The Earth Day theme this year as set by the UU Ministry for Earth is “Working Towards
Sustainable Communities”:
“The need for sustainable communities – ones that are economically,
environmentally, and socially healthy and resilient – has never been stronger.
The current and future impacts of our changing climate and extreme weather
events affect the lives of families and communities across the country; our
out-of-control materialistic consumer culture challenges Earth’s finite
resources and contributes to environmental degradation; many in our increasingly diverse society
endure an unequal burden of economic and environmental injustices; and social
isolation and loss of meaning in life continue to be an all-too-familiar fact
of life for many. Resilient sustainable communities offer
integrated solutions to many of these challenges when they are based on
long-range perspectives, reflect their local circumstances, and speak to the
needs of current and future residents. The Unitarian Universalist Ministry for
Earth (UUMFE) is focusing this year’s Earth Day resources on Sustainable
Communities because we believe such communities, with their focus on realizing
and sustaining a just and equitable world, embody our mission and reflect key
Unitarian Universalist principles. For Earth Day 2013, the Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth
(UUMFE) is asking congregations to connect to issues related to realizing
sustainability and to commit to actions that will help build a sustainable and
just world, one congregation and one community at a time.” (http://uuministryforearth.org/2013-ED-Main-Page).
Today my message concerns something that we take for granted: the clothes we wear everyday. But who makes those clothes? Are they getting a
fair wage for making them? Are they making them in acceptable working
conditions? Are they working with dangerous machinery? Are they children?
Lots of questions we could ask, and here is another one for you to ponder:
If you had to choose between buying a piece of clothing that costs $20
and you are not sure how it was made, and one that is certified as not made in
a sweatshop but costs $25, which one would you buy?”
My sermon title
for today, "Where do you wear?" is based on Where Are You Wearing, the title of a book written by a
young man named Kelsey Timmerman. In it he describes how he embarked on a
global tour to the countries, factories, and people that make our clothes. He
writes: “One day while staring at a pile of clothes on the floor, I noticed the
tag of my favorite t-shirt: MADE IN HONDURAS.
I read the tag.
My mind wandered.
A quest was born.”
Earlier, we saw
our children as they looked at the tags of their clothing and tried to imagine who
the people were who made them. Maybe their parents will help them look up on
the web the name of the brand, and maybe they can find out where the clothing
is made and even who made it. They might even think to themselves that when
they get older, they might like to do what Kelsey did and travel around the world
to different places.
Kelsey is no
radical activist, he didn’t do this for a newspaper expose, I don’t know if he
is even a Unitarian Universalist! He didn’t think at first about creating a
sustainable and just world, - in fact he really didn’t know what to expect when
he decided to become a ‘consumer on a quest’…except that he was finishing college,
he didn’t want to become engaged to his girlfriend yet, he didn’t want to grow
up yet. With a degree in anthropology he set off in eager anticipation to meet
people who lived in exotic faraway locations very different from his home in
the flat fields of Ohio. He did first go to Honduras, but it was more of a
beach bum experience, although he did meet a worker from the factory that made his t-shirt.
But the idea
would not let go of him, even when he went back home, got engaged, bought a
home and a flat-screen tv. So he took out a second mortgage and went into the
world of the globalized garment industry. Kelsey says that
he’d learned about globalization in school and had negatively associated it
with the problems Americans faced when factories closed and work went overseas.
He’d heard the term ‘sweatshop’ in sociology class, and had the image of “dark,
sweaty, abusive, dehumanizing, evil sweatshops” (4). But his travels made him
an engaged consumer, aware of the complexity of the garment industry. He asks
“What are we to do as consumers? If we buy garments made in some developing
country, we are contributing to an industry built on laborers whose wages and
quality of life would be unacceptable to us. But if we don’t, the laborers
might lose their jobs.” (10)
One place Kelsey
went was to Bangladesh, because that was where his favorite underwear came from
– they were faded boxer shorts with a Christmas ornament design on them, with the words ‘Jingle These’! What he found was
not the exact factory – there were too many. But he was treated like a rock
star – being a blond, blue-eyed foreigner, he was a real rarity. He met village
elders and the village chairman, who sent out for soft drinks and cookies; he
was challenged to play kabbadi, an amazingly fast-paced game on a court where
you try to reach your opponents baseline while chanting "kabbadi, kabbadi." The villagers let Kelsey win.
Then he met an
underwear business executive, and then was taken to a few factories. Kelsey
comments that for him, the true meaning of the word ‘sweatshop’ really comes
from the intense heat that hit him as he entered, especially in the color dye
factory where furnaces helped to set the color. But then he met some of the
young workers, teenagers using wooden sticks to help push the cloth into the
furnaces, others who prepared rolls of thread for feeding into machines. And here is
where Kelsey began to reflect uneasily on what he saw, and contrasting the
scene with how American children live.
Kelsey met many
workers in his travels: Arifa from Bangladesh, who worked at a garment factory
and hoped to make enough money to support her family so that she is not forced
to send another child to work in Saudi Arabia – one of her sons who is 18 is
there, and he sends half his paycheck home to her each month. He makes $146 a
month. In China, at the factory
where his flipflops were made Kelsey met a husband and wife, who, because they
need to pay off debt, work long hours and rarely see their son. He even went
into a Wal-Mart near Guangzhou; he was greeted by a Wal-Mart greeter and saw
flat-screen tvs that cost over a thousand dollars. He saw Barbies that were
Caucasian, and the speakers in the dairy section were blaring the Queen anthem
‘We Will Rock You”. And he spoke with a store manager and asked him, “Some
people back home won’t shop at Wal-mart because most of their products are made
in China. Do people in China not shop at Wal-Mart because it is an American
company?” (208)
He was told no,
and that Wal-Mart was an exciting place to work. Because more and more Chinese
are moving from rural to urban areas there will be more Wal-Marts to
accommodate their consumer needs.
Interesting that
Wal-Mart was in the news just before Christmas because of a factory fire in
Bangladesh. The fire killed over one hundred workers who were making clothes
for Wal-mart .According to a Huffington Post report, Bangladeshi factories
often ignore safety precautions in order to supply major retailers in the US
and Europe (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/27/walmart-bangladesh-factory-fire_n_2197441.html) - this fire was caused
when an exit door was locked, but also fire extinguishers didn’t work. When a
fire alarm went off the workers were told to stay at their machines, and they
became trapped or jumped from windows eight floors down to their deaths. This
sounds depressingly familiar.
In 1911 a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in
New York City took the lives of 146 young immigrant workers; the youngest was
only 14 years old. Fire inspections and safety precautions were woefully inadequate at
the time. Survivors spoke about how they tried to open the ninth floor doors to
the stairs. They and many others afterwards believed they were deliberately
locked by the factory owners, who’d claimed in the past that because workers
stole materials they needed to lock the exit doors. Even if the workers got out
onto the ninth floor fire escape, it bent under the weight of the factory
workers trying to escape the fire. “Others waited at the windows for the rescue
workers only to discover that the firefighters' ladders were several stories
too short and the water from the hoses could not reach the top floors. Many
chose to jump to their deaths rather than to burn alive.” (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/story/fire.html)
The Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire at least led “to the transformation
of the labor code of New York State, and to the adoption of fire safety
measures that served as a model for the whole country”; and the desperate
working conditions drove workers to form unions, such as the International
Ladies' Garment Workers Union.
A century later, “Recent studies conducted by the U.S. Department of
Labor found that 67% of Los Angeles garment factories and 63% of New York
garment factories violate minimum wage and overtime laws. Ninety-eight percent
of Los Angeles garment factories have workplace health and safety problems
serious enough to lead to severe injuries or death.” (http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/story/sweatshopsStrikes.html)
So what can we do, when we know that even here in the US working
conditions are still not ideal? Remember the
question I asked about how you would choose between buying a piece of clothing
for $20 but not knowing where it was made, or buying one that s certified as
not being made in a sweatshop for $25? A poll by the University of Maryland’s
Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 61% of those polled said
they would pay $5 more for the piece certified as not being made in a
sweatshop.
Maybe we can work with the industry to produce a new labeling system
that would tell us about the working conditions…except that there are problems
with that, like the changing conditions of factories when they’re bought by new
owners.
In Where Are You Wearing? Kelsey suggests that we ask ourselves what kind of consumers we are: if
we are bargain hunters who just want a good deal, then we are not concerned
with who made our clothes or where they were made. If we are patriotic
consumers who just want to buy American, there are companies like American
Apparel that sell only American clothing and give their workers fair wages and
benefits. And if we want clothes that are made by workers who get fair
treatment and a living wage, we can find them online at sites like No Sweat
Apparel.
When we talk
about sustainability and the ‘unequal burden of economic and environmental
injustices that exist on our planet, maybe we need to think about being
consumers who make a low-impact on the environment and buy secondhand clothing
or even make our own clothes. But in today’s
world, whatever kinds of consumers we’ve been in the past, we can become
engaged consumers who base our buying decisions on our research.
Last fall, I
gave this book to the students in my Intercultural Communication class as an
assignment. They were asked to research the origins of some of the typical
items of clothing that they wear. And most of them were very surprised at what
they found out. They were shocked that some of the most popular brands are not
the most ethical when it comes to how the companies treat their workers or the
earth. As teens many of them had purchased clothes from Aeropostale or
Abercrombie and Fitch.
In a study done
on the people who manufacture Aeropostale clothing, Geoffrey Vollmer found that
some of their clothing was produced in Sri Lanka, where the average wage is
2500 rupies a month, the equivalent of 32 US dollars. The main workforce of Sri
Lanka’s garment industry are single young women, and factories typically have
poor working condition. Vollmer fund that ‘in most factories workers only get
30 minutes for a lunch break, less than enough time to eat lunch and go to the
toilet. In fact in 2002
the government of Sr Lanka made laws that force women to work more overtime, up
to 60 hours; and they also are forced to use restroom tokens for their restroom
breaks. Sexual harassment is frequent, and occupational health and safety
practices are either poor or almost nonexistent. (http://www.units.muohio.edu/ath175/student/vollmega/index.html
)
According to the
International Labor Rights Forum, Abercrombie and Fitch has the dubious honor
of having made the Top Ten Sweatshop Hall of Fame in 2010: clothing is
manufactured at the Alta Mode factory in the Phillippines, and employees of the
factory tried to form a union to address concerns. On the day when the worker’s
union was to be certifies all of the more than 100 members and officer were
placed on forced leave. Abercrombie and Fitch does not have a code of conduct
and has employed factory inspectors who have missed or not reported safety
issues.
Some of us might
buy Hanes or LL Bean products. They too appear in the Sweatshop Hall of Fame
because of their use of cotton from Uzbekistan. The Uzbeck
government has mandated children as young as 7 to work in cotton fields during
the late summer harvest, even if they miss the start of the school year. More
than 25 companies have committed to boycotting the use of Uzbeck cotton, but
although Hanes and LLBean have been contacted about the issue they refuse to
address it. (http://madeinusachallenge.com/2011/abercrombie-fitch/
)
Kelsey suggests
visiting the websites of companies who make products you’re interested in to
see if they monitor the factories that make them. He says that the Fair Labor
Association is an organization that companies can affiliate with; Patagonia Inc
belongs to the FLA and on its website has a feature called The Footprint
Chronicles. You can trace the footprint a product leaves on the environment – from
the raw materials used to make it, to the manufacturing and distribution of it.
You can also go to Greenpages.org to find clothing companies that are helping
to grow a ‘green economy for people and the planet’.
When we become
engaged consumers, we will choose companies whose values echo ours when we
decide on what role we want shopping to play in our lives. We as Unitarian
Universalists have the Seventh Principle to guide us when we are reflecting on
our roles as consumers: the interdependent web of life, of which we are a part,
is never more apparent when we look into where we wear. It helps us to
see our shared humanity with those workers who sewed your jacket or colored
this scarf.
As Kelsey says
in the conclusion of his book, “When I walk into my closet, I think about the
hundreds – if not thousands – of people around the world who had a hand in
making my clothes. Jeans are no longer just jeans, shirts are no longer just
shirts, shoes no longer just shoes, clothes are no longer just clothes. Each is
an untold story.” (243)
May the stories
our clothes tell us open our hearts and minds and may we be moved to do our
part to create sustainable communities for ourselves and our children.
Gaye W. Ortiz
April 21 2013
