Something a lot of people know about me: I’m all about buying fair trade.And I can’t afford to be fair trade right now.Now: I’ve heard a lot of nice middle class folks say this, and I’ve been annoyed by it. Because frankly, if you can afford to buy $80 shoes that were made in China and own a gas-guzzling SUV, then YES, you can afford to be fair trade. It’s really not out of your price range, sorry. You could just say “I don’t feel like putting the effort in to be fair trade,” which would annoy me less because you’re just being honest and I don’t necessarily hold other people to the principles I hold myself to.It usually DOESN’T annoy me when any of my friends say “I can’t afford to be fair trade,” though, because the majority of my friends are somewhat closer to where I’m at: broke as a joke! Hey man, if you can’t even really afford to put food on your table and you need to buy a nice pair of pants so you can keep your job, it’s OK with me if you spend $20 on sweatshop pants rather than go without eating for a few weeks. And that’s about where I’m at right now. For those of you who don’t know, I recently had to move back in with my folks after supporting myself for 6 years. It’s been really humbling and I don’t like to talk about it much. It was due to a few close-together financial crises that were really beyond my control. (The kicker is that they were all fairly low-end financial crises. A few of those in a row can literally put you on the street if you live paycheck to paycheck–as much of America does! I’m just lucky enough to have someplace to GO.)So, I’ve relaxed my own fairly stringent principles in light of the “I can’t even afford a place to live” situation. In the past, when I couldn’t afford the fair trade version of something I needed, I just went without until I could afford it. (Which was sometimes years! Case in point: I saw my ex-girlfriend last night, and she said, “You have a new coat! I thought you just kept things… forever! I didn’t think I’d ever see the day that you had a new coat.”)After years of exercising that principle while living on a low income in an incredibly expensive city, and then losing my independent living situation to boot, here’s what happened: I needed some new stuff (like a coat!) and I couldn’t wait anymore. Everything fell apart. My old cons became somewhat legendary in their disrepair*. I could no longer close my old coat (the, ah, fasteny-things all fell off.). The soles of the boots I wore in rain and snow literally broke in half.This is why I buy fair trade: because I can’t stand to contribute any money to corporations that are keeping poor people in poverty (and in fact making that poverty worse and more widespread on a daily basis). Even though I KNOW my $20 or whatever makes absolutely no difference in the scheme of things to these companies–especially since I can hardly ever afford to, y’know, buy anything!–I just can’t stand to do it. It HURTS me. It makes me feel like I am doing something dirty and wrong. I hate, hate, hate buying things that I know were made with sweatshop labor. I hate buying things that are made at the literal, physical expense of the poor, and then are marked up so that the profit the companies are making is ten times what it cost to make the product. I hate contributing to things that are hurting poor people.**Yet, I have had to come to terms with something in the last year: I am poor people. I cannot afford to feed, shelter, and clothe myself. I’m just lucky enough to have somewhere to go. That being the case, I’m relegated to the same position as everyone else in my class: I take what I can get and do my best with it. So, what I was able to replace fair-tradely I did (see my long-ass footnote about my sneakers below), but the few times I had to choose between spending $20 and $80 on a necessity, principles had to go out the window. —For those of you who need a crash course (and I can’t imagine how anyone would, but, y’know, they do like to try to keep people ignorant of this stuff), here’s how it works:A corporation buys a smaller company that makes shoes. The smaller company, as it turns out, can’t keep itself financially afloat. The corporation knows how to make this shoe company financially viable, forever! It fires many people. For starters, it fires all the American people in the shoe factories (who were already barely making rent with their factory jobs, btw) and instead sends the work to China, Singapore, whatever, where they can pay people perhaps a hundredth of what they were paying the people here to do it.This saves them so much money that they could sell the shoes for like, five bucks and still make a good profit–even with the importing fees and everything! Wow! Cheap shoes for all! This is great, especially for all those Americans that just lost their jobs but may still need to purchase shoes in the near future. But the going price for shoes is at least like $20, right? Maybe $10 on sale at payless, depending on what kinda shoes they were. So they can easily charge $20 for these shoes, but these are kinda nice shoes AND they just got the support of this well-known corporations brand power. Folks’ll buy these shoes for $40, $60, $80…?*** So they price the shoes at, I don’t know, let’s say $60. They’re just making a ridiculous, ridiculous profit at this point. Where is it going? Some of it is going into advertising. OK. Some of it is going into buying other small companies to do this with–growth! The rest is going into the pockets of pre-existing rich people–the sort of people who can afford to have a lot of stock in a company like this, or the people who, you know, run it. The folks who make the decision to charge 10 times as much as they have to and pay the labor 100 times less than they should.So check this out–this has been going on for a while, right? And you may have noticed it’s really hard for Americans to find jobs, and, therefore, buy things and put food on their tables–we’re in this pesky thing called a recession and we’ve been there for a bit. Say, right around the time our current (almost gone! Thanks America president took office. What was his advice? “GO OUT AND BUY STUFF.”Now–you see what I’m getting at, right? This is like, really stupid advice. If we go out and buy stuff, we’re giving money to these rich folks who took our jobs away and made our basic needs (like shoes) unnecessarily expensive to begin with. I gave you a rundown of where that money goes, right? 1: (A teeny little bit) to production (which, uh, has no effect on the American economy but if anyone else has been reading business news on occasion, you’ll know that China’s economy is like BUSTLING which you should ALSO know does NOT help all the poor folks working in sweatshops in China one bit), 2: to advertising (OK, some of that money is actually circling back to Americans who are employed in the advertising industry), 3: to investment (which just circles back into number 4), 4: a few rich people’s pockets. Meanwhile, you’ve just spent a lot more money than you should actually have to on things like shoes, clothes, a place to live (don’t even get me started on real estate, particularly in New York), and if you’re LUCKY you have a job and you have enough money left over to buy gas or a bus or train ticket to get there in the morning. So, uh, surprise… being a consumer hasn’t resulted in you being better able to put food on your table and live comfortably.—The solution for all this? I don’t really know. I kind of feel like it’s too big for me to affect any kind of change in and all I know is that I’m pissed off about it and don’t want to pump any money into it if I can’t help it. But I can’t help it! Because people who spend the money to make shoes in, y’know, a fair and not horrible way, NEED to set their shoe prices fairly high just so that they can continue to operate and get enough of a market share to keep their doors open. And I can’t afford it and it’s not my fault, and it’s not THEIR fault either. It’s the fault of the jackasses who are undercutting them because they’re willing to hurt people for money. Who loses? Everyone (except the jackasses). Boohoo. All I know is that if I ever GET enough money to have a voice–because money gives you a voice–I’m going to be REALLY LOUD about this stuff.—*They lasted ten years, by the way, and were purchased back when Cons were still made in the USA. I WAS able to replace them with a fair-trade counterpart which actually doesn’t cost anymore than Cons do now: No Sweat Classic Black High-tops. Lookit, they’re on sale for $25 as we speak!**By the way, I do NOT want to hear “At least they have jobs.” A job that eats up the majority of your waking life, causes you physical and mental problems and then leaves you flat once it’s rendered you incapable of work anymore, and STILL DOES NOT COVER THE EXPENSES OF YOUR BASIC NEEDS, is not anything to be psyched about. It’s a horrible situation that is SLIGHTLY less horrible than being reduced to beggary.***I’m being hypothetical and not botheing about math here, so I’m not even going to bother being too specific. But I know that when Nike bought Converse it was suddenly impossible to buy a pair for under $50. The same shoes that my dad remembers as the Cheap Shoes–you know, like Payless shoes–the kind of shoes musicians buy ’cause we’re always broke! Now they’re $50 if you’re LUCKY and they’re being sold in many colors to rich NYU students on St. Mark’s Place, who wear them with sceney pride alongside all the superskinny (starvingskinny not fashionskinny) street punks who are still wearing the old USA cons they can’t afford to replace and are wishing they could just buy a freakin slice of pizza for $1.25 instead of having to scrounge around for $8 bucks just to eat at Chipotle. ::breathes:: Many of my economic diatribes come back around to St. Mark’s Place eventually.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 at 6:32 pm and is filed under fairtrade, important, me, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.