Contemporary World Culture

STUDENT VOICE: EXPERIENCING CONSUMERISM AND SWEATSHOPS

Some American, as Tiffany Andersons shows, are beginning to question our
participation in the unequally distributed benefits of free trade.

Tiffany Anderson

I spent the summer of my sophomore year of college working stock at the
Gap Outlet in the nearby mall. Although I complained of the early
morning hours, the stifling heat of the back room, and the physical
labor it required, I was secretly proud to be a part of our all-girl
stock team. We worked hard, but our shifts resembled the ambiance of
sleepovers; we gossiped, joked around, and blasted the top 40 station as
we unpacked boxes of clothing and accessories. On days when shipments
of new products came in, we each took turns passing snap judgments on
the cuteness of the new items. On this particular day, I know it was
going to be rough because we were getting one of the biggest shipments
for the Back to School season. I pulled on my black apron and searched
for my exacto knife, eyeing the seemingly endless stacks of boxes.
There was nothing to do but start.

I hummed along the new Christina Aguilera song as I pulled corduroy
pants from their protective plastic wrapping, wrinkling my nose at the
sour smell of newness that clung to them. I finished unpacking the box,
broke it down, threw it onto the garbage heap, and ripped open the next
box on my stack. I tore off the lid and froze as a numbing chill
enveloped my perspiring body, and I yelled, “Oh, you guys. Look.”

My co-workers gathered around, anticipating my horror at an atrocious
sweater or some ill-advised pants. Instead, I pointed to a few line
scrawled across the inside of lid of my box in navy blue pen and in a
foreign language that I couldn’t translate or decipher. The language
looked Thai, or maybe Vietnamese….something, Asian, I was sure. The
tags on the clothing were of little help. In the one box alone, there
were tags from Indonesia, China, Vietnam, and Thailand.

“What do you think it says?” asked Amy.

Each of us knew The Gap had been cited repeatedly as a major employer
of sweatshop labor, although we rarely acknowledged this fact to each
other.

“Do you think it’s a cry for help?” I sensed the author’s
presence, as if the sight of the blue right-slanting writing had freed
the author from her prison, like rubbing of a lamp releases a genie. I
pictured a woman, my age but skinny, with sunken eyes and black hair,
locked in a bindingly hot factory until she met her daily quota. I
thought about her family of five she had to feed on a skimpy wage,
children raised by a mother who was practically absent as she tried to
provide for them. We went through the possible scenarios, embarrassed
by our frequent references to our own jobs as “sweatshop labor.” An
unsettling silence descended on the room, and all you could hear was the
tearing of plastic and cardboard. Before I recycled the box, however, I
tore off the piece with the message and put it in my locker, hoping to
find a translation although I never did.

As the day progressed, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been
chosen to open that box, that I now had a responsibility to my friend
overseas, trapped in a situation she couldn’t free herself from.
Maybe I was being melodramatic, but the problem was I had very little
information on the actual working conditions of the people who made the
clothes. Now I could no longer ignore the fact that I didn’t know.

As an American, I realized that I had the privilege to listen to the
radio at work and chatter with my co-workers. My biggest complaints
consisted of feeling tired after a six-or seven-hour day, or of having
to drive home sweaty and dust-covered. I worked to make money so I
could go out dancing during the school year and get a discount on Gap
jeans. I now felt guilty that may $30 pair of jeans paid marginal
fraction of the profit to the person who had made them. It slowly began
to occur to me that I had a choice of which companies to support and
that I had responsibility as a consumer to know what sort of practices
my money supported. While the research only problematized these issues
further for me, I at least think now that consumer consciousness is
encouraging. Nothing will change if I continue to ignore the problem,
unwrapping khakis and singing along with the radio, as if I’m the only
person in the world.

Based on the information about, would you stop shopping at certain
retailers? Is the consumption of food and clothing somehow different
from the media products that require less of a local commitment of
resources, such as sewing a pair of jeans in contrast with printing a
comic book.

PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEE HELP

After reading the “Student Voice in my text, I would not stop shopping
at certain retailers, also as the introduction said in order to make a
wide variety of goods available at ever-decreasing prices or to maintain
profits, retailers rely on low labor costs and working conditions that
are often illegal in the United States. As the text stated free trade
affects us everyday what we eat, wear and buy.

This is what I got so far. HELP ME PLEASE