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)

Arthur Fournier, on the Huffington Post, responded to Dan Harris’ investigation into child slavery in Haiti in a recent Nightline special (see previous post on Human Goods).

Slavery, he says, is only the “tip of the ‘consequences-of-poverty’ iceberg”:

Given how little most Americans understand about Haiti and how this lack of understanding during the early years of AIDS led to stigmatization of Haitians that persists to this day, this is no small point - exploitation of vulnerable people has nothing to do with ethnicity or culture and everything to do with poverty and the survival choices poor people are forced to make …

Solutions, therefore must address conditions that make rural life insufferable - poor agricultural productivity, lack of education, high maternal and child mortality and lack of health care. Such models do exist.

Fournier is correct in identifying the scope of the problem (a scope so large that it’s questionable that Harris could have covered it in that much depth in a brief episode about Haiti).

The Not for Sale Campaign launched a tool they’re calling a Slavery Map, which allows people to report incidents of slavery around the United States and the world.  You can click on any area and see where cases of human trafficking have been reported, including who reported them and what happened.

It’s a clever way to make learning about modern-day slavery interactive, since you can create an account and publish an incident if you encounter one.

(source: The Economist)

The Economist published a nice concise response to the release of the 2008 Trafficking in Persons report released by the State Department. It gives a good overview of what the global situation is and a very brief definition of what the report is supposed to do.

The State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons released its 8th annual Trafficking in Persons report last week.

Since the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act was passed and the TIP office was created, it has annually ranked all the countries in the world (besides the U.S., quite conspicuously) on a four-tier system that works like this:
TIER 1
Countries whose governments fully comply with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s (TVPA) minimum standards
TIER 2
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards
TIER 2 WATCH LIST
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards
AND:
a) The absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; or
b) There is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or
c) The determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring themselves into
compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to
take additional future steps over the next year
TIER 3
Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so

The report is worth reading, to get a sense of how the U.S. government frames the fight against human trafficking. But keep in mind that it’s a tool, and a controversial one. Some critics argue that methods for gathering the information from country to country are not clear, and we don’t necessarily know how accurate a reflection the report is on a country by country basis.

Moreover, its purpose gets a little shoved around by other geopolitical motivations. For example, check out some of the Tier 3 list (countries that face potential sanctions). Many of them have been on there for years:

ALGERIA, BURMA, CUBA, IRAN, NORTH KOREA, SUDAN, SYRIA.

Undoubtedly, these countries do have terrible problems when it comes to trafficking. But we’re not really burning any bridges with them when we threaten them with sanctions on slavery grounds.

Meanwhile, India, which has more slaves than the rest of the world combined, remains on a “watch list,” where we can shake our finger a bit at them but all other diplomatic causes basically trump slavery. Which is not the TIP office’s fault, it’s just the way things go, I guess.

Click below to listen to Condaleezza Rice’s remarks on the 2008 report:

(source: Pravda)

Pravda reported that a formerly homeless man escaped slave owners who had been holding him in a barn, forcing him to work with other slaves on a farm.  Authorities shadowed the man until he was caught by his pursuers at a bus stop, and then followed them all back to the farm to discover this:

The policemen visited the people who kept the man in a suburb. They found the slave with his neck chained and tightened with bolts and wires. The prisoner was bound to a metal tube by the other end of the chain.

Apparently, the perpetrators had been luring homeless people into slavery.

Recently I had coffee with Ben Skinner, author of the new book “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern-Day Slavery.” We talked about his experience as a writer communicating the grief of others, about why the anti-slavery movement does make economic sense, and what’s being done to fight it. The conversation is broken into a couple of different articles for the Medill News Service. Just click on them to read more.

PART I: Eradicating slavery is not just moral, it makes economic sense too

The Roman Empire, at its height, was home to 2 million slaves. During the peak of antebellum slavery, 4 million people living in the American South had been bought or bred into slavery.

But in today’s world, we leave those figures in the dust. There are as many as 27 million slaves in the modern global village.

Author E. Benjamin Skinner dedicated the last 5 years of his life to finding out why. His new book, “A Crime So Monstrous: Face to Face With Modern-Day Slavery,” spans five continents, exploring what the lives of today’s slaves look like, who it is that’s enslaving them, and the role they play in the world economy.

“The devaluation of human life is incredibly pronounced,” Skinner writes, observing the gulf between the value of an American slave in 1850 (about $40,000, adjusted for inflation) and the value of a 9-year-old Haitian girl he is able to bargain down to $50.

Although he didn’t actually buy her, it helped him learn how recognizing and understanding slavery is like going “through the looking glass.” He sat down with Medill Reports to talk about what it looks like from the other side.

(READ MORE…)

Skinner got his first real exposure to modern-day slavery while working for Newsweek in South Sudan. (Photo courtesy of Ben Skinner)

PART II: One author gives voice to the voiceless, and finds his own along the way

E. Benjamin Skinner has stood in the parched desert of Southern Sudan, where thousands of people over the past two decades have fallen prey to violent slave-raiders.

He’s waited in the murky courtyard of a makeshift Romanian brothel, noticing the way sewage squeezed through clear plastic piping on the outside of a building where pimps were forcing makeup onto a mentally challenged girl they tried to sell him.

He’s witnessed the way Haitian child slaves double as sex toys because they’re “there for that,” and the way generations of Indian untouchables are bonded to the endless sweaty work of smashing rocks into sand.

And he’s seen how these slaves are sometimes taken to the United States, too—raped and enslaved in a Florida suburb.

He has seen all of these things. He has known those who survived them, and those who probably won’t. And now he’s stepped up to the challenge of how to tell their stories to the world.

Skinner talked to Medill Reports about the writer’s responsibility to communicate suffering with sensitivity and truth.

(READ MORE…)

(map by Christa Hillstrom and Kevin Janowiak)

Part III: Go deeper

The more in depth response to the question of economic sustainability:

Medill Reports: Here in Chicago, the Archdiocese has an anti-trafficking task force and one leader has pointed out what an economically sustainable industry slavery is. And on the other hand, he said, fighting it is not economically sustainable, it takes huge amounts of commitment, some reprioritizing of resources, and it has to be made an issue. Is that something you see as a challenge?

Ben Skinner: I think we have to change our conception of it here. We have to look at fighting slavery, and harnessing some of the lessons that the good sustainable development organizations have learned in fighting absolute poverty. And again, fighting the two things are different, but there are many, many things that are similar. I mean, we’re talking about access to credit, and credit that doesn’t come from a human trafficker. And so, we’re talking about micro-credit organizations in some instances, and we’re talking about mini-credit organizations, because these people will have no collateral whatsoever. These are not people that would normally be found by the Grameen Bank or by BRAC or by these other organizations that deal with this.

But at the same time, what I found in Northern India were examples of credit unions that had grown up around these quarries that were entirely self-sustaining. The key to freedom here was there would be one or two people were able to pull together, you know, just one or two rupees… In other words, individually they would not be getting paid anything beyond subsistence but collectively they might be able to save one or two rupees a month. And they put that into a collective fund and eventually come up with enough money for one of them to buy a plot of land or something like this. I mean, a tiny plot of land. And then from that plot of land, that’s a piece of collateral. There’s also a much more effective way of dong this. This is what was going on in the 90s and it took years in order to get two people out of slavery, and then those one or two people out of slavery could help the others organize.

The much more effective way of doing it is to get good legal representation that presses the cause of the slaves with the district magistrates in India, and other local officials in other parts of South Asia, and says, Ok here’s the situation: You’ve got these quarry contractors who have this lease from the Raja to quarry on this land. The thing is, it’s forest land, it’s not owned by the Raja. The largest landowner in India is the state. So these quarry contractors are there illegally.

Now even if you’re not going to stop quarrying from going on in forest land, which you should be, let’s make this fair and give the workers, the people who have lived here for generations, title to the land (or anyway, in this case lease to the land). So this is not even a question of their owning the land – it should be a question of their owning the land—but it’s getting lease to the land so they can work it. And once they get that, then they can keep the products of their own labor. And it’s a legal process that, you know, given the Indian courts it could drag on for decades, or if there are good lawyers who press the case and if you get the right magistrates involved you can get this done in a matter of months. In the cases I looked at in India, they managed to get this through in a matter of months.

So, legal rights, property rights, matter a great deal. If the private property rights of the poorest of the poor are respected, recognized, and enshrined by the state, if those who have squatted on that land for generations are given title to that land, they will for the first time in their lives have access to an asset. And with that asset, they can leverage capital. They can leverage credit. And slowly, they can begin to build wealth and pull themselves out of slavery.

MR: I imagine that people here, when they hear how relatively little money is needed to pull people out of slavery, want to know what they can do to contribute. What do you tell people?

BS: Well, the simplest thing, even if you’re not going to dedicate your life to this or you’re not going to go overseas to free and rehabilitate slaves, the critical thing is contributing to some of the very good organizations that do work on this. And the organizations that have dealt with modern-day slavery, some of them have been around for centuries, in the case of Anti-Slavery International. Anti-Slavery International is the oldest human rights organization in the world. And I’ve been really involved with Free the Slaves.

Read an excerpt of Ben’s book

On the Immigration Here & There blog, Elise Barthet explores the trend of Lebanese families purchasing foreign maids, a symbol of economic prestige. In Lebanon, Barthet writes, buying a maid is as common as buying a car: “And just like cars, maids are imported.”

Although the women often come through legal agencies and are somewhat trained for the domestic work, they frequently have their passports confiscated when they arrive and suffer physical and sexual abuse. According to Barthet,

Beirut employment agencies promote them as merchandise or, in extreme case, as pets. They offer advice about which nationalities are supposedly docile, easy to maintain or “harder to break.”

Pets????

That’s a first, even for me.

This Indonesian maid reportedly got gangrene after being tied up in Saudi Arabia for a month.

(Reuters photo, Source: BBC News)

The BBC reported on the decision of a Saudi court to overturn a ruling that would prosecute employers who physically abused their Indonesian maid.

The maid, Nour Miyati, allegedly suffered from gangrene after being tied up and left without food for a month in 2005, according to the report.

Her employer was originally sentenced to “35 lashes,” but the sentence was overturned and instead Miyati will just be paid $670 in damages.

Human Rights Watch is challenging the government to impose a heavier sentence. The BBC quotes them saying it “sends a dangerous message to Saudi employers that they can beat domestic workers with impunity and that victims have little hope of justice”

The U.S. seems to be moving a little bit on slavery prosecutions this month.

• In Lexington, Kentucky, human trafficking suspect Calvin Walker has been indicted by a grand jury for forcing two domestically trafficked women into strip club work, as this video report on KKYT in Lexington shows. It’s usually difficult to prove cases of trafficking in the U.S., even when women are forced across state lines or national borders, and when law enforcement nails traffickers they often end up charging them with other offenses.  It’s relatively unusual to prosecute for human trafficking
• The Immokalee drama continues in South Florida.  Jose Navarrete pled guilty to human slavery, according to WINK News.  Navarrete is accused of forcing Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants to work without pay, sleep in box trucks and shacks, and pay for food and showers in Immokalee.

• Two owners of a Denver sushi restaurant are accused of holding workers in “indentured servitude” for years, ABC Channel 7 in Denver reports.