Hi Kanishk, excellent post about a very important topic. I would carry this premise a lot further though. The workers behind the products we use have increasingly become invisible no matter where we buy those products from, online or in-person, or what those products are, from the food in the kitchen to the clothes we wear to the electronic goods we use or the office table on which we place them. Nobody puts the chocolate in their mocha thinking about the child laboring in the tropical forest of South America or Africa. Or spends money on the 20th cheap beautifully tailored shirt remembering the 1000 lives lost in the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. Or cooks the chicken or beef thinking about the workers on the assembly lives in cramped places required to tackle a chicken every 8 seconds without adequate PPE protection during this pandemic! Our current global economy structures have always reminded me of the districts and the capital in hunger games where the districts are the workers at the end of supply chains and the capital is "us", the economically well off who can afford to buy those products.
We, as consumers, need to realize the price that millions of people pay for the lives of comfort that we live. And then, we need to demand from these companies some accountability. Over the years this has happened, especially after incidents like the Rana Plaza collapse, or the rise of suicides in China's Apple factories, but then people slide back into forgetfulness. I once heard a podcast on gratitude where a researcher decided to follow her cup of Starbucks coffee down to every single person who contributed to it and then decided to visit them and thank them in person. While all of us cannot hope to do that, gaining an appreciation for the sweat of people spread across the globe that make our lifestyle possible, is the first step to making change happen. (Shruti Aunty)
Hi Kanishk, excellent post about a very important topic. I would carry this premise a lot further though. The workers behind the products we use have increasingly become invisible no matter where we buy those products from, online or in-person, or what those products are, from the food in the kitchen to the clothes we wear to the electronic goods we use or the office table on which we place them. Nobody puts the chocolate in their mocha thinking about the child laboring in the tropical forest of South America or Africa. Or spends money on the 20th cheap beautifully tailored shirt remembering the 1000 lives lost in the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh. Or cooks the chicken or beef thinking about the workers on the assembly lives in cramped places required to tackle a chicken every 8 seconds without adequate PPE protection during this pandemic! Our current global economy structures have always reminded me of the districts and the capital in hunger games where the districts are the workers at the end of supply chains and the capital is "us", the economically well off who can afford to buy those products.
We, as consumers, need to realize the price that millions of people pay for the lives of comfort that we live. And then, we need to demand from these companies some accountability. Over the years this has happened, especially after incidents like the Rana Plaza collapse, or the rise of suicides in China's Apple factories, but then people slide back into forgetfulness. I once heard a podcast on gratitude where a researcher decided to follow her cup of Starbucks coffee down to every single person who contributed to it and then decided to visit them and thank them in person. While all of us cannot hope to do that, gaining an appreciation for the sweat of people spread across the globe that make our lifestyle possible, is the first step to making change happen. (Shruti Aunty)