"The Myth of the Ethical Shopper"

"For a generation now, buying better has been one of our most potent forms of protest. Who doesn’t want to believe that he can rescue Manisha from misery simply by purchasing the right T-shirt? The same idea underpins hundreds of earnest NGO advocacy campaigns urging people to take action against the Swooshtika, Badidas, Killer Coke. It prompted a much-praised John Oliver exposé in which he blasts H&M for selling “suspiciously cheap” clothes sourced in Bangladesh. The only trouble is, this narrative is bullshit...

for a while there, it worked...

But in the past 25 years, the apparel industry, the entire global economy, has undergone a complete transformation. The way our clothes are made and distributed and thrown away is barely recognizable compared to the way it was done in the ’90s. And yet our playbook for improving it remains exactly the same...

these structures aren’t designed to make factories take better care of their workers. They’re designed to make factories look like they are...

It’s not the largest or the second-largest company we should be worried about anymore. It’s the 44th, or the 207th. Those small-batch, hemp-woven Daisy Dukes you bought in Dumbo are far more likely to be made in a sweatshop than your $7 H&M gym shorts...

In the olden days—the early ‘90s—brands produced two to four fashion cycles per year, big orders coordinated by season, planned months in advance. These days, there’s no such thing as cycles, only products...

rather than manage a giant, respirating network of factories themselves, most of them have outsourced this coordination to megasuppliers: huge conglomerates that can take a design sketch, split the production between thousands of factories, box up the goods and ship them to stores in less time than they’ll stay...

Some companies ordering clothes through megasuppliers, he says, don’t know which factories they were made in—or even which countries...

After the Tazreen fire, NGO campaigns focused on how Wal-Mart was responsible for 60 percent of the clothing being produced there. But Wal-Mart never actually placed an order with Tazreen. In fact, over a year before the fire, Wal-Mart inspected the factory and discovered that it was unsafe. By the time of the fire, it had banned its suppliers from using it...

Maybe even more than the other reasons I’ve outlined, this is why consumer advocacy campaigns are never going to improve working conditions in the developing world: Western markets simply don’t matter as much as they used to. India produces twice as much clothing for its own consumers as it does for us. Fifty-six percent of the clothing produced in China is for the Chinese market. Both of those numbers are only going to grow."

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/the-myth-of-the-ethical-shopper/

Woah. Complicated feelings. This is very worth reading in full, tons of stuff I didn't excerpt. 

For a long time, I had this thing where I didn't ever buy clothes made in China (and for a little bit in high school I was trying to only buy clothes made in the U.S...  obviously quickly unrealistic). I think it was this period in middle school when I was starting to really understand the privilege of being American and having economic privilege and how goods were produced and what my habits meant for the rest of the world. It's sort of an unofficial Palo Alto curriculum that needs to be much better taught, because I started feeling responsible for everything that capitalism ruins, and I'm reading this and realizing the ways in which I've been able to ease away from that. And how much my decision was very me-focused.