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Samenvatting leadership and ethics, final (300333-B-6)
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Leadership and ethicsLecture 5
The true cost movie – clothing industry, fashion market, capitalism, modern slavery
What are the problems identified with the fashion industry?
- Exploitation
- Environmental damage
- Health impact
- Fashion cycle is changing fast
- Prices is pushed down
What should we do?
- Demanging Transparancy
- Change habits
Documentary: The True Cost – Clothing Industry, Fashion Market, Capitalism, Modern
Slavery
The environmental and social impact of the fashion industry
Focus on big business interest
If you go to a store and you benchmark the price of a garment over the last 20 years, you will find that
there is actually a deflation of the product (i.e., the price has gone down over time) while the cost of
production has gone up. The most production we outsource, the cheaper prices have become on the
clothing we buy, making way for a whole new model, known as Fast Fashion.
Globalized production means that all of the making of goods has been outsources to low-cost
economies, where wages are very low and kept low.
- Those at the top of the value chain get to choose where the products are being made (and they
get to switch whenever they want
Dhaka – Bangladesh (7.15 min)
Either the price of the product need to go up, or manufacturers have to shut down or cut corners to
make it work.
Cutting corners and disregarding safety measures had become an accepted part of doing business in
this new model.
An event just outside of Dhaka, Bangladesh brought a hidden side of fashion to front page news:
- The worst garment-industry disaster in history
- An eight-story building (Rana Plaza) has collapsed near the capital of Dhaka, killing hundreds
(1129) of people
- Factory owners ignored an order to evacuate
o The workers had already pointed out to the management the cracks in the building.
The building was structurally unsafe, and yet they’d been forced back in.
- Garment workers in Bangladesh paying the price for cheap clothing
- The risk of the supply chain problems in Fast Fashion are being carried by those who are most
vulnerable and the worst paid
,Three of the four worst tragedies in history of fashion had all happened in the last year:
- Ali Enterprises (289 dead)
- Tazreen Fashion (112 dead)
- Rana Plaza (1129)
As the death toll rose, so did the profits generated. The year following the disaster at Rana Plaza was
the industry’s most profitable of all time.
This enormous, rapacious industry, that is generating so much profit for a handful of people,
why is it unable to support millions of its workers properly? Why is it that it is not able to
guarantee their safety (=essential human right) while generating these tremendous profits?
This low-wage manufacturing (= so-called sweatshops), they’re not just the least bad option workers
have today. They’re part of the very process that raises living standards and leads to higher wages and
better working conditions over time.
Sweatshops
The alternatives available for these workers are much worse than working in the sweat shop.
People Tree (Fair Trade Company)
There are people who believe in a way of making and selling clothing that does generate economic
growth, but without taking such an enormous toll.
Cotton
Cotton is responsible for most of the clothing worn by the world today. As our appetite for fashion
grows, the cotton plant itself is being re-engineered to keep up (industrialization and intensification of
agriculture).
Nitrogen Fertilizers (min 27)
By patenting these genetically modified plants, Monsanto has become the largest seed and chemical
corporation in history.
- ‘If a poor farmer has to go to Monsanto to buy (expensive) seeds every time.’ So farmers get
into debt when they get the seed. They get into deeper debt because it doesn’t deliver on the
promise of controlling pests, so they have to buy more pesticides.
- Seed monopoly
The tragedy with chemicals, whether it’s fertilizers or pesticides, is that they are what has been called
ecological narcotics:
- The more you use them, the more you need to use them
- The soil will become contaminated
- India: the largest user of pesticides
- Dr. Pritpal Singh has been studying the effects of these chemicals on human health, and his
reports show dramatic rise in the number of birth defects, cancers and mental illness in the
region.
o People are facing severe mental retardation and physical handicaps
- This resulted in the largest recorded wave of (farmer) suicides in history
Materialism and advertising
The more the people are focused on materialistic values, the more they say that money, image, status
and possessions are important to them, the less happy they are, the more depressed and anxious they
are.
All these kinds of psychological problems tend to go up as materialistic values go up.
,It is important to understand that advertising is a species/category of propaganda.
The reason that advertising works:
- (smart) advertisers are trying to tie the consumption of their product to a message that
suggests that your needs will be satisfied by consuming this thing.
- It wants you to believe that you will look wonderful in that thing.
- The message is always the same thing: ‘The way to solve the problems in our life, is through
consumption.’
Everything we need is very costly (home, studies, insurance). On the other side, there is a source of
consolation. The Fast Fashion industry results in people getting poorer and poorer, because buying all
these clothes will take you further away from the things that really matter.
Consumptionism
There are two kind of products:
1. Products to use (washing machines, cars). You buy these and use them for a long time.
2. Products that you use up (chewing gum, cigarettes, perishables)
Consumptionism is about getting people to treat the things they use, as the things they use up.
Customers instead of consumers
‘Customers who recognize the impact of their consumption. They recognize that, as consumers, they
are part of the problem.’
Business through advertising has pulled society along into a belief that happiness is based on stuff.
You may not feel that you are having a direct impact by buying this organic shirt, but the impact you
are creating is in the bigger picture in the world at large (especially in the community where the
cotton’s grow).
Problems in current model
- It is all about the profit
- Fashion today is the number two most polluting industry on earth (second only to the oil
industry)
- The alarming thing is that not only is fashion using a huge amount of natural resources and
creating staggering environmental impacts, these natural resources and this impact is often not
even measured.
- When everything is concentrated on making profits for the big corporations, what you see it
that human rights, the environment, workers’ rights get lost alltogether. You see that workers
are increasingly exploited because the price of everything is pushed down just to satisfy this
impulse to accumulate capital.
- We need to acknowledge that human capital is part of this miraculous formula
Eco Age
Combodia – Phnom Pheng
A demonstration to demand a minimum wage of $160 was violently cracked down by the government
and as a result 5 workers were killed, 25 were arrested and more then 40 were injured.
Capitalism
Capitalism couldn’t be questioned. It is the reason why the fashion industry looks as it does today.
, ‘Our economic system is one of consumer capitalism, and that is why the government needs to have
consumption at very high levels.
What we need:
- Is a revolution of values
- To stop treating people like things
- To stop treating people in ways that were just about profit
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