Topic: Development
The BBC reports that "US retail giant Wal-Mart has been hit with a lawsuit that claims it ignores sweatshop conditions at many of its suppliers' factories around the world." I wish I had it in me to be gleefully happy that someone is finally attempting to stick it to Wal-Mart on their overseas labor practices, but the most I can manage is a "good for you" sort of feeling toward the people who have put this lawsuit together.
Wal-Mart is a symbolic target, really. I hope that by saying that, I don't sound dismissive of the efforts that the workers behind this lawsuit engaged in to file it, because I'm guessing that they're not thinking of it in symbolic terms. But looking at the larger picture, even if the plaintiffs go to court and win the case, it won't change the fact that essentially, almost any major American retailer is going to be implicated in supply relations with overseas suppliers who provide employment under exploitative circumstances. For example, when I was in Honduras in 1999 with a group from college, we visited a garment-making maquiladora in an export processing zone. This was one of the "good" ones -- clean, brightly lit, minimal crowding. And yet their workers were doing repetitive, potentially hazardous labor for wages that wouldn't allow them to afford the garments they were making, even if they were available for sale in Honduras. It wasn't a horror show, and I'm not saying that the workers might not have been glad to have the jobs, but it didn't make me feel good about the clothes that I had on my back.
It's really frustrating to me that the best that I can do, short of making my own clothes (and even then, how would I know what conditions the cloth was made under?), is to try to dance with the devil who's doing a lesser degree of damage. Everybody I know who's aware of the issues has their own strategy for coping with the situation (patronize particular retailers, buy secondhand, never pay full price for clothes), working within the constraints of limited time and money. Its not easy, though -- sometimes you just want to buy the cute shirt and not think about the exploitative systems behind its production.
So, even though I'm not as happy about the news as I might like to be, if this lawsuit makes a positive change in the lives of the workers on whose behalf it was filed, that would be one good outcome. Another would be if the case gets people thinking about the systems that Wal-Mart practices support, and whether they want to encourage the continuation of those practices by shopping there. Not that that's a simple issue either: Wal-Mart is a major employer, it may (now) be the only significant retail provider in some non-urban areas, and cheap goods are all that some people can really afford. It's not like Wal-Mart has created the system, it's just sort of the biggest, ugliest exploiter of it.
I've got no solutions. I don't even really have any suggestions, beyond saying: think about it, be aware of the issues, decide what level of participation in the system you can live with and what you can realistically do to minimize the harm that your spending habits might be causing. Just, you know, pay attention, decide what the best you can do is, and then try to stick to it.