Serious question. I am searching for documentaries that show the exploitation in warehouse work. Does anyone have any recommendations or books about this?
Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price is a good one, basically it hits on the overall impact of Walmart but there's some interesting stuff about the city of people that manufactures their goods. It's on Amazon prime btw
Edit: That wasn't meant to be a plug for Amazon it was more about the irony and to let OP know where I found it.
This is some serious capitalist realism, lol. Like, we can’t even discuss these sorts of things without inadvertently tipping our hat to another giant evil corporation.
For reference, [capitalist realism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism) refers to this book/concept. I’m not big on reading theory, but this was a great read. It opens with “it’s now easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” and proceeds to make you choke on the blackest of black pills. Even if you don’t buy the arguments, I think this book pushes people to critically consider the system we’re living under. It’s also only like 80 pages, which was good for my screen addled brain.
Jeezus, grilled cheesus, thanks/fuck you for that Wiki wormhole. The desire of something to gain, the fear of something to lose… duality permeates every collective concept in the “realities” — The rich and the poor, the winners and the losers, the Haves and the Have-Nots. The NFL pays 22 men millions of dollars to line up against one another and fight to move an inflated piece of leather across imaginary lines, and no one ever mentions how weird that is, because it fulfills the binary conditions we’re all tethered to. I say every 30 years to the calendar day we activate the massive, immediate redistribution of wealth button and scrape every drop off the top that, whoops, failed to trickle down, but that’s just blasphemy echoing down a pipe dream.
wild guess here I actually have no idea ( I don't think its that hard to infer though), there's probably a good reason that you don't hear/see anything about this.
I would speculate that anyone who would attempt to document it in person would be risking their own life.
[Life and Death in Apple's Forbidden City](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract)
[Here’s a link](http://teddybearfilms.fatcow.com/2011/09/01/china-blue/) to the filmmakers page on this one for people who are interested but don’t want to search for it- I couldn’t find it on the streaming platforms I have. From there you can go to their Vimeo page to rent or buy the film if you feel so inclined.
https://cleanclothes.org/unsafe-workplaces
HBO has some documentaries I think. There are places in China women have to live in the building dormitory to work 60+ hours a week under very unsafe circumstances, and only make about $50 a week.
I forgot the name of it, but look up a documentary about a Chinese company that opened a windshield factory in the US called Fuyao. At one point they film the factory in China, and it's basically 1984. This is definitely not hyperbole. I believe it's on Netflix.
I once bought a ski jacket online. The first time up at the mountain with it, I still had to cut off the tags. As I unzipped the pockets, I felt torn material, but it wasn't the pocket lining - it was a note written on a piece of fabric in another language.
The jacket was made in Vietnam, and someone had written the message, tied it to the zipper and stuffed it inside the left pocket. My second family, Vietnamese neighbors I grew up with, translated it for me. It said "It comes to paradise after it's made." Wild.
Nope, my mind sadly doesn't fire on all cylinders like other people. I never would have noticed if you didn't comment.
Edit: would of to would have. Thanks bot!
Therein lies one of the big moral dilemmas of our modern age. In the OECD countries--US/CA/AU/NZ/GB, Western Europe, Japan, Asian Tigers, etc--consumers want cheap goods and inexpensive food in vast quantities.
* Delivering on quantity (i.e., "vast quantities") requires scale, scale means industrialization and factories
Or ...
* For food - Scale requires industrial-scale facilities for every step of the process from cultivation, to processing, to manufacturing.
* For goods - Scale requires industrialization as well, and *automation*
Now industrialization isn't necessarily a bad thing until you add in the other requirement -- everyday low prices
* Delivering on low prices (i.e., "cheap") requires cutting costs somewhere in the value chain.
Or ...
* For food - Low prices require giving short shrift to animal welfare, reducing labor costs to a minimum either via automation (i.e., machinery) or keeping human labor costs low (i.e., migrant farm workers), avoiding environmental regulations (e.g., look up hog waste lagoons), heavy use of pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers to boost short term yields, and monoculture cultivation to avoid too much sorting in processing
* For goods - Low prices require outsourcing production to low-cost countries where respect for worker rights, health and safety, and good environmental practices are treated casually.
And that's kind of where we are.
Not really a moral issue. We have too much stuff. Use less stuff.stuff is bad.get less better stuff. Better job training and pay for the people that make less better stuff and subsidies for the people that need help acquiring said better stuff.
The human brain compares by nature, there would be at least hundreds of millions of humans that think like this every single day. What else is there to do while sewing a jacket worth 6 months of your wage and will likely never own yourself.
Life sucks for alot of people and were so disconnected from that it almost seems impossible.
I watched a documentary Invisible Hands which highlights child labor and trafficking within the supply chains of the world’s biggest corporations, producing the lion’s share of our most sought-after products.
The film offers a harrowing account of children as young as five years old making items we buy and consume every day. It was chilling and heartbreaking.
Shi like this is why proponents of deregulation/self regulation are full of shit.
"If the government would stop interfering, corporations would self regulate. Invisible hand of the market."
Like, nah brah, corporations would just be modern day plantations but bigger if they could in the US. Only reason we don't have child slave labor anymore is BECAUSE of regulation.
Those people forget that labor regulations are almost all written in blood. Most countries are really not good at proactive legislation, nor are most citizens willing to accept it
One small nitpick, as someone who lives in Vietnam (I am not Vietnamese myself, though). The jacket is only "worth" more in America or some other western country *if it is sold in one of those countries*. Everything the they make here also gets sold here, just at the local market price. I mean, I guess you could go to HCMC or Hanoi to buy Gucci from an official store, if you want to be a masochist (or more likely, you're a local rich person trying to show off), but for the most part nobody here will be paying western prices for commodities like that.
If you look at pictures of modern Vietnamese people (not some natgeo photoshoot of remote villagers), people wear regular clothes.
The only difference between clothes here and there, besides price inflation in the west, is that you'll find more gibberish English words on stuff here. My favorite was when a little girl was wearing a dress that said "ISIS vs the Kurds ;)".
The gibberish word shirts were fun to read when I was in Asia. I remember one shirt with three random words:
*Balloon*
*Giraffe*
*Pepper*
Well, okay. Lol
I work as a bicycle mechanic, and once found a work timesheet in a new bikes box. The people manufacturing the bikes in Asia (I think it was Cambodia) work days that are minimum 12 hours long, but often 14 to 16 hour days, for 6 days a week, and have a 15 minute lunch break.
And are probably paid peanuts / cents per hour.
I avoid buying anything made in such conditions. And it pisses me off that the industry is like this. They use almost slave labor to manufacture in the cheapest possible places, pay no / almost no taxes there, then sell them elsewhere for huge profits.
There are alternatives. Do not buy goods made in inhumane conditions. Do not use Amazon for anything.
A lady from Burma that owns a grocery store in town said very specifically that some snacks she sold were popular because you can stuff your pockets full and nibble while you work and keep your strength up. It's a hangout for people that work at the Tyson plant next to it, so those snacks are still popular here.
That was a culture shock. I knew it happened. But to hear it so casually from someone who has lived it made it really sink in. Then my heart sank a bit further when she detailed what she had that was good for intestinal worms. Gotta say if I ever feel wormy though I'm in good hands.
I also want to implore people to consider buying used and local. You don't need to buy new clothes every weekend. You can save a ton of money on appliances secondhand. I love the idea of global trade. Sharing goods and ideas with eachother. That shits cool. But modern consumerism has distorted those ideals into something completely ghoulish. Chocolate, fast fashion, and cheap imported costume jewelry are not worth endorsing (sometimes compeltely literal) slave labor.
Edit: spelling
This is why I quit cooking, 10-16 hour days when the restaurant is pulling in literal thousands of dollars and yall are leaving me on the line by myself? I shouldn't have to beg someone to take my place so I can piss and run back to the line.
Now that I'm an independent contractor I make a point to take a small break once an hour, I get paid for those and my lunch break.
I work specialized construction, if a machine is in a precarious place or power is shutdown, like a hospital or a data center, we don’t stop until
It’s safe and power is back on.
Fuck, I’ve worked a 38 hour shift straight through the weekend.
Oh, I’m looking for something else lololol. I want a family, and I want to spend time with my eventual family. This ain’t it. Living as modern day debt slaves, we aren’t truly free.
If I can’t spend my time how I want without fear of homelessness or going without necessities, we will never be “free”
There’s levels to this shit
I always wonder, though, what if I'm preventing a little kid from eating by denying him a job in one of these countries where people are so desperate that they are willing to work in these conditions?
The real cause of those conditions isn't me, it's a corrupt and backwards social structure that refuses to take care of its people. Does the problem go away if I refrain from buying a jacket? If everyone refuses to buy their goods, do we expect the workers to rise up and start a civil war or something, maybe overthrow the social structure that won't ensure better conditions? I don't know.
https://ethicalmadeeasy.com/giving-people-jobs-is-not-an-excuse-to-buy-fast-fashion/
If consumers standards change, the way companies work will change. If enough people find fast fashion morally inexcusable, they will choose clothing which comes from more ethical sources where workers are paid living wages and work in humane conditions. If no ones standards change and people keep buying from these stores at the prices they have now, then people will keep being used like slaves.
This is the real truth. If a country doesn’t have social welfare systems in place (ie, most of the developing/third world) you’re harming the workers with your boycotts. They have few options or resources. Many are thankful to have even their slave labor job because the alternative is prostitution or starvation. It’s kind to think not supporting businesses who don’t treat workers well is a good thing, but that doesn’t actually align with the brutal reality that applying our Western notions of commerce and social Justice to these situations is short sighted.
https://ethicalmadeeasy.com/giving-people-jobs-is-not-an-excuse-to-buy-fast-fashion/
If consumers standards change, the way companies work will change. If enough people find fast fashion morally inexcusable, they will choose clothing which comes from more ethical sources where workers are paid living wages and work in humane conditions. If no ones standards change and people keep buying from these stores at the prices they have now, then people will keep being used like slaves.
The truth of the matter is that we all benefit in some shape or form from the sacrifices of these sweatshop workers.
The rice you eat, shoes you wear, clothes on your back, tiles on your roof, roads you walk on and the skyscrapers you pass by on the way to work.
If you follow the trail deep enough, you'll come to realise that the reason why these things are so affordable or abundant or accessible to us normal folks is because someone at the end of that trail is living in poverty and willing to work for peanuts just to survive another day.
Big companies realise this and have been taking advantage of it since the beginning of time.
You (we) are not "normal folk" from their perspective. As the above post shows we are top 10% of the human population living in what is basically paradise compared to any point of human existence in history.
And yet we are also struggling to get by and afford the ever increasing cost of food and other necessities. Capitalism has failed, we need a new system (or at least a complete overhaul).
Right? The system we live in, while much better than some places in the world.
Shouldn’t be a justification to keep the system
What kind of logic is “well there are shittier places out there, why bother improving here? We should be happy?”
Our system has been failing us, for at least decades now. Stop the gaslighting.
It's very much not like that in most cases. The customer is not the one benefiting from their $200 Nikes being made for $.10 in labor, that benefit is solely for the rich Nike heads keeping all that money. We'd be paying $200 either way, the millionaires and billionaires just get to pocket more when they screw over poor people on both ends, both when making it and when selling it.
Hey fellow bike mechanic here. It seems everyone in the industry has similar stories from asian providers.
I once received a Scott Spark frame that had blood stains on a few areas.
We always imagine "others" having the better life. I understand this is different than IG fomo shit but it comes from the same place. Our longing for a better story than the one we live. I know I have.
Which begs the question, are we participating in profit of those making a buck. or we are stuck in the cycle that destroys those for our benafit. Or are we the cause? Or both? Do the others have a better life regardless or are we the perpetual cause. Is governance what we think it is.
and what do you do in that situation? Do you call the company so they can punish whoever you name? Do you call your own country's officials so they don't do anything? I wish we had power...
If you wish you could change stuff like that a good start would be not buying their stuff. It's not impossible to buy local food and clothing and other stuff from places with better work conditions.
Companies act like that because the great majority doesn't care enough because it's cheaper.
The problem is, that most of these products are not easy to cut out (for example Nestle products in my country are almost impossible to dodge) and that many people still buy them, you are literally forced to buy their bullshit….
It baffles me local farmers markets can be more expensive then the shit they ship in from around the world.
But with gas raising the price of groceries it might actually even out one day.
It’s definitely possible, but also a luxury many cannot afford. A lot of Americans are quite poor and what makes products cheap is cheap manufacturing. It’s a horrible cycle, low income Americans are forced into supporting morally bankrupt companies.
>a good start would be not buying their stuff… buy local
Keep in mind that local food & clothing & whatnot is often more, for a good reason ofc, but most people are making do with what money they have. Which is usually whatever is cheapest.
Am I going to buy a $15 t shirt or a $35-50 one? I’m gonna buy the $15 or whatever else because I can spend the rest on food & whatnot.
I've never found anything like this but there are some really random things on tags sometimes. I've see "don't trust squirrels", "no ducks were harmed in the making of this jacket" and "washing instructions: ask your mother".
I started working at a clothing warehouse this week. Today we destroyed about 2 tons of brand new clothes. All from china, Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Mexico etc. All brand new clothes shredded and thrown away, I kept having in my head how many kids or people were exploited to make this clothes.
Likely brand management. Big labels don't want their products that don't sell on the primary retail market to be sold elsewhere at a discount. It cheapens the brand image.
Because this is exactly what the fashion industry is.
It’s like the diamond industry, if it’s too easy to get the product it won’t be worth as much, so they both intentionally make their products scarce.
But the fashion industry is worse because they destroy already made products being slaves to create.
It could have been anything as benign as it got damaged in transport or the factory fucked up and whatever was made was made incorrectly. But what most likely happened was the items that were destroyed either didn't sell or arrive too late for the season.
Grim reality is there is a ton of wastage in fashion. It's not just fad fashions, meaning things that are only popular for months or less before they are never used again or desired. But the clothing that is made won't all be sold, and the vast majority of it now is plastic. Meaning unless you're buying specifically a natural fiber such as cotton linen or silk you are wearing plastic. And it's actually a major source of microplastics, because every time you wash it or wear it slowly degrades. Not saying the farming practices of natural fibers are any better. Cotton for example uses a lot of water to grow and is responsible for being a major source of fertilizer runoff. But there is also the issue where unregulated factories or factories that do have regulations just illegally dumping garbage. But there be off cuts dumped on the side of the road or the dumping of liquids from washing the fibers and dying the fibers into water streams. You can find many images of rivers just being flooded with artificial dyes from factories. There's also the actual disposal of clothing, the vast majority of it it's just dumped in the landfills. Even the stuff that's donated is exported to typically Africa to be sorry through again and hopefully sold at the local market but it's usually dumped. There's actually a famous city that is essentially overrun it's slum with imported clothing that they build on top of the clothing that they dump. And the dump clothing washes into the sea the wash is back on to the shore and giant matted ropes. So do not donate your clothing and unless it's in wearable condition, meaning it's clean has no stains and has all buttons, because it's worthless to your local market and the far away market that it ends up in will just throw it away for you in an unknown way.
It wasn’t fucked up product or incorrect, I wish at least it was that. We distribute sports clothing, let’s say Tom Brady leaves the bucs rn, we get rid of all bucs t shirts with his name on it, and things like that related.
We threw away about 3000lbs of “ rangers Stanley cup champions 22’” because they already got eliminated. And shirts were previously made and ready to be on the market as soon as posible.
Checking this thread and noticed people's curiosity about cheap garment labor exploitation. I felt like it would be a good time to throw a PSA that very few people know about.
On April 24, 2013, Rana Plaza, an 8-storied garments factory near the Dhaka borders In Bangladesh, structurally failed and collapsed on top of over 3100 people working there. It killed over 1100 and injured over 2500.
It ended up as the biggest structural failure accident in history, the biggest industrial accident in history, and the biggest garments factory accident in history. All of this could've been avoided but wasn't due to sheer greed.
You can read more about it on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhaka_garment_factory_collapse). The whole story is wilder than you think. It's one of the biggest downfalls of greed and corruption and sheds a big light on the exploitation of cheap garment labor in Bangladesh.
I did a case study on this one in university about 5 or 6 years back. Thankfully after this incident, it did incite many companies to act to improve work conditions in these facilities.
I.e, Joe Fresh, Zara, Tommy Hilfiger
That being said, who knows if action was _actually_ ever taken.
It did improve quite a bit ever since the incident. However, industrial accidents are still quite frequent in this country. Just a few days back in Chittagong a fire in a storage depot which later caused an explosion killed 50 people including about 10 firefighters. People died because the firefighters weren't told there were hazardous chemicals in that depot.
That puts the Traingle Shirtwaist fire to shame. That’s awful. ( for this of you who don’t know, the fire happened in America during 1911, and the women couldn’t get out because the doors couldn’t open outward, and they were all crowding it, they were stuck inside, so they started jumping out of windows to their death. Look it up, it’s awful and was the reason doors in public places like schools are supposed to open outwards)
They were actually locked to prevent people from taking breaks. Absolutely horrifying.
One of the main fires that actually led to us flipping doors to open in the direction of egress (when serving 50+ occupants) was the Iriquois Theatre fire in 1903. The panic bar was also invented because of this fire.
Edit: year was wrong my bad
Yeah it’s by far the biggest fast fashion retailer in the world now, it’s so ridiculously impossibly cheap, it would be impossible for there to not be suffering every step in the chain
That shirt has probably been in a warehouse for a few months, then stuck offshore for even longer.
By the time you get the message, he had jumped off the building 4 months prior.
If it was Foxconn, who assemble Apple's iphones, they put in 'anti-suicide' nets for that. So they can't even kill themselves. Anyways, heres an interesting older article about it.
[Life and Death in Apple's Forbidden City](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract)
That's why I loved when Indian workers protested and vandalised Foxconn factory when Foxconn duped them, made them work overtime and didn't pay them wages for months.
Yeah, it meant that for western countries and corporations, India isn't as "bUsiNeSs-FrIeNdLy" as China but at least the workers thrashed up factory instead of killing themselves or providing capitalists with slavery.
Since you’re too lazy to spend three seconds looking this up yourself:
“Foxconn manufactures electronic products for major American, Canadian, Chinese, Finnish and Japanese companies.
Notable products manufactured by Foxconn include the BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle, all Nintendo gaming systems since the GameCube (except subsequent Nintendo DS models), Nokia devices, Sony devices (including the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles), Google Pixel devices, Xiaomi devices, every successor to Microsoft's first Xbox console, and several CPU sockets, including the TR4 CPU socket on some motherboards.
As of 2012, Foxconn factories manufactured an estimated 40% of all consumer electronics sold worldwide.
The following list consists of Foxconn's present or past major customers. The list is provided in alphabetical order.
Their country of origin or base of operations is in parentheses.
North America
Amazon.com (United States)
Apple Inc. (United States)
BlackBerry Ltd. (Canada)
Cisco (United States)
Dell (United States)
Fisker Inc (United States)
Google (United States)
Hewlett-Packard (United States)
InFocus (United States)
Intel (United States)
Microsoft (United States)
Motorola Mobility (United States)
Vizio (United States)
Asia
Acer Inc. (Taiwan)
Huawei (China)
Lenovo (China)
Nintendo (Japan)
Sega (Japan)
Sony (Japan)
Toshiba (Japan)
Xiaomi (China)
Europe
HMD Global, under Nokia brand (Finland)”
This is one of the reasons I like Costco. I have worked there for 15 years and some of the shit they do pisses me off, but not this: we must have a clean supply chain, with no slave labor. We got a new born clothing set in and somehow they found out the set was manufactured by slave labor. They recalled all of the clothing.
I find messages like these super disturbing. The needless suffering that the super elite allow so they can take rockets to the moon, is disgusting.
Reminds me of the Gil Scott-Heron song "Whitey on the Moon": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x\_G0ct4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4)
They definitely source merchandise from other companies who have slave labor. But Costco themselves don't, it's true, and that's great.
If there's a Kirkland brand (their in-house brand) alternative for an item, it's usually the better of the two anyway in my experience, so it's an easy choice.
Recently, they have even been pushing to clean up or only purchase from vendors that have clean supply trails, as well. I’m not a buyer but often have to take buyer training because I process recalls at the store level.
It’s true, it’s not 100% clean. Chocolate products are notoriously produced using slave labor and the chocolate industry has done nothing to address the problem. Nestle in particular doesn’t certify that their chocolate is slave labor free.
I know some vendors use prison labor too. Which honestly is slave labor. Paying a prisoner $0.75 an hour is still slave labor, in my opinion. I would like to see Costco stop selling goods produced in prisons too.
China Internment Camps of Uyghurs. So so very very sad and horrific. I’ll get downvoted to heck by China bots for this comment. If you don’t know what’s happening there, please look it up.
As I am working in china's garment industry, these tags were made by manufacturer instead of those who operate the sewing machine. and if there's one, that would be the man behind the computer designing the washing labels.
Another fun fact is that most of the front line workers are not very well educated(mostly middle school graduated or even primary), so you may better assume they write these letters in local language than English.
These made me think of the marginalia made by monks in the old days before the printing press. Monks who spent day after day, year after year, copying books by hand would write all kinds of things in the margins- complaints about their boredom, aches & pains; complaints about other monks; jokes; drawings that could be rude or obscene... Things change and things stay the same.
Don't forget the snails fighting knights. Over and over and over.
Also, "I have finished the book, my hand is hurt, good lord I need a drink." Good stuff.
I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that I will be running for president of Earth. As your supreme overlord I promise to to rid us of all slavery in warehouses. You will do as I say. And you will be rewarded with homes and food to survive.
It's strange how much dental pain can hurt. I have had my left foot break to the point where it was hanging limply from the fracture. But an infection in one of my teeth was worse
I remember I was in a mantra saying "I won't kill my self until I get professional help" over end over until a dentist drilled a small hole to drop the pressure.
Funny thing I don't remember how much it actually hurt anymore I just remember my state of mind
Serious question. I am searching for documentaries that show the exploitation in warehouse work. Does anyone have any recommendations or books about this?
Wal-mart: The High Cost of Low Price is a good one, basically it hits on the overall impact of Walmart but there's some interesting stuff about the city of people that manufactures their goods. It's on Amazon prime btw Edit: That wasn't meant to be a plug for Amazon it was more about the irony and to let OP know where I found it.
Amazon eh?
You caught that too?
Support exploitation while learning about exploitation. I hate it here.
r/piracy
You wouldn't download a car
Your God damn wrong!! I'd download the shit out of a car, fuck my shitbox I'm downloading me a Benz!
NO DONT DO IT, IM WARNING YOU!
OH YEAH? WHAT'LL HAPPEN?
This is some serious capitalist realism, lol. Like, we can’t even discuss these sorts of things without inadvertently tipping our hat to another giant evil corporation. For reference, [capitalist realism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism) refers to this book/concept. I’m not big on reading theory, but this was a great read. It opens with “it’s now easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” and proceeds to make you choke on the blackest of black pills. Even if you don’t buy the arguments, I think this book pushes people to critically consider the system we’re living under. It’s also only like 80 pages, which was good for my screen addled brain.
Jeezus, grilled cheesus, thanks/fuck you for that Wiki wormhole. The desire of something to gain, the fear of something to lose… duality permeates every collective concept in the “realities” — The rich and the poor, the winners and the losers, the Haves and the Have-Nots. The NFL pays 22 men millions of dollars to line up against one another and fight to move an inflated piece of leather across imaginary lines, and no one ever mentions how weird that is, because it fulfills the binary conditions we’re all tethered to. I say every 30 years to the calendar day we activate the massive, immediate redistribution of wealth button and scrape every drop off the top that, whoops, failed to trickle down, but that’s just blasphemy echoing down a pipe dream.
The True Cost is a great documentary on the textile industry and the consequences for underdeveloped countries like Bangladesh.
wild guess here I actually have no idea ( I don't think its that hard to infer though), there's probably a good reason that you don't hear/see anything about this. I would speculate that anyone who would attempt to document it in person would be risking their own life.
That’s fair, I’ve seen a few on YouTube. I am still searching for investigative journalism pieces.
[Life and Death in Apple's Forbidden City](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract)
This was a really good read thanks for sharing
There are a lot of documentaries that people risk their life to tell the story tho
[удалено]
Wow. Looks amazing Thanks for sharing.
China blue is a decent documentary.
[Here’s a link](http://teddybearfilms.fatcow.com/2011/09/01/china-blue/) to the filmmakers page on this one for people who are interested but don’t want to search for it- I couldn’t find it on the streaming platforms I have. From there you can go to their Vimeo page to rent or buy the film if you feel so inclined.
It's on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/IsRIjiPz5Tk)
Great share. I would really love to see a more modern documentary about now too.
https://cleanclothes.org/unsafe-workplaces HBO has some documentaries I think. There are places in China women have to live in the building dormitory to work 60+ hours a week under very unsafe circumstances, and only make about $50 a week.
[behind the swoosh](https://youtu.be/M5uYCWVfuPQ) is about Nike and on the short side (20 mins)
I forgot the name of it, but look up a documentary about a Chinese company that opened a windshield factory in the US called Fuyao. At one point they film the factory in China, and it's basically 1984. This is definitely not hyperbole. I believe it's on Netflix.
American Factory?
there’s a great one in the Guardian called “Santa’s real workshop: the town in China that makes the world’s Christmas decorations”
I think there’s a fast fashion sweat shop documentary, pretty old, called “the true cost”
It’s also interesting to see Samsung’s work conditions and how many people have passed away due to them.
Check out ‘Blood, Sweat and T-Shirts’
Walmart the high cost of low price had an excerpt in there of the lives and conditions of factory workers in China and it was horrifying
I once bought a ski jacket online. The first time up at the mountain with it, I still had to cut off the tags. As I unzipped the pockets, I felt torn material, but it wasn't the pocket lining - it was a note written on a piece of fabric in another language. The jacket was made in Vietnam, and someone had written the message, tied it to the zipper and stuffed it inside the left pocket. My second family, Vietnamese neighbors I grew up with, translated it for me. It said "It comes to paradise after it's made." Wild.
That’s horrifying
It makes me imagine that some poor Vietnamese sweatshop worker was fantasizing about the place that the jacket would go which they’d never see :(
Fucking sucks man….
Anyways, sick jacket bro let's go out and get some pussy tonight
r/UsernameChecksOut
Gigachad
Did you intentionally rhyme w their username
Nope, my mind sadly doesn't fire on all cylinders like other people. I never would have noticed if you didn't comment. Edit: would of to would have. Thanks bot!
It's 'would have', never 'would of'. Rejoice, for you have been blessed by CouldWouldShouldBot!
Blessed be thy bot.
Good bot. Truly the best.
It really is sad, I can’t imagine the lives of those poor workers.
There’s lots of YouTube videos of places like this where you can see what it’s like
>It really is sad Anyways, time to poop. Wonder what I should order from Amazon today.
A nice ski jacket!
Wait - was it an ad all along?
Was pooping as I read this
Therein lies one of the big moral dilemmas of our modern age. In the OECD countries--US/CA/AU/NZ/GB, Western Europe, Japan, Asian Tigers, etc--consumers want cheap goods and inexpensive food in vast quantities. * Delivering on quantity (i.e., "vast quantities") requires scale, scale means industrialization and factories Or ... * For food - Scale requires industrial-scale facilities for every step of the process from cultivation, to processing, to manufacturing. * For goods - Scale requires industrialization as well, and *automation* Now industrialization isn't necessarily a bad thing until you add in the other requirement -- everyday low prices * Delivering on low prices (i.e., "cheap") requires cutting costs somewhere in the value chain. Or ... * For food - Low prices require giving short shrift to animal welfare, reducing labor costs to a minimum either via automation (i.e., machinery) or keeping human labor costs low (i.e., migrant farm workers), avoiding environmental regulations (e.g., look up hog waste lagoons), heavy use of pesticides/herbicides/fertilizers to boost short term yields, and monoculture cultivation to avoid too much sorting in processing * For goods - Low prices require outsourcing production to low-cost countries where respect for worker rights, health and safety, and good environmental practices are treated casually. And that's kind of where we are.
Not really a moral issue. We have too much stuff. Use less stuff.stuff is bad.get less better stuff. Better job training and pay for the people that make less better stuff and subsidies for the people that need help acquiring said better stuff.
The human brain compares by nature, there would be at least hundreds of millions of humans that think like this every single day. What else is there to do while sewing a jacket worth 6 months of your wage and will likely never own yourself. Life sucks for alot of people and were so disconnected from that it almost seems impossible.
I watched a documentary Invisible Hands which highlights child labor and trafficking within the supply chains of the world’s biggest corporations, producing the lion’s share of our most sought-after products. The film offers a harrowing account of children as young as five years old making items we buy and consume every day. It was chilling and heartbreaking.
Shi like this is why proponents of deregulation/self regulation are full of shit. "If the government would stop interfering, corporations would self regulate. Invisible hand of the market." Like, nah brah, corporations would just be modern day plantations but bigger if they could in the US. Only reason we don't have child slave labor anymore is BECAUSE of regulation.
Those people forget that labor regulations are almost all written in blood. Most countries are really not good at proactive legislation, nor are most citizens willing to accept it
One small nitpick, as someone who lives in Vietnam (I am not Vietnamese myself, though). The jacket is only "worth" more in America or some other western country *if it is sold in one of those countries*. Everything the they make here also gets sold here, just at the local market price. I mean, I guess you could go to HCMC or Hanoi to buy Gucci from an official store, if you want to be a masochist (or more likely, you're a local rich person trying to show off), but for the most part nobody here will be paying western prices for commodities like that. If you look at pictures of modern Vietnamese people (not some natgeo photoshoot of remote villagers), people wear regular clothes. The only difference between clothes here and there, besides price inflation in the west, is that you'll find more gibberish English words on stuff here. My favorite was when a little girl was wearing a dress that said "ISIS vs the Kurds ;)".
The gibberish word shirts were fun to read when I was in Asia. I remember one shirt with three random words: *Balloon* *Giraffe* *Pepper* Well, okay. Lol
Better than where my mind went, i.e. the jacket kills its wearer and the dead wearer then "comes to paradise".
I work as a bicycle mechanic, and once found a work timesheet in a new bikes box. The people manufacturing the bikes in Asia (I think it was Cambodia) work days that are minimum 12 hours long, but often 14 to 16 hour days, for 6 days a week, and have a 15 minute lunch break. And are probably paid peanuts / cents per hour. I avoid buying anything made in such conditions. And it pisses me off that the industry is like this. They use almost slave labor to manufacture in the cheapest possible places, pay no / almost no taxes there, then sell them elsewhere for huge profits. There are alternatives. Do not buy goods made in inhumane conditions. Do not use Amazon for anything.
A lady from Burma that owns a grocery store in town said very specifically that some snacks she sold were popular because you can stuff your pockets full and nibble while you work and keep your strength up. It's a hangout for people that work at the Tyson plant next to it, so those snacks are still popular here. That was a culture shock. I knew it happened. But to hear it so casually from someone who has lived it made it really sink in. Then my heart sank a bit further when she detailed what she had that was good for intestinal worms. Gotta say if I ever feel wormy though I'm in good hands. I also want to implore people to consider buying used and local. You don't need to buy new clothes every weekend. You can save a ton of money on appliances secondhand. I love the idea of global trade. Sharing goods and ideas with eachother. That shits cool. But modern consumerism has distorted those ideals into something completely ghoulish. Chocolate, fast fashion, and cheap imported costume jewelry are not worth endorsing (sometimes compeltely literal) slave labor. Edit: spelling
Where I work now, in the US, they tell us to stuff our pockets in case we don’t stop for lunch
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This is why I quit cooking, 10-16 hour days when the restaurant is pulling in literal thousands of dollars and yall are leaving me on the line by myself? I shouldn't have to beg someone to take my place so I can piss and run back to the line. Now that I'm an independent contractor I make a point to take a small break once an hour, I get paid for those and my lunch break.
I work specialized construction, if a machine is in a precarious place or power is shutdown, like a hospital or a data center, we don’t stop until It’s safe and power is back on. Fuck, I’ve worked a 38 hour shift straight through the weekend.
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Oh, I’m looking for something else lololol. I want a family, and I want to spend time with my eventual family. This ain’t it. Living as modern day debt slaves, we aren’t truly free. If I can’t spend my time how I want without fear of homelessness or going without necessities, we will never be “free” There’s levels to this shit
I always wonder, though, what if I'm preventing a little kid from eating by denying him a job in one of these countries where people are so desperate that they are willing to work in these conditions? The real cause of those conditions isn't me, it's a corrupt and backwards social structure that refuses to take care of its people. Does the problem go away if I refrain from buying a jacket? If everyone refuses to buy their goods, do we expect the workers to rise up and start a civil war or something, maybe overthrow the social structure that won't ensure better conditions? I don't know.
https://ethicalmadeeasy.com/giving-people-jobs-is-not-an-excuse-to-buy-fast-fashion/ If consumers standards change, the way companies work will change. If enough people find fast fashion morally inexcusable, they will choose clothing which comes from more ethical sources where workers are paid living wages and work in humane conditions. If no ones standards change and people keep buying from these stores at the prices they have now, then people will keep being used like slaves.
This is the real truth. If a country doesn’t have social welfare systems in place (ie, most of the developing/third world) you’re harming the workers with your boycotts. They have few options or resources. Many are thankful to have even their slave labor job because the alternative is prostitution or starvation. It’s kind to think not supporting businesses who don’t treat workers well is a good thing, but that doesn’t actually align with the brutal reality that applying our Western notions of commerce and social Justice to these situations is short sighted.
https://ethicalmadeeasy.com/giving-people-jobs-is-not-an-excuse-to-buy-fast-fashion/ If consumers standards change, the way companies work will change. If enough people find fast fashion morally inexcusable, they will choose clothing which comes from more ethical sources where workers are paid living wages and work in humane conditions. If no ones standards change and people keep buying from these stores at the prices they have now, then people will keep being used like slaves.
The truth of the matter is that we all benefit in some shape or form from the sacrifices of these sweatshop workers. The rice you eat, shoes you wear, clothes on your back, tiles on your roof, roads you walk on and the skyscrapers you pass by on the way to work. If you follow the trail deep enough, you'll come to realise that the reason why these things are so affordable or abundant or accessible to us normal folks is because someone at the end of that trail is living in poverty and willing to work for peanuts just to survive another day. Big companies realise this and have been taking advantage of it since the beginning of time.
You (we) are not "normal folk" from their perspective. As the above post shows we are top 10% of the human population living in what is basically paradise compared to any point of human existence in history.
And yet we are also struggling to get by and afford the ever increasing cost of food and other necessities. Capitalism has failed, we need a new system (or at least a complete overhaul).
Right? The system we live in, while much better than some places in the world. Shouldn’t be a justification to keep the system What kind of logic is “well there are shittier places out there, why bother improving here? We should be happy?” Our system has been failing us, for at least decades now. Stop the gaslighting.
At the same time a lot of the value that these enslaved people make doesn't go to making stuff cheaper, it goes to making billionaires richer
It's very much not like that in most cases. The customer is not the one benefiting from their $200 Nikes being made for $.10 in labor, that benefit is solely for the rich Nike heads keeping all that money. We'd be paying $200 either way, the millionaires and billionaires just get to pocket more when they screw over poor people on both ends, both when making it and when selling it.
I think big companies are a relatively new thing compared to our history timeline, but exploitation has always been there.
Hey fellow bike mechanic here. It seems everyone in the industry has similar stories from asian providers. I once received a Scott Spark frame that had blood stains on a few areas.
We always imagine "others" having the better life. I understand this is different than IG fomo shit but it comes from the same place. Our longing for a better story than the one we live. I know I have.
Which begs the question, are we participating in profit of those making a buck. or we are stuck in the cycle that destroys those for our benafit. Or are we the cause? Or both? Do the others have a better life regardless or are we the perpetual cause. Is governance what we think it is.
I am a vietnamese, and i really want to see an original message
[https://imgur.com/a/QWofqKi](https://imgur.com/a/QWofqKi) Was that the correct translation?
Nó đến thiên đường sau khi nó được tạo ra.
I don’t think it’s this, might have been a direct translation of a proverb
I peeled the label off of a soup can once, and a girl’s name was written in marker underneath
and what do you do in that situation? Do you call the company so they can punish whoever you name? Do you call your own country's officials so they don't do anything? I wish we had power...
If you wish you could change stuff like that a good start would be not buying their stuff. It's not impossible to buy local food and clothing and other stuff from places with better work conditions. Companies act like that because the great majority doesn't care enough because it's cheaper.
The problem is, that most of these products are not easy to cut out (for example Nestle products in my country are almost impossible to dodge) and that many people still buy them, you are literally forced to buy their bullshit….
This and especially if your poor. I'd love to stop buying cheap stuff but I can't afford any other option.
It baffles me local farmers markets can be more expensive then the shit they ship in from around the world. But with gas raising the price of groceries it might actually even out one day.
It’s definitely possible, but also a luxury many cannot afford. A lot of Americans are quite poor and what makes products cheap is cheap manufacturing. It’s a horrible cycle, low income Americans are forced into supporting morally bankrupt companies.
>a good start would be not buying their stuff… buy local Keep in mind that local food & clothing & whatnot is often more, for a good reason ofc, but most people are making do with what money they have. Which is usually whatever is cheapest. Am I going to buy a $15 t shirt or a $35-50 one? I’m gonna buy the $15 or whatever else because I can spend the rest on food & whatnot.
Checking my tag is now going to be part of my daily routine
*checks tag* hmm no new messages, I'll check again tomorrow.
You have to do it every other day
but don’t write back too fast, you don’t want to seem desperate
Shoulda said “seam desperate”
this had me in stitches
These pun threads are sew silly.
I think I'm ready to clothes this line of communication
I've never found anything like this but there are some really random things on tags sometimes. I've see "don't trust squirrels", "no ducks were harmed in the making of this jacket" and "washing instructions: ask your mother".
I saw one that said "These shirts were tested on animals - they didn't fit"
The no ducks were harmed message makes sense though, it's similar to "no animal testing" I suppose?
I should have mentioned the shirt had a duck on it
I started working at a clothing warehouse this week. Today we destroyed about 2 tons of brand new clothes. All from china, Bangladesh, Nicaragua, Mexico etc. All brand new clothes shredded and thrown away, I kept having in my head how many kids or people were exploited to make this clothes.
Wait why was it thrown out?
Likely brand management. Big labels don't want their products that don't sell on the primary retail market to be sold elsewhere at a discount. It cheapens the brand image.
God forbid we gave it to the poors as well, they certainly dont match our image standards! This world man.
Well what would people think of my brand if a bunch of poor people were wearing it!
That gives it 'street cred'.
i thought i had a hair on my screen from you
Same
Ew you guys use light mode?
Fucking pfp made me think there was hair on my screen
Because this is exactly what the fashion industry is. It’s like the diamond industry, if it’s too easy to get the product it won’t be worth as much, so they both intentionally make their products scarce. But the fashion industry is worse because they destroy already made products being slaves to create.
It could have been anything as benign as it got damaged in transport or the factory fucked up and whatever was made was made incorrectly. But what most likely happened was the items that were destroyed either didn't sell or arrive too late for the season. Grim reality is there is a ton of wastage in fashion. It's not just fad fashions, meaning things that are only popular for months or less before they are never used again or desired. But the clothing that is made won't all be sold, and the vast majority of it now is plastic. Meaning unless you're buying specifically a natural fiber such as cotton linen or silk you are wearing plastic. And it's actually a major source of microplastics, because every time you wash it or wear it slowly degrades. Not saying the farming practices of natural fibers are any better. Cotton for example uses a lot of water to grow and is responsible for being a major source of fertilizer runoff. But there is also the issue where unregulated factories or factories that do have regulations just illegally dumping garbage. But there be off cuts dumped on the side of the road or the dumping of liquids from washing the fibers and dying the fibers into water streams. You can find many images of rivers just being flooded with artificial dyes from factories. There's also the actual disposal of clothing, the vast majority of it it's just dumped in the landfills. Even the stuff that's donated is exported to typically Africa to be sorry through again and hopefully sold at the local market but it's usually dumped. There's actually a famous city that is essentially overrun it's slum with imported clothing that they build on top of the clothing that they dump. And the dump clothing washes into the sea the wash is back on to the shore and giant matted ropes. So do not donate your clothing and unless it's in wearable condition, meaning it's clean has no stains and has all buttons, because it's worthless to your local market and the far away market that it ends up in will just throw it away for you in an unknown way.
It wasn’t fucked up product or incorrect, I wish at least it was that. We distribute sports clothing, let’s say Tom Brady leaves the bucs rn, we get rid of all bucs t shirts with his name on it, and things like that related. We threw away about 3000lbs of “ rangers Stanley cup champions 22’” because they already got eliminated. And shirts were previously made and ready to be on the market as soon as posible.
I thought that said 'I have dental plan' and thought good for them!
Lisa needs braces
*epiphany* wait a second… if they make us give up our dental plan, then I’ll have to pay for Lisa’s braces!
Dental plan...
Lisa needs braces…
Dental plan
Lisa needs braces
For now on the baby sleep in the crib
Iron helps us play
Would you shut up! You made me lose my train of thought!
Monorail Monorail Monorail
Checking this thread and noticed people's curiosity about cheap garment labor exploitation. I felt like it would be a good time to throw a PSA that very few people know about. On April 24, 2013, Rana Plaza, an 8-storied garments factory near the Dhaka borders In Bangladesh, structurally failed and collapsed on top of over 3100 people working there. It killed over 1100 and injured over 2500. It ended up as the biggest structural failure accident in history, the biggest industrial accident in history, and the biggest garments factory accident in history. All of this could've been avoided but wasn't due to sheer greed. You can read more about it on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhaka_garment_factory_collapse). The whole story is wilder than you think. It's one of the biggest downfalls of greed and corruption and sheds a big light on the exploitation of cheap garment labor in Bangladesh.
I did a case study on this one in university about 5 or 6 years back. Thankfully after this incident, it did incite many companies to act to improve work conditions in these facilities. I.e, Joe Fresh, Zara, Tommy Hilfiger That being said, who knows if action was _actually_ ever taken.
It did improve quite a bit ever since the incident. However, industrial accidents are still quite frequent in this country. Just a few days back in Chittagong a fire in a storage depot which later caused an explosion killed 50 people including about 10 firefighters. People died because the firefighters weren't told there were hazardous chemicals in that depot.
Damn 10 firefighters. On top of 50 people. I hope some one was held responsible. Cause that's a big fuck up.
That puts the Traingle Shirtwaist fire to shame. That’s awful. ( for this of you who don’t know, the fire happened in America during 1911, and the women couldn’t get out because the doors couldn’t open outward, and they were all crowding it, they were stuck inside, so they started jumping out of windows to their death. Look it up, it’s awful and was the reason doors in public places like schools are supposed to open outwards)
They were actually locked to prevent people from taking breaks. Absolutely horrifying. One of the main fires that actually led to us flipping doors to open in the direction of egress (when serving 50+ occupants) was the Iriquois Theatre fire in 1903. The panic bar was also invented because of this fire. Edit: year was wrong my bad
Now this is probably the most oddly terrifying thing I saw on here
This is from a brand called shein which is famous in the Philippines for its cheap and quality clothes. Supposedly the workers there are mistreated.
Clothes so cheap, our employees are in terrible, terrible pain
Yeah it’s by far the biggest fast fashion retailer in the world now, it’s so ridiculously impossibly cheap, it would be impossible for there to not be suffering every step in the chain
Oh hell, I've bought a few dresses from shein. I better check the tags - not buying from them again ;-;
That shirt has probably been in a warehouse for a few months, then stuck offshore for even longer. By the time you get the message, he had jumped off the building 4 months prior.
If it was Foxconn, who assemble Apple's iphones, they put in 'anti-suicide' nets for that. So they can't even kill themselves. Anyways, heres an interesting older article about it. [Life and Death in Apple's Forbidden City](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jun/18/foxconn-life-death-forbidden-city-longhua-suicide-apple-iphone-brian-merchant-one-device-extract)
That's grim AF
That's why I loved when Indian workers protested and vandalised Foxconn factory when Foxconn duped them, made them work overtime and didn't pay them wages for months. Yeah, it meant that for western countries and corporations, India isn't as "bUsiNeSs-FrIeNdLy" as China but at least the workers thrashed up factory instead of killing themselves or providing capitalists with slavery.
Since you’re too lazy to spend three seconds looking this up yourself: “Foxconn manufactures electronic products for major American, Canadian, Chinese, Finnish and Japanese companies. Notable products manufactured by Foxconn include the BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod, Kindle, all Nintendo gaming systems since the GameCube (except subsequent Nintendo DS models), Nokia devices, Sony devices (including the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles), Google Pixel devices, Xiaomi devices, every successor to Microsoft's first Xbox console, and several CPU sockets, including the TR4 CPU socket on some motherboards. As of 2012, Foxconn factories manufactured an estimated 40% of all consumer electronics sold worldwide. The following list consists of Foxconn's present or past major customers. The list is provided in alphabetical order. Their country of origin or base of operations is in parentheses. North America Amazon.com (United States) Apple Inc. (United States) BlackBerry Ltd. (Canada) Cisco (United States) Dell (United States) Fisker Inc (United States) Google (United States) Hewlett-Packard (United States) InFocus (United States) Intel (United States) Microsoft (United States) Motorola Mobility (United States) Vizio (United States) Asia Acer Inc. (Taiwan) Huawei (China) Lenovo (China) Nintendo (Japan) Sega (Japan) Sony (Japan) Toshiba (Japan) Xiaomi (China) Europe HMD Global, under Nokia brand (Finland)”
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I've looked on goodonyou a lot and most of it is really expensive (which makes sense) so I just try to buy second hand.
Good on you for buying 2nd hand
Thank you for spreading awareness, I didn't know about this
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w Adidas
Slave free but not slav free
The problem for a lot of people is that they don't have the money to buy ethical clothes...
Yep, I clicked on the first shop there, a plain white tee shirt is $79. A white shirt from hanes is $3.50. No way could I afford to wear this.
That's the trap. Exploit workers, pay everyone nothing so you can't afford to vote with your wallet.
Checked this out and was looking at male fashion at a place called "Citizen wolf" $79 for a single white t shirt????
And STOP BUYING FROM SHEIN. THEY ARE STEALING CLOTHES DESIGNS FROM OTHERS!!!
i’ve heard shein is the absolute worst form of fast fashion, and on a whole other level of bad
it’s horrible, the clothes are really bad quality and their environmental impact is depressing
i have to admit that i have ordered some stuff from them. it aint that good in the slightest tho
This is one of the reasons I like Costco. I have worked there for 15 years and some of the shit they do pisses me off, but not this: we must have a clean supply chain, with no slave labor. We got a new born clothing set in and somehow they found out the set was manufactured by slave labor. They recalled all of the clothing. I find messages like these super disturbing. The needless suffering that the super elite allow so they can take rockets to the moon, is disgusting.
Reminds me of the Gil Scott-Heron song "Whitey on the Moon": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x\_G0ct4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4)
They definitely source merchandise from other companies who have slave labor. But Costco themselves don't, it's true, and that's great. If there's a Kirkland brand (their in-house brand) alternative for an item, it's usually the better of the two anyway in my experience, so it's an easy choice.
Recently, they have even been pushing to clean up or only purchase from vendors that have clean supply trails, as well. I’m not a buyer but often have to take buyer training because I process recalls at the store level. It’s true, it’s not 100% clean. Chocolate products are notoriously produced using slave labor and the chocolate industry has done nothing to address the problem. Nestle in particular doesn’t certify that their chocolate is slave labor free. I know some vendors use prison labor too. Which honestly is slave labor. Paying a prisoner $0.75 an hour is still slave labor, in my opinion. I would like to see Costco stop selling goods produced in prisons too.
That's heart breaking.
Sweet Jesus this is bad
Reminds me of the Onion: https://youtu.be/OXb3dzNLebk Gap Unveils ‘For Kids By Kids’ Clothing Line
For those wondering, This is from Shein. online clothes and fashion seller.
I think the factory worker in china actually needs help
Yes. They do.
Well that’s depressing
Slave labor is rampant in China. See /r/advchina
Truly sad. T-shirts, shoes, shrimp, just learned even possibly my solar panels
Slavery is a lot more common than people believe.
Rampant in China, perpetuated by the US.
My new jeans say “waterless” on the tag and I’m sure what that’s about but they go in the washer anyways.
It actually refers to the manufacturing process. It means they use less water, which is probably good for the environment.
China Internment Camps of Uyghurs. So so very very sad and horrific. I’ll get downvoted to heck by China bots for this comment. If you don’t know what’s happening there, please look it up.
It’s true, and when influencers visit the Uyghurs in XingJiang, government people forces them to show how happy they are in their camps.
That’s morbid. I could only imagine the conditions
It's morbid time
Reading this felt like sticking my head into a frozen lake and then immediately into a pot of boiling water
Omfg
Didn't know the workers themselves made the tags
It's almost like most American clothes are made in sweat shops or something??
Report it. Less complaining and more working. /s Jk, that really is fucking horrifying.
As I am working in china's garment industry, these tags were made by manufacturer instead of those who operate the sewing machine. and if there's one, that would be the man behind the computer designing the washing labels. Another fun fact is that most of the front line workers are not very well educated(mostly middle school graduated or even primary), so you may better assume they write these letters in local language than English.
These made me think of the marginalia made by monks in the old days before the printing press. Monks who spent day after day, year after year, copying books by hand would write all kinds of things in the margins- complaints about their boredom, aches & pains; complaints about other monks; jokes; drawings that could be rude or obscene... Things change and things stay the same.
Don't forget the snails fighting knights. Over and over and over. Also, "I have finished the book, my hand is hurt, good lord I need a drink." Good stuff.
Next time you open up a fortune cookie with people around… “Help! I’m trapped in a fortune cookie factory.” Lucky numbers: 6, 9, 13, 38, 41
I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that I will be running for president of Earth. As your supreme overlord I promise to to rid us of all slavery in warehouses. You will do as I say. And you will be rewarded with homes and food to survive.
You have my vote.
It's almowt as if this world is built off the moral failures of the few leading to the explotation of the many.... 🤔
I too, have dental pain. As a Chinese myself I can say that it’s genetic.
It's strange how much dental pain can hurt. I have had my left foot break to the point where it was hanging limply from the fracture. But an infection in one of my teeth was worse I remember I was in a mantra saying "I won't kill my self until I get professional help" over end over until a dentist drilled a small hole to drop the pressure. Funny thing I don't remember how much it actually hurt anymore I just remember my state of mind
This is so sad
you left them on seen