Why Ethical Shopping Must get Smarter

by Devin Chesney, Founder of FairWear

Michael Hobbes, a human rights consultant in Denmark recently wrote a post on Highline entitled the Myth of the Ethical Shopper, and then a follow up post on Huffington Post, So you Say Your an Ethical Shopper in which he argues that consumer movements are powerless to stop sweatshop labor in the garment industry.

Now you might expect the Founder of a social enterprise building a consumer movement to end sweatshop labor in the garment industry to disagree with him, but first let me point out what he gets right.

His analysis of how the modern garment industry works is thorough and well researched. He identifies many of the key challenges inherent to modern globalized industry:

· Dispersed sourcing by multiple layered middlemen that both diffuses the moral imperatives felt by any particular actor and makes transparency nearly impossible.

· The geographic remoteness of both brands and consumers to their products sources places limits on the actions they can take to mitigate the problem.

· Many developing countries have a broad cultural ethic that prioritizes encouraging any form of economic activity over individual human rights. In this sense they tend to see complaining about working conditions as #firstworldproblems.

These are indeed real challenges in desperate search of answers, and in some ways I sympathize with his fervor. My discussions with people about socially responsible business in the clothing industry inevitably circles back to the TOMS shoes example. This model of socially conscious consumption is mostly an empty promise and it should be rightly derided. It is not particularly helpful at improving anyone’s life and it overly simplifies complex issues of poverty and economics. It is a fantastic bit of marketing, but a terrible economic development plan.

His solution is instead to highlight the incentive structure that local institutions place on industry (the example he gives is of Brazil’s pig iron industry) and use political power in the form of trade agreements to encourage further action in this area.

But he has setup a false choice. There is no reason that advocating for better trade agreements that address worker’s rights precludes us from finding better ways to put our consumption choices to use. What we must do is find a better approach because our established paradigm is deeply flawed.

The example we have built at FairWear is a perfect counterpoint to his argument. Doing business around the world has no more inherent moral complexity than a local small business, it is simply more operationally complex. A small business would not use a factory in its own town that it suspected of enslaving its workers. It would seek out and establish relationships based on trust and accountability.

We manufacture our t-shirts in Bangladesh with a trusted partner, a subsidiary of BRAC the worlds largest NGO native to the developing world. They have well established standards that comply with fair trade principles and they are serious about enforcing them. Their profits go directly to support economic development programs and they have no incentive to oppress people on the one hand in order to serve them on the other.

You see our belief that we can do better is simple and straightforward. The mistake that Hobbes makes is to deny individual human agency in the face of vast problems. He argues that institutions of global commerce are static and unchanging and they must therefore be the only way to do business. A plane ticket to Bangladesh is around $1,000, and an international phone call or Skype is far cheaper.

If you care enough to pay a little more, to go directly to the source, to truly know who you are working with, then accomplishing it is not some heroic feat, it is simply a mundane act of moral responsibility.

What the world needs is not another cynical critique that deems our best intentions meaningless. Instead it requires a clear eyed view of exactly what it is we are undertaking together and how we intend to get there. When I founded FairWear, I spoke with around 100 experts in the field. I interviewed staffers from major human rights organizations, labor organizers in the field, international human rights lawyers, CSR staff from clothing labels, operations directors for large established brands and many others. I wanted to know the enemy I was fighting inside and out, to stare it in the eye and find its weaknesses. Sadly many of our most prominent social enterprises were first conceived by consulting marketing professionals or newly minted MBAs, not those who dedicate their lives to addressing the deep and complex problems we are setting out to solve.

Hobbes and I would likely agree that social enterprise has thus far been mostly noted for its neat and tidy answers to what are actually complicated problems. The world is unimaginably vast and messy and making it better is not for the light-hearted. But we can do better, and FairWear is but one example among many next generation social enterprises that take the problems of the world seriously, grit their teeth and get down to the real work of building engines of change powered by consumers who care enough to put their money where their good intentions are. The more of those consumers there are, the more socially conscious businesses will thrive and transform our world for the better.