More awful news about apparel factories... scary and sad. What are your thoughts on the social responsibility of Canadian clothing sales outlets? (This is very pertinent to the Grade 8 "Geographie" program.)
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/bangladesh-garment-factory-collapse-kills-least-87-175738741.html
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6 comments:
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Emily and Shiloh: You guys are awesome! Thanks for posting the vids!
Wow, what happened in Bangladesh is absolutely awful. It really made me think of our social responsibilities as consumers. I did some research, and I discovered that a lot of the clothes/items that are sold in Canada are manufactured in third world countries. I found this saddening, because the workers in developing countries are paid incredibly low, unfair wages to work in these sweatshops and factories, which have very poor working conditions. In the future, when I am buying things, I’ll try to look at the tags/labels to see where it was manufactured and if it was made with fair trade. I think that Canadian citizens should take more notice of these issues, and do things to force companies to be more ethical. We can take action by trying to only buy things from socially responsible brands and by basically boycotting the companies whose products are not made using fair trade/try to make them change their socially irresponsible ways.
This situation reminds me of when we were learning about the Chinese railway workers in Canada in the 1880s. These Chinese immigrants helped construct the Canadian Pacific Railway, and they worked in extremely poor working conditions and were paid awfully low.
I think that this could relate back to the Bangladesh incident. After the CPR was completed, many Chinese were left with no work and no longer seen as useful to both the CPR and the Canadian government. I wonder if this could be true with people who are in need of jobs in these countries – I mean, could eliminating these companies’ factories in these countries be eliminating job opportunities for the most desperate of people? It leads me to question if this whole issue might be a complex problem. Although I feel that placing these people in an unsafe factory is inhumane and absolutely wrong, could not buying these clothes put these people out of work completely? Also, we would not place our Canadian or American workers at safety risks, so why would we do it to people of developing nations?
I came across this recent news article. There’s a video too (within the article), which shows this lady asking people if they’ll be more careful of the brands they buy (checking WHERE and HOW they are manufactured) after hearing about the devastating incident that occured in Bangladesh.
Link: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/pulseofcanada/wake-bangladesh-factory-collapse-more-careful-brands-buy-132231805.html
Katie: Thank you for posting! Very well expressed comments! It is indeed a very complex issue. The subject of working conditions in developing nations certainly is something people should be made more aware of. It's difficult to make the right choices, much more difficult though if one isn't aware of the issues involved.
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