue stating of their own government workers:

As in the rest of the government, the management of human resources is severely deficient. Most of the tax officials are not paid a living wage and none is paid a middle class wage.

Look at the government pay scale and you’ll see that a large majority of pay grades (adding on a monthly government allowances of 500 rupees for medical care and a transportation allowance of 680-2480 rupees) have earnings at or above the 6000 rupee/month minimum wage currently in force. It looks to me like the government of Pakistan has concluded that this level of compensation is not a living wage.

This indication and other indications of a less-than-living wage leaves me personally disinclined to sell Econscious shirts until Econscious more affirmatively and specifically demonstrates the living standard of its workers. If your read of available information tells you something different, make your case and I’ll be sure to pay attention.

I’ll get to considerations of a basic food budget in Lahore in a moment, but first a review of why I’m interested in the matter:

For a bit less than a month now, I’ve been considering the veracity of claims of CafePress that the Econscious brand shirts it sells are made produced by “sustainable organizations” in accordance with “fair trade practices.” In particular, I’m looking at production in one of the factories that supplies shirts to Econscious — a factory in Lahore, Pakistan. Econscious executives have proclaimed that “Econscious can prove fair labor practices in their factories verifed by 3rd party inspectors. I suggest you remove your article until econscious is given the opportunity to respond.”

Econscious has had three weeks to respond with proof of fair labor practices in their factory in Lahore, Pakistan… but I have not seen that proof. I’ve seen certification of organic processes, and I’ve seen “fair trade” certification of some seed cotton that an Econscious factory in another country buys, but no, I have not seen documentation of fair labor practices in the Lahore factory by an independent third party inspector. Two weeks ago, the President of Econscious told me he would be sending on audit reports on the factory in Lahore, Pakistan, and to his credit he did send me two documents for that factory. They are:

1. An STR Audit report for the winter of 2007-2008
2. Reports of pay of factory workers (unverified by the STR auditor) for the winter of 2007-2008

Until the leaders of Econscious produces public copies of the audits of their factories, as they said they’d do, these two documents are the closest thing to any public proof Econscious has provided to back up its claims (and CafePress’ claims) about the labor conditions of its apparel production.

I encourage you to read the documents carefully. I especially encourage you to read the description of pay reported to have been received by workers producing Econscious apparel at the Lahore, Pakistan facility during the winter of 2007-2008. In that factory, workers are reported to have been paid the minimum wage of 4600 Pakistan Rupees per month during the winter of 2007-2008, plus overtime. The average worker at that factory for Econscious took home PKR. 5344.75 (equivalent to US $89) in a month for an average of 222 hours of work (on average approximately 51 hours a week).

Is that level of pay a “fair labor” practice? Is it a “fair trade” for 51 hours of factory work every week? There are various aspects of “fair labor” and “fair trade” that have been established by groups such as the International Labor Organization and FLO International, but one aspect of them is raising wages up from the level of a minimum wage to the level of a “living wage”. Econscious has been selling its t-shirts for some years now… have the Pakistan producers of Econscious t-shirts gotten their “living wage”?

Well, what is a “living wage,” anyway? One way to answer that question is to ask what the stakeholders relating to industry in Pakistan industry themselves consider reasonable. On that score, Fair Trade producers and labor unions in Pakistan have articulated a much higher standard for pay: 18400 rupees a month and 12000 rupees a month, respectively. Are these wild and crazy standards for Fair Trade producers and the Pakistani labor movement to set? Well, no. They’re actually quite low compared to estimates of the cost of living by the Lahore University of Management Sciences, which tells its potential hires that the monthly cost of living in Lahore is 71,900 rupees a month. None of these standards for a “living wage” are met by the factory Econscious uses in Lahore, Pakistan.

A second way to figure what a “living wage” would be is to define it not by the subjective claims of people in Pakistan, but according to objective estimates of basic human needs. SA8000, an organization Econscious has itself referred to as definitive, defines “living wages” as wages that satisfy “basic needs.” “Basic needs” are further defined by the SA8000 Guidance Document as capable of sustaining 1/2 an average sized family with food, clean water, clothing, housing, transportation, schooling, health care, and a further undefined “discretionary income.”

In a living wage formula, one standard is that housing should cost no more than 30% of income. A UNHCR report on conditions in Lahore, Pakistan — one contemporaneous with available pay reports — places the cost of living in a toxic, fly-infested slum with running sewage located downwind from a garbage incinerator at 7500 rupees a month. Even if two parents each work at the factory full-time (48 hours a week), housing costs in a fetid, toxic slum in Lahore during the winter of 2007-2008 would have cost 82% of the resulting monthly wage of 9200 rupees a month, leaving just 1700 rupees a month for food, clean water, clothing, transportation, schooling, health care, and discretionary income. That’s 1700 rupees a month for two adults to carry — 850 rupees apiece.

Let’s delve further into those monthly costs. The government of Pakistan provides statistics on food prices in Lahore, Pakistan for the fiscal year of 2006-2007. This was a time of rampant inflation, so we can assume that food costs were higher still during the winter of 2007-2008 — but to err on the side of caution, let’s go with the lower food prices for 2006-2007. The government of Pakistan also provided a caloric budget in the form of a food basket for its citizens on the basis of 2100 calories per day per adult:

Use those resources, do the math for an adult, multiplying out prices per day and multiplying by 30 days, and you’ll get somewhere between 780-800 rupees a month for food. Further assume that this adult has two children, but is only responsible for providing for one of them, and that child requires just 1500 calories a day, and you’ll end up with 1300-1350 rupees a month for food for this part of the “basic needs” budget.

On the factory scale used for that factory in Lahore, Pakistan, after a food budget for 1/2 a family and 1/2 of the cost of housing in a slum, that leaves no money left for a worker to provide clean water, clothing, transportation, schooling, health care, and discretionary income for half a family. Worse, it leaves the factory worker — not providing for any of these additional costs — in 500-550 rupees of debt.