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Archive for the ‘production chains’ Category

Cuckoo for cocoa: Valentine’s chocolate in the age of unfair trade

Posted in activism, africa, americas, awareness, children, consumption, corporate responsibility, fair trade, food, labor, production chains, united states on February 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

(image by the International Labor Rights Forum)
The absurdity of the fact that many of us in the first world show our love for one another with products produced by the blood, sweat, and tears of others ought to give all of us pause.  Valentine’s Day offers a unique opportunity to probe into the reality of [...]

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Make the connections: Exploitation, consumption, and change

Posted in activism, awareness, consumption, global, make the connections, policy, production chains, video on February 6, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

From Annie Leonard and Yes Magazine:
I’ve spent much of the past two decades visiting factories where our stuff is made and dumps where it is disposed of around the world. After years of seeing firsthand the often hidden environmental, social, and health impacts of all the stuff we consume, I’ve developed a sort of neurosis: [...]

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Children of Industry: South Asia’s child labor dilemma

Posted in asia, bangladesh, children, consumption, india, labor, policy, prevention, production chains, prosecution on November 5, 2009 | 1 Comment »

These are the hands of an 8-year-old …

Child laborer in a Dhaka garment factory (photo: G.M.B. Akash – click for more)
The ubiquitous smile of the poor should not be taken at face value; it conceals inexhaustible grief,
Jeremy Seabrook cautions in his September piece in the New Internationalist. The longtime reporter on poverty in South Asia [...]

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Sweet Dreams: The battle for the chocolate trade

Posted in africa, awareness, children, corporate responsibility, cote d'ivoire, families, food, global economics, labor, policy, prevention, production chains, video on October 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Democracy Now! interviewed Free the Slaves founder Kevin Bales, a lifelong abolitionist and author of several pivotal works in the corpus of today’s anti-slavery literature, including Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy, and the recent The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America. He defined slavery for interviewer Amy Goodman as,
“One [...]

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Rare gems, cheap lives: Tanzanite’s disposable child miners

Posted in africa, children, consumption, corporate responsibility, families, global economics, labor, production chains, tanzania, video on October 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »

“I’m looking at a piece right now, and it’s flashing red.  It is very exotic,”
London jewelry designer Stephen Webster told Time’s Sarah Larenaudie in 2007.  “In top-end jewelry now, the client is way over branded luxury goods.  They are looking for limited availability or one of a kind.”
But when it comes to mining Tanzanite, the [...]

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Light up: Malawi’s child laborers poisoned by export tobacco fields

Posted in africa, children, consumption, corporate responsibility, fair trade, global economics, labor, malawi, production chains on September 20, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Multinational tobacco giants have been long-vilified for marketing cancer-causing cigarettes for consumption by children in Europe and the United States, and increasingly in the developing world. But even as public outrage has slightly softened the aggressive marketing agendas in the West (or at least rendered them less overt), less attention has been paid to the [...]

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All that glitters: Child labor and Pakistani bangle-making

Posted in asia, awareness, children, consumption, global economics, labor, pakistan, production chains on October 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »

IRIN recently reported on the International Labor Organization’s study of child labor in Pakistan’s bangle industry.  According to the study, children must hunch over hot stoves for average 12-hour days in order to produce glass bangles.
Pakistan’s Federal Bureau of Statistics claims 3.3 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are currently involved in [...]

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