Today, everyone is concerned about what’s in his or her food. Consumers demand the increasing amount of information on nutrition labels in an attempt to be healthier and make better decisions about what they eat.
People now want to know where the food they buy was grown, what the ingredients are, and whether or not pesticides were used in the process. Why can’t this amount of concern be applied to the clothes we wear or the products we buy?
If customers had the same desire for transparency from the companies that manufacture our goods, sweatshops would be a thing of the past.
Obviously, the majority of the population is inherently against sweatshops, yet people are ingrained with apathy that leads them to buy $2 shirts without a second thought as to where it came from or why the price is so low.
Most would agree it’s not right for another human being to work slave-like hours, and get paid a pittance for it. The only way to abolish these conditions is for customers to demand transparency.
One solution is for every garment sold in North America to carry an informative label (similar to nutrition labels found on food) that plainly states whether or not the item was made in a sweatshop.
If the item was made in a sweatshop, the label would also have to show what the worker who made it was paid. This would blatantly bring the problem home to the source of consumption.
No longer would customers be allowed to hide behind the fact that they didn’t know where their garment came from, pleading negligence.
Suddenly, customers would be faced with the moral decision to buy the garment or not, knowing full well it was made unethically, and that the people who made it don’t even have enough money to buy it themselves.