Intentional Living Journal

Intentional Living Journal

Jennifer Bosveld, editor

This online journal showcases wise observations, creative questions, and innovative solutions regarding social justice (from labor to housing), alternative energy sources, fair trade, transportation, food ethics, preservation of community resources, watershed clean-up, stewardship for our environment (from pollution to recycling), and a broad range of issues regarding intentional living. Attitudes expressed might find fellowship with agencies and organizations such as The Green Party, Nature Conservancy, Planned Parenthood, Legal Aid Society, Greenpeace, Hightower Low-Down, The Nation, Michael Moore, some programs for the homeless, and much more. Economic social issues are closely linked to environmental issues. This belief comes from a deep reverence for the Interdependent Web of Life.

Political, scientific (with an accessible pop-sci approach), environmental, psychological, personal relationship, travel, homeplace, and spiritual (not denominationally oriented) themes are welcome for consideration. This online journal is an outgrowth of the Pudding House book, Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society, Nita Penfold, editor (see publications list). The Intentional Living Journal is edited by Jennifer Bosveld.

Submission Guidelines:
Email your tightly written, well-edited and proofed articles, essays, poems, short-short stories, and other language art on these matters to Jennifer Bosveld with Intentional Living in the subject line. There is no payment for this first-time use and author will own copyright with Pudding House retaining permission to reprint in other Pudding House publications if the opportunity should arise. Authors may use their work freely in any other way they see fit; credit Pudding House Publications. The purpose of this online publication is to create a dynamic showcase of inventive thinking on important issues that could improve community circumstances.

The Philosophy of Emmitt’s Philanthropy
by Tony Marconi
In last week’s paper, I read about the closing of yet another local manufacturing plant with a loss of almost two hundred jobs. As such shutdowns go, it doesn’t appear to be a particularly remarkable event. I don’t work there, nor does anyone else I know. The jobs aren’t particularly high-paying. The workers will probably find some other employment, and life will go on. Or, so I reason.

And yet, the report of this particular business failure leaves me with a sense of unease—perhaps because I’ve reached a saturation point in my capacity to absorb bad economic news. Or maybe the journalist’s words simply caught me at some teachable moment, and I’ve suddenly realized just how much I, as a citizen of a powerful nation, have bought into the fleeting illusion of my own prosperity.

Lately, it seems that more and more of the people I talk to are experiencing the same unsettling feelings. As participants in an affluent culture, we find ourselves feeling both blessed and cursed. Blessed with the gifts of our privilege; cursed with the one aspect of that privilege that can undo us—our ability to ignore the plight of those who do not share the advantages we enjoy. It’s not that we actively try to forget about them. It’s just that our society is structured so as to make them invisible. We have to work to see them.

But evidence of their existence can be found, if you take time to look for it. I discovered that the other day when I found an umbrella in a dollar store. I actually bought half a dozen, knowing I’d eventually lose or misplace them—something that usually happens long before they break. While I was driving home after making my purchase, I happened to notice an aluminum can lying on the side of the road, and in one of those crazy ways my mind tends to connect things, I had a kind of epiphany. The cheap umbrellas and the discarded container were part of a larger reality I would never have noticed if it weren’t for an anecdote I was once told about the friend of a friend named Emmitt.

It seems that whenever Emmitt drove and indulged himself in one form of liquid refreshment or another, he’d simply toss the empty can out of the window. Once, when my friend witnessed this and criticized Emmitt for it, Emmitt replied that there was no harm done because there were people in this world who made money by collecting cans and turning them in for the bounty on scrap aluminum. He apparently said it with a straight face, sincerely believing in his rationalization. Philanthropy à la Emmitt. Instant, self-indulgent gratification even as economic opportunities for others were being simultaneously created. American ingenuity at work.

Later that day, I read a book review about a landmark incident in the labor movement of the early 20th Century, and yet another connection clicked in my brain as I remembered how that good old American ingenuity was making itself manifest late one Saturday afternoon on March 25th, 1911. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was operating at full capacity that day. Hundreds of young women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants, labored over sewing machines in cavernous, dimly lit rooms crowded with thousands of pounds of fabric piled dangerously close to unprotected wiring.

Only one set of doors remained unlocked—ostensibly to discourage theft. But the workers understood implicitly that the real reason for this “security” measure was to ensure the women would remain at their machines until dismissed from their shifts. There would be no chance for them to gather with their co-workers to voice their mutual complaints or to allow union organizers to talk to them.

Shortly after 4:30, someone noticed smoke coming from a pile of scrap material, but the women were ordered to continue working. Within minutes the fire had spread with a rapidity that surprised even the supervisors. Workers attempted to flee but the only accessible stairwell had already been engulfed in flames.

Faced with the prospect of being burned alive, dozens of women chose to jump. Rescue efforts by the fire department were futile—flames had moved too fast, ladders were too short, and nets broke as falling victims hit them. One hundred and forty-six people died in a matter of minutes.

The owners of the company were tried and acquitted of manslaughter charges, although three years later, when the families of twenty-three of the victims sued, they were awarded an out of court settlement of $75 each. At the time of the fire, the public expressed anger over the working conditions that led to the tragedy, yet, in spite of the outcry, popular opinion in some quarters insisted that the shop owners had a right to resist government safety regulations because such legislation could interfere with their ability to be competitive. All the same, this event crystallized support for efforts to organize workers in New York’s garment district, and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union was born.

Today, the story of the Triangle Factory Fire is fairly well known, and though it may cause us to shudder and shake our heads disparagingly over the loss of life caused by the callous management policies of a by-gone era, we tend to console ourselves with the belief that the cause of labor did, at last, emerge triumphant from the ashes of the victims. And yet, our peace of mind is made possible only by exercising our privilege to ignore the reality of work place abuses that are still the norm in much of the world. For example, how many Americans have ever heard of the Kader Industrial Toy Company or the fire that incinerated its plant near Bangkok, Thailand on May 10th, 1993?

The Kader fire shared a number of notable similarities with the Triangle blaze: Young female workers, locked factory doors, unsafe working conditions, rapid spread of the flames, and dozens of frantic people leaping to their deaths to escape being incinerated. The official count was 188 dead, far surpassing Triangle, but it was barely mentioned in the world press and was almost non-existent in either US papers or broadcast news reports. Somehow, nobody deemed it important enough to call it to the attention of the public.

Yet, Kader’s Thai factory was primarily devoted to the manufacture of toys for American children. In his book, One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, William Greider refers to the macabre image of dolls and stuffed animals based on popular cartoon characters that lay scattered among the dead, and he notes the irony of this nation’s obsession with installing safety standards that protect our children from injury from their toys while at the same time ignoring the brutal and dangerous conditions imposed on the workers who make them, many of whom are adolescent children themselves.

Nor is the Kader fire an isolated incident. It is simply, to date, the largest in terms of human deaths. But hundreds of others workers all over Asia continue to perish in these kinds of accidents with depressing regularity. Countless other sweatshop employees develop permanent debilitating illnesses and suffer premature deaths because of the unhealthy work environments they’re forced to endure in order to eke out meager subsistence livings.

The problem is global. In Saipan, an island captured from the Japanese during WWII and now an American protectorate, thousands of workers imported from the mainland labor for slave wages in factories that would be shut down in an instant in this country. The workers, whose passports are confiscated so they cannot easily leave, are housed in cramped barracks reminiscent of inner-city tenements. Overworked and underpaid, they are summarily dismissed when their health fails. In the meantime, they produce clothing and other products for US companies like Levi Strauss, Calvin Klein, Brooks Brothers, and Abercrombie & Fitch.

In Central and South American free-trade zones, young women routinely work sixteen to twenty-hour shifts for wages that can’t sustain them. An ad that appeared in a trade magazine a few years ago offered manufacturing companies the opportunity to “hire Rosa Martinez for only 57 cents an hour.” A few months later the same ad appeared with only one change. You could now hire Rosa for only 33 cents an hour. What a deal! A twenty-five cent per hour wage savings over the previous year, and there would be no pesky labor unions to file complaints when the workers were forced into double-shifts without overtime pay. Nor would there be any official interference with the practice of forcing these young women employees to take mass-prescribed birth-control pills or to endure the effects of abortion-inducing drugs if they should become pregnant.

It’s not as if American corporations approve of these practices—at least not officially. They simply contract with management companies from other countries to ensure that production quotas are met. This allows them to claim they are blameless for mistreatment of workers. Spokespeople for these industries are quick to point out how difficult it is to monitor abuses, and they insist that wages simply reflect the reality of the marketplace. And yet, for women like Rosa Martinez, a four-fold increase in pay would not raise the price of a $20 shirt sold in the U.S. by even half a dollar.

But why should we care, you and I? Other than that old nagging-conscience thing that makes most of us squirm in discomfort during those rare moments when we bother to think about the problem. After all, cheap labor lets us buy an umbrella for a dollar, and when it’s raining, that’s all we need to know. We’re just as dry as we’d be if we bought more expensive rain gear, whether or not it was made by a company that paid its workers a higher wage. And for a dollar, it doesn’t even matter if it actually rains. I was told by the clerk when I bought them that a lot of people take these to King’s Island or Cedar Point and that, used or not, they throw them away at the end of the day.

This may seem a wasteful practice—one that fails to even provide a secondary employment opportunity for recyclers—the way Emmitt’s casually-tossed beer cans do—but it does have the advantage of ensuring that somebody, somewhere, has job security making more of them.

Of course, such a cavalier philosophy presupposes a lot of things, not the least of which is that we can afford to indulge ourselves in pointless waste with no regard to the eco-damage we inflict during the process of garnering raw materials, turning them into finished products, and dumping them into ever-growing mountains of non-recyclable trash.

Yet, even without environmental considerations, the impact on global labor economics suggested by the very existence of cheap umbrellas should give us, as American workers, much more reason for concern than we’ve been hitherto exhibiting. The cold hard fact of the matter is this: World-wide production of everything is at an all time high and surpluses are growing faster than ever. Cars, pharmaceuticals, clothing are all being over-produced while the scramble for markets is rapidly reaching a crisis point. It is a house of cards—a humongous Ponzi scheme—that has, for the past several decades, been propped up by the United States through its absorption of staggering trade deficits. Year after year, we import far more than we export. We have become the market of last resort for the rest of the world, a vortex of consumption that allows the economies of other nations—and therefore our own—to survive. Optimistic observers think we may be able to continue in this role for another fifteen to twenty years. Maybe even thirty. Maybe. Then the walls come ’a tumblin’ down, so to speak, unless the world has figured out a better way to do business. So far it hasn’t shown the inclination to do so.

So, as we wait for the hammer to fall, multi-national corporations continue to compete with each other by continuously lowering their break-even points in order to make their products more and more inexpensive and, therefore, attractive to consumers. Innovations in technology allow a certain amount of price reduction to be obtained through new manufacturing processes, but ultimately, the really big savings come—and will continue to do so—through reductions in labor costs.

With the advent of NAFTA, GATT, and the World Trade Organization, manufacturing jobs have been leaving this country in record numbers. The sad fact of the matter is that they will never return. Not when you can hire Rosa Martinez for 33 cents an hour or her counterpart in Vietnam for a third of that.

It was obvious to anyone who was watching the process as it unfolded that this was the inevitable outcome, but the Reagan-Bush administrations were determined to make it happen, and Clinton finished the job for them. A truly bi-partisan effort at kissing the rings of multi-national powerbrokers. Not that the ideal behind globalization isn’t valid. The plan to raise the wages and living conditions of other nations and make it possible for them to enjoy some of the economic prosperity that Americans have been indulging in for over a century would cost our citizens very little—maybe some wage flattening, but with no real harm to lifestyle—and in exchange, we’d live in a more productive, safer, and healthier world as standards of living rose everywhere.

Unfortunately, it didn’t happen that way. According to a UN report, half of the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day. The globalization of trade has proven to be a disaster for labor, but how could it have been otherwise when no environmental or worker-safety regulations were ever mandated by either NAFTA or GATT? And thanks to the establishment of the World Trade Organization—replete with its secretive tribunals for determining whether or not a nation is accountable for interfering with the profit-potential of a multi-national—local control over worker safety and environmental conditions is rapidly becoming non-existent.

The simple fact is this: The people who were pushing then and who are pushing now for fast-track powers and expanded free-trade zones have little or no concern for anything that might curtail the growing power of multi-national corporations. Inexorably, governments are devolving into tools used primarily for the enforcement of boardroom policies.

There is a two-fold explanation given to the American worker as to why they should be glad that this is happening. First, though it’s true that a certain number of production jobs are being lost, rapid advancements in technology will create ever-increasing opportunities for trained employees. Education is the key to a financially rewarding future. And second, by opening up markets in places like China—with over a billion potential customers—there will be enough work to go around for decades to come.

The flaw in the first premise is quite evident, though a lot of people still have yet to grasp its full meaning. The whole point of applying advanced technologies to the manufacturing process is to reduce the number of labor-hours needed to make a finished product. Thus, as technology advances, even more jobs will be eliminated. In addition, the more people who train to become proficient in these technological fields, the more suppressed technologists’ wages will become as the supply of workers exceeds the demand for them.

Furthermore, the idea of selling some of the things we do still manufacture (like airplanes) to other countries (like China) likewise comes with serious strings attached as more and more nations begin to put conditions on their imports: “We’ll buy your aircraft,” they tell us, “but only if you let us manufacture some of the parts over here.”

Increasingly, our major industries are outsourcing their work. The result of this splintering of production capability directly undermines labor. If a group of people in America wants better wages or working conditions, the company can threaten to shut down their plant and outsource the work to Korea. When Korean workers demand living wages, the jobs go to Indonesia, and so forth, ’round and ’round the world.

The question naturally occurs: Won’t there come a point in time when labor demands will have to be met—if for no other reason than companies must sooner or later run out of places to run to? This, of course, presupposes the possibility that labor could be organized into some kind of international grass-roots movement on a global scale—something extremely unlikely to happen.

The more realistic scenario likely to unfold over the next twenty to thirty years is one in which China successfully completes its industrial-technological transformation. This would create for that nation an upper-middle class of consumers numbering up to two hundred million people. The subsistence-level work force needed to sustain this huge upper class could easily come from the 1.2 billion people they’d still be able to employ for subsistence level wages.

The numbers are staggering, and they may very well do it—if they manage to compete with the US for control of the consumption of the majority of the earth’s resources without both countries rendering the planet unfit for human habitation in the process. The threat of this possible future gives us a remarkably clear picture of why our leaders in Washington have been so desperate to gain control of Middle Eastern oil. Twenty years from now two-thirds of the world’s crude will be coming from the Persian Gulf and most of that is going to find its way to Asian markets. The nation that controls the oil will have leverage against the economic growth of its competitors. The scariest part of this reality is that this is the stuff that wars are made of. Does anyone think that if we start exchanging blows with China that there will be any winners?

So, bad news is that the prospects for America’s workers are not looking good. Even so, I don’t believe that the situation is hopeless. The key to our survival is for us to recognize that we still live in the most privileged country on the Earth and to acknowledge that our privilege cannot remain intact if it is treated as a zero-sum game. It must be shared and extended to have real value, but the power to do so rests almost entirely with those who are endowed with it in the first place. Thus, we must act while we still have the capability to do so.

I cannot stress strongly enough the need for our nation to implement federal laws to mandate that all business and industries pay a living wage based on formulas applicable to the specific regions from which their labor is drawn. To that end, health care must become universal and defined by a core single-payer structure with the right of individuals to seek independent care in private systems if they so desire. Regulation of vital services such as water, electricity, and the production and distribution of fossil fuels must be tightened, and profit margins of companies chartered to operate them should be much more stringently defined. Environmental safeguards, especially in the work place and in all regions affected by industrial production must be brought up to standards adequate to the maintain a reasonable quality of human and other life, and all new industry must show the ability to meet those standards before commencing operation.

All of these principles must be made a part of any international trading agreements. It is not beyond us, nor is it economically unreasonable. An international wage floor—a living wage that would compel nations to raise the bottom levels of their work forces consistent with growth—would reward nations for expanding educational opportunities and implementing technological improvements.

Of course, we really don’t have to do any of these things. We can go on just the way we are now, accepting the inevitable, choosing to indulge ourselves in the privilege of ignoring the plight of the subsistence worker and insisting that classical laissez faire capitalism, with its system of unchecked competition and profit-driven calculation of human worth, is really a superior form of government to representative democracy.

But, then, we might as well be honest and admit that we are the true spiritual heirs of Emmitt and his philosophy of philanthropic littering. Only, it isn’t empty cans we are throwing away. It’s people.

Our message is sent and received: “You masses of the un- and under employed: We demand that you work cheaply for our comfort; that you provide us with an unlimited supply of dollar umbrellas. We’ll be tossing them out soon enough, and your job making more for wages that you cannot live on will be secured.”

Like Emmitt, we are privileged enough to allow ourselves to be generous with what we don’t actually value. But let’s be fair and acknowledge that at least Emmitt was sufficiently embarrassed by his own bad behavior to invent a rationalization for his actions. What will be our excuse for not standing up to the politicians who promote further globalization without insisting on corporate responsibility?

Are we going to tell our kids that we were just making sure there would be some poverty-level jobs available for them when they started looking for work? Or will we stand up now and insist that they, along with the rest of our fellow citizens, have an opportunity to live in dignity on what they earn, regardless of the labor they eventually find themselves engaged in?

More to be posted soon! Please check back.