Mixing business with pleasure has never been so much fun!
Earn extra on milk and bananas
92% discount, 1 day delivery
Save 40% when you buy 4!
You have 2 friends with birthdays this week
Hurry and add them on “we’re related.”
Do you know the no 1 mistake people make?
A better theme would make the blog nicer.
This is your last chance.
(I did a mistake today. I logged into a very old e-mail account)
The video isn’t new, but I couldn’t have a blog with a consumption focus and not include it. Because consumption is more than the tangible items we have delivered from online shops or pay for at the till; it is more than clothes and food and holiday flights.
We also consume entertainment. And when we narrow that field a little – to animation, we enter an area where labour issues are rarely in the spotlight. Not even when considering the huge spin-off production associated with popular shows. (I mean, I once gave my little sister a Southpark mug with the soundtrack :”Oh my God, they killed Kenny!”)
So – when Banksy was asked to draw the introduction of a Simpson episode, I knew I would just have to see it. And I did. I wasn’t disappointed. (Fox, however, withdrew the video from youtube, though it is back again now!)
It doesn’t stop with Banksy, however. Comic book author, Guy Delisle, has also published a comic book about his stay in Pyongyang in North Korea where the animation production of his employer was outsourced to.
Before I read his graphic novel, I have to admit, I rarely thought about how or where cartoons were made. Although the book isn’t about the animation industry itself, you still get a fair picture of it as this what brought Delisle to North Korea in the first place. In addition, it also depicts a stay in the probably most isolated country in the world (and I can’t help but think that this is a strange place to outsource your business to).
Delisle admits to probably never going back to North Korea, guessing that he won’t get the warmest welcome if he should return.
You can get a taster of the graphic novel on Amazon.
There was a joke about a person describing Heaven as a place where the police are British, the engineers German, the lovers Italian, the cuisine is French and the Swiss manages it all. In Hell, however, the police are German, the engineering is French and the cuisine British whilst the lovers are Swiss – all under Italian organisation.
But this isn’t about stereotypes. It is about labels. Why? Because I am one of those annoying people who actually read them. Despite the fact that I know the information I want will not be found there – like the answer to the question: “where does this product actually come from? How was it made?”
I want to know these things; because I want to understand the journey behind what I ultimately pay for at the till. Is it likely to have been produced under indecent labour conditions? (Probably). What do the company actually do for transparency? In fact, I was once told off by a fellow student exactly for requesting this type of information in a clothes shop. As I asked “what can you tell me about the conditions under which this shirt was made?” my fellow student hissed and pulled me in the arm. “That guy is really cute,” she raged at me, “and you are embarrassing me!”
For some reason I came home from town both empty handed and alone that day.
It was only later that I realised that labels can be more deceiving than I though; it all depends on how you define “made in”. There is a certain wriggle-room in the regulations here, and they are likely to vary from country to country. To sum it up – a product made in Scandinavia is no guarantee for anything. Here goes:
If I buy a product that is made in for example Germany, it doesn’t really mean that the entire product or the raw materials will come from Germany. Not at all. It only means that the final production point is in Germany or that a certain percentage of the total value is created there (and “value” in this sense can be a rather iffy thing to define – how do you value the actual brand vs the materials and craftsmanship involved, for example?) Perhaps the shoes receive their buckles or laces there; perhaps this is where a jacket has its buttons sewed on. The journey from cotton picking, weaving, dying, cutting etc… ? Not only would it not fit on a regular label, but the information is quite often simply lacking. Did children or adults pick the cotton? Is it from Egypt or Uzbekistan?
But ok. So the product is eventually defined to be ”Made in Germany:” at least something has to happen in Germany. Right? But even so: Made in Germany doesn’t equate to “Made by German standards” or “Made in good German working conditions.” Made in the UK, for example, doesn’t exclude the possibilities of a production involving sweatshops in Manchester.
Maybe, I think, maybe I shouldn’t have embarrassed my co-student by asking about the origins of a shirt. To be fair, he couldn’t answer in any case, as it turned out. Quite often they can’t. I guess quite often nobody quite can.
It’s not on the label. Sometimes, I think, the labels should quite simply just read “made”.
Most people have heard about their ecological footprint – which is a way of measuring your lifestyle’s demand on the eco-system. The concept of finite resources aren’t new; most people are aware that when something runs out it will be inaccessible.
But, there is another type of footprint which can be harder to quantify: and that is the social impact of our lifestyles. Making it hard to quantify, also makes it harder to connect with as it becomes more difficult to communicate a relevance to and individual.
I have to admit I got very excited, therefore, when Made In A Free World was launched in 2011.
Made In A Free World attempts to quantify the social impact of our lifestyle – not the entire social impact, mind you, but they are trying to measure how much forced labour it takes to sustain the way we live in our current situation. Slavery isn’t much talked about today, but yet there is an estimate that there are 27 million of them. So what has that got to do with you?
Made In A Free World makes it easy: You fill out a questionnaire. It look as what you consume, what you own and give you an estimated number of how many slaves supply chain is likely to contain. (Warning: the results may well be depressing!)
And: if you don’t quite understand the implications of forced labour in todays society, the folks behind Made In A Free World have explained that nicely too.
So. Enough advertising from me, ok? Have a look!
And for the real geeks? I was very interested in looking at the method behind such analysis. Partly because I had never seen supply chain data be used this way before. The number you are given represents the total number of forced labourers likely to be involved with creating your products, looking at source countries, raw materials and the processing of the most popular consumer goods. I won’t repeat the method here, because the Made In A Free World people are transparent about the method used and they explain it rather well themselves.
The second thing I thought about after opening this blog, was a song by Tim Minchin. I couldn’t have a blog about consumption and not include this brilliant piece about guilt and apathy, which is a combination that always puzzles me.
It started in December, the dreaded month of late Christmas shopping.
I am in the post office. Queuing to pick up a parcel, and I am not exaggerating but there are over sixty people ahead of me in the queue, and three cashiers available, not all of them work at what I would call efficient speed. And I stand there, and I think I don’t particularly want anything for Christmas. I would be quite happy to just go home. But I can’t. Because this is what the world looks like:
Everybody wants stuff, and everybody wants to give away stuff. If you don’t want stuff, you are being difficult, if you don’t want things people think you reject them, if you don’t give them things, they think you have forgotten them. We are reduced to this: the purchasing and offering of stuff is the only way we seem to be able to express love; and we buy and we give and we receive – we try to find space for the new items, and we try to make sensible wish lists because if you are going to receive things you might as well try to receive things that you want, but quite often people think they know you better than you do yourself, and you end up with stuff you never knew existed in the first place and quite frankly you would be quite happy to get on with your life without these new items, but did you know, nothing say I love you as a shiny USB-toy that can whistle and dance? And would I want to upset someone by not bothering to pick up a parcel of stuff selected for me with the very best of intentions? No, I wouldn’t. So I queue for over forty minutes and carry home the parcel of love and consumption, thinking that it is nice that people care about each other, after all, and that it is the way we express the care that needs to change, though probably not if the retailers have a say about it.
At home, I look at my list of names; listing people that expect to find a little something from me underneath the tree they have dragged in and decorated. I worry that I have forgotten someone. I worry what kind of things I could send them that would still arrive on time by the time I have identified the missing gift recipients.
I am not Father Christmas. I don’t go by naughty or nice. I go by expectations and my purse, and I go by supply chains and sustainability of products as far as I am able to. I dream of a sustainable christmas for 2012 . What it looks like, has yet to be determined.
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