Hey there, friends! While it’s not exactly in keeping with the fun times & delicious recipes theme of the rest of this (mostly inactive) blog, I figured this installment of my semi-regular posts on modern slavery was a wee bit long for a Facebook post. 😂
Kudos on making it this far. This year has been a dumpster fire filled with difficult things, so making the effort to tackle another difficult thing right now is pretty amazing of you.
From our comfortable homes in countries where WiFi & McDonalds are ubiquitous & the biggest concern most of us face is paying the bills for the lifestyle we’ve chosen, it’s easy to believe that we are far removed from the horrors of little children being beaten & starved by callous taskmasters.
We demand 2-day delivery & rock-bottom prices. Companies, eager for our business & ready to please, deliver both at the click of a button.
But everything has a price.
The brands we know & love graciously do their best to shield us from the price of our low-cost convenience, but it is getting harder & harder for them to hide the fact that those luxuries are paid for with the lives of children whose faces we will never see & whose names we will never know.
The harsh reality is this: while others may wield the whip, we are the callous taskmasters.
With my Amazon Prime subscription & my seemingly endless trips to Sam’s Club & Costco, I am no less culpable that any of you-& likely more so than many of you. I’m not trying to preach at you. Rather, I want to share my stumbling journey of improvement in the hopes that it might help others on a similar path.
I know that each of us have different strengths, opportunities, abilities, & needs. Because of that, I’m not going to go into detail on all the ways to change/advocate/etc.; I think you’re best suited to figuring out what your contribution can be right now.
I also know that getting started can be the greatest hurdle, so I’ve included several links at the end of the post to help you navigate this problem & I’ll sum up a few highlights from them here.
Like most of the difficult problems in our lives, the solution is simple, it’s just not easy. Here are a few ways you can get started:
1-BUY LOCAL WHEN YOU CAN
The closer to home the better, but no location is likely to provide all you/your business might need. Wherever you live, buying goods made in your home country from raw materials sourced in your home country goes a long way towards reducing the number of child slaves working for you. Sometimes local can be less expensive, but that’s not always the case. If you can’t transition all your purchases right now, consider making these changes:
- Hold off on upgrading that smartphone or laptop.
Cobalt is essential in making rechargeable lithium batteries used in millions of products sold by the tech industry. Tesla, Apple, Google, Microsoft & others have knowingly allowed children, some as young as 6 years old, to be maimed and killed to supply them with cheap cobalt.
I frequently refer to my phone as my “brain” & have no idea how I’d keep track of everyone’s crap without it. I try to lessen my impact by keeping the same phone & other tech for as many years as they are serviceable, repairing instead of replacing, & donating items to schools or organizations that will salvage/recycle them responsibly instead of throwing them in the trash.
- Spend a couple extra bucks when you treat yourself to chocolate.
About 1.56 million children—many as young as five—are engaged in the back-breaking work of harvesting cocoa for chocolate in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Those two West African countries together supply about 70% of the world’s cocoa beans. In addition to facing brutal labor practices, these children are also vulnerable to being sold into the global cancer of human trafficking. Hershey’s, Mars, Cadbury & others have all acknowledged their part in this crime against humanity & have pledged to work to eradicate child slave labor in their industry. Despite those pledges, the corporations in this $100 billion industry have not only missed every single target set, but the proportion of child labor on coco farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast increased by a staggering 14 percentage points in the past decade-up from 31% to 45% of children living in the two countries.
Sure, you’ll buy less chocolate (because the ones raising the bar are also kind of spendy), but if you’re anything like me that’s not exactly a bad thing health-wise. 😂
Here’s a site that can help you find brands that measure up (yes, I know the beloved Ferrero of Nutella fame doesn’t make the cut.😭) https://www.greenamerica.org/end-child-labor-cocoa/chocolate-scorecard
- Change the way you look at clothes.
From high fashion to Walmart, the clothing supply chain is rife with child labor. Is that cheap t-shirt or pair of jeans still a great buy if you know that that rock-bottom deal was made possible only because of child slave labor? Yeah, not for me either.
The Fair Wear Foundation has a list of over 120 brands that have signed up to its code of labour practices, which do not allow for the use of child labour. Accredited brands must ensure with regular audits that all of the suppliers in the cut-make-trim stage of production meet these standards.
Another great option is to help reduce production demand by purchasing clothes from resell shops. Bonus points to this one for also being cheaper!
2-MAKE YOURSELF HEARD
- Petition lawmakers to require greater transparency & accountability (including meaningful penalties) for corporation supply chains.
If you live in the U.S.A., you can find your representatives, how to contact them, bills they’ve introduced, committees they serve on, and political contributions they’ve received at this website: https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/
- Let your favorite stores & brands know that this matters to you.
Yes, your letter, email, phone call/whatever to those representatives, stores & brands represent a tiny drop in the bucket. However, if enough of us cause enough of them enough trouble we CAN effect change.
3-TAKE A DEEP BREATH
We’re all at different places in life. While I firmly believe that we all have changes we can & should make (& I know I could be better about not letting myself off the hook for the sake of convenience), stressing about the changes that aren’t realistic for you right now helps no one & will only lead to burnout & a likely abandonment of any progress you do make.
So make changes for the better, but do it in a way and at a pace that fit where your life is right now with a commitment to yourself to continue that course of positive change as your circumstances allow.
And here are the promised links...totally unorganized because I have put off voting in this accursed election long enough. 😒
https://www.endslaverynow.org/blog/articles/products-made-by-child-labor-with-alternative-options
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/our-work/child-forced-labor-trafficking/child-labor-cocoa
http://www.slavefreechocolate.org
https://fortune.com/2020/10/19/chocolate-child-labor-west-africa-cocoa-farms/
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/child_labor_reports/tda2018/ChildLaborReportBook.pdf
https://www.careeraddict.com/10-companies-that-still-use-child-labor
https://labs.theguardian.com/unicef-child-labour/
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/ListofGoods.pdf
https://www.epa.gov/international-cooperation/cleaning-electronic-waste-e-waste
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