Human Goods

(photo source: IKEA)

Robert Young Pelton’s bestselling guide to getting into, out of, and staying alive in the world’s most dangerous places does not include IKEA on a Sunday afternoon. Most people don’t stumble on minefields or receive ransom demands, but you still have to take a deep breath before going inside. Even from the parking lot, your skin starts to prick with the pressurized bustle of crowds and accumulation. Escalators criss-cross through the air above, carrying young couples in summer shorts with crabapple toddlers in tow through a maze of bedroom enclaves with fake books, fake televisions, clothing that is weirdly not for sale but seems shrewdly selected by a stylist for the room’s inhabitants that actually don’t exist.
Most of us are here for two reasons, the first being that there is something we want or think we need, and the second that, as first-world consumers, we have every right to get it. I woke up this morning bemoaning the lack of counter space in my kitchen. I had been intending to get into cooking, just as I had wanted to get into exercising a few months before and so had splurged on a gym that was ritzier than necessary, hoping the airy vibe would inspire me to hit the machines more often. As I attempted to slice bananas into my cereal on a meager plot of linoleum wedged between the microwave and the stove, I figured I’d be much more inspired to chop vegetables that evening if I had a little more space. Maybe a smooth wooden countertop, room to spread out, something comfortable. So I grabbed my keys to go fulfill that vision, a vision made possible by IKEA.
IKEA’s proclaimed mission is to bring aesthetically pleasing, well-designed furniture to everyday people at affordable prices — eye-popping prices, in many cases. I bump along through the shoppers strewn among displays of bathroom mats and living room sets, amassing ideas of how to brighten up a room here and there, or even totally overhaul it on the cheap. I have to make my way through dozens of versions of living space before I reach the faux kitchen sets, and not without feeling an onslaught of materialism ripple through me. That is indeed a neat idea for creating more sitting space in the living room. Maybe I would be happier with desk space like that. And it’s not an astronomical reach, of course. I mean, I’m an everyday person, right?
But there’s a small, sneaky conundrum that creeps into my heart. How come it’s all so cheap, after all? What really makes that possible? I pay extra for fair trade coffee because marketers have made it easy for me to choose a brand that’s fair. So what’s the deal with furniture?

There’s nowhere people like to point accusing fingers more than at corporate America when it comes to catch phrases like “social responsibility.” This shift in consumer values has forced U.S. companies to better account for what happens along their supply chains, and companies like Nike and Wal-Mart have both faced customer boycotts for sketchy labor conditions among the lowest echelons of their production chain.

Robert Strand, a teacher of business ethics at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, researched the Scandinavian approach to corporate responsibility as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Norway. One of his initial mistakes when first exploring the issue was that he was digging around for responsibility clauses as add-ons to already existing corporate policy. American companies seemed to be tacking these gimmicky “extras” on like mad, so he wondered why he wasn’t seeing the same things happen in Norway.

What Strand found was that Scandinavian companies, including IKEA, were committed to a “triple bottom line,” a way of framing success that is not measured by next quarter’s profits alone, but a balance between economic, social, and environmental factors. Strand credits much of this to more entrenched values of social justice in Scandinavian cultures that benefit stakeholders – including employees, communities, and production workers, to name a few – as much as they do shareholders.

With stores in 24 countries throughout the world, IKEA reported $29 billion in revenue last year. Anyone who’s ever been anywhere near Scandinavia knows that that the affluent countries that make it up are anything but cheap. Salaries are high and labor laws generous, so IKEA moved its production to lower-cost regions to produce lower-cost goods. Makes sense.

Except the developing world taps an entirely new well of nightmarish problems when it comes to monitoring human rights and environmental safety. Take, for starters, the “carpet belt” of Uttar Pradesh.
There are 27 million slaves in the world today, and at least half of them live in India. Many are children, and in states like Northern India’s Uttar Pradesh, it’s almost impossible to monitor labor conditions. This is partly due to the fragmentation of production. UNICEF figures identify as many as 525,000 weavers across the belt.

“The production of carpets in India is spread over large geographical areas and divided into many small units,” IKEA spokeswoman Marianne Barner writes. “Sometimes right down to individual looms in villages scattered across the countryside.”

The nature of the beast, then, is that it’s impossible for IKEA to fully monitor the working conditions of those at the bottom of the supply chain. But what’s unique about the blue-and-yellow giant is that it has partnered with organizations like UNICEF to work out strategies to tackle rights violations as best it can, rather than throwing its hands up with the defense that the problem is just too big.
It’s common, when sweatshops and child labor are exposed somewhere in the supply chain of U.S. companies, to reflexively cut off those suppliers like gangrenous appendages that threaten the grail of positive branding. But all too often, this actually further jeapordizes the welfare of children, who are considered stakeholders. They are scuttled from sweatshop to sweatshop, or, if production in the area is completely shut down, some children find themselves involved in survival sex.
IKEA’s corporate social responsibility code is unique in the way it recognizes this complexity – how poverty, exploitation, and lack of education are all interwoven. When IKEA inspectors unearth instances of child labor, instead of severing the connection in a flush of PR anxiety, IKEA works with suppliers to reshape their treatment of children and labor conditions, and even sends the kids to school. It’s about reforming, improving, making good on a genuine value of accountability. Not carefully maintaining a corporate image with hedge-clippers.
Great, I think. Now I don’t feel bad about wanting that new kitchen counter, and being able to get it with a swipe of the card.
Being green and having a social conscience are all too often temporary fads that you can frivolously clip on like earrings, and as I weave through conversations among other IKEA shoppers who sound like they’re toying with greenness as the season’s new accessory, it strikes me, in a sheepish, sinking way, that maybe the corporations are a lot more responsible than we are. Maybe we point fingers at “big this” and “big that” simply because it’s easy.

I sit on the wide hardwood floors of my apartment – beautiful floors that stretch across four rooms for one person – and furrow my eyebrows at the Swedish cartoon instructions on how to assemble my pretty new counter amid an explosion of nuts and bolts, and I realize something. The conundrum, even after assurances of broad-based, sincere and effective corporate efforts that are surely paving goodness in the world, hasn’t resolved itself. It flaps its wings instead of settling, because the whole point is still missing, and my heart knows it. It knows my concern about social responsibility is outwardly focused, that responsible policy provides relief because it requires me to give up nothing. I have license to carry on the way I do with the assurance that I’m not harming anyone. Not really, anyway.
So I do carry on. I set up my counter. I give myself more space and convenience. I don’t learn to brook discomfort, because comfort remains so attainable. I slice those bananas with all the elbow space I need.

(Click here to watch a WCCO interview with Robert Strand)

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