Buy Right

Many powerful boycotting campaigns have successfully impeded the growth of slavery and other forms of exploitation in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.  In the 1980s in South Africa, a powerful, multi-national divestment campaign brought the Apartheid government to its knees.  The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida successfully used boycotts to insist that Taco Bell (2005), McDonald’s (2007), and Burger King (2008) all pay fair prices for the tomatoes they use in their fast food, which are picked by underpaid, exploited immigrant laborers who were making as little as $10,000 a year, though they were performing full-time labor.  These campaigns produce lasting changes for labor standards and help to end egregious forms of bad governance.  As good citizens, it is crucial that we keep up-to-date on these movements, as our “purchasing power” is indeed a form of power we can use to affect change in the world.

When it comes to modern day slavery, however, boycotting and divestment are not always reliable or appropriate responses to the problem.  Unfortunately, slavery exists in much of the supply chain of many of the most basic products we consume.  Products that may have been produced by slaves can be found in our cell phones, our jewelry, our clothes, our shoes, our charcoal, our rugs, our gravel, our computers… even in our sugary foods.  In 2009, the US Department of Labor produced a list of products made by child and forced labor -- it's enormous and daunting.  It would be nearly impossible to boycott all of the products that we consume that could have been made, at least in part, by slaves.  

But more importantly, typically, we cannot precisely know to what extent slavery is involved in the production of these products.  In the case of cotton, for instance, only a very very small percentage is grown or harvested by slave labor – perhaps as little as one percent.  Another consideration is that companies might be working to monitor the use of slave labor in their production chain, and so a boycott could actually punish companies that are taking steps to avoid slavery.  The chocolate industry, for instance, has worked to create a Cocoa Protocol that would create systems to ensure that the chocolate being brought to the US is slave-free.  A boycott of all cotton or all chocolate products would actually hurt the vast majority of producers – big and small businesses – that don’t use slave labor. 

So what can a conscientious consumer do?  Instead of boycotting when it is impossible to target a particular producer, company, or retailer, what we need to do is to try to buy wisely.  There are many opportunities to buy Fair Trade products, whether we are buying clothes or food or home furnishings, even at our local stores.  You can also shop at sites like Made By Survivors, which not only sell fair trade, non-slave-made products, but they intentionally employ people who have survived modern day slavery in order to support their rehabilitation and provide them with non-exploitative and lucrative work and skills.  There are ever more opportunities to purchase products that are guaranteed to be slave-free.  Recently, news came out that Emma Watson of Harry Potter fame is endorsing a clothing line that uses only fair trade materials, and she actually took a trip to Bangladesh herself to investigate the production line and to learn more about the labor that goes into the clothes she wears and puts her name on.  

Whenever we can, we should all use our purchasing power to help bring slavery to an end.