We have all heard sayings like you vote with your money.
Underlying it is clearly the point of view that money and power are
intertwined, that spending money is really what we do with our
“allocation” of power. Our experience suggests that this is, at
least to some extent, correct: people with lots of money have more
power than people with less money.
Whenever we buy a good or service, we are casting a vote of sorts,
because we are funding some company or organisation. Indeed, all of
us do it: we buy food, clothes, often electronics, transportation
goods (like a car, bike, motorbike, etc.) or services (like tickets
on buses, trains, aeroplanes, or a taxi), and so forth. At least some
of these are what we could consider “basic”, that is, we have
some need for them. It is true that we could live in
such a way that does not involve money, like a hermit or a monk does,
but for most people these are not really options.
Modern society, however, brings us two problems which were not really
experienced by people a few centuries ago: we live in heavily
globalised societies, and we live in economies which thrive on
consumption. In other words, we live in such a way that our actions
in what part of the world are connected to other parts of the world
in ways that were essentially unimaginable in earlier periods of
human history, and we live in economic set ups that really only work
on the condition that people consume goods and services. Whether or
not these are good things does not concern me at present: they are,
for most humans in the West, simply facts.
These three things can be combined: we have to consume, our
consumptions and actions affect people on a global scale, and we are
giving funds, we are voting, when we consume. Add to all of this the
implicit point that we are talking about humans in all these
interactions, and we have an issue that falls under the magisterium
of ethics.
This matter not only falls under ethics, it is a matter of profound
ethical concern. It would be a matter of ethical concern even if the
economy were not so globalised. The problem is made incredibly
complex by the way the economy functions, though, because of how far
reaching our actions are. The only solution that can be deemed
“simple” is to not play the economy game at all, to be a hermit
or monk. For most of us, those of us who will not do so, the ethical
course of action is not clear.
Let me give an example of why this is difficult, one that was briefly
discussed at the Glimpse conference I attended recently in one
of the electives, involving clothes. It is fairly well established
that the working conditions for many in Bangladesh are deplorable.
That is an affront to human dignity, particularly as expressed in
terms of worker's rights. So what do we do? If we do not,
collectively, buy Bangladeshi clothes, then people no longer have a
job. Their economy is based on the textile industry. If we do buy
clothes from there, then we are funding their exploitation.
Suppose we work to ensure they have better working conditions, so
that their clothes are fair trade. Chances are, a bunch of the
multinationals that make a large profit margin from cheap labour in
Bangladesh will just move to neighbouring countries, and once again,
the Bangladeshi people working in textile factories will be out of a
job and even worse off than before. Maybe the solution lies in not
buying new clothes at all, after all, if we buy from somewhere like
Vinnies, we support a good cause, and the original labour is (to some
extent) secondary, because the clothing is second hand and the
proceeds go to a good cause.1
But living in an economy built on consumption means that not
consuming essentially means that someone else can no longer make
money producing, and once again, someone is out of a job. Of course,
that's aside the fact that someone had to have the piece of clothing
first-hand in any case.
Clothing is not the only sort of thing that has this problem. I heard
last year that many of our electronics, notably our mobile phones,
have a metal called coltan, almost all of which is sourced from
Africa, and particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are
other metals also sourced from mines in the DRC. However, the past
fifteen years have seen about five and a half million people
die in fighting which gets funding (and motive) from these mines.
That's about the population of Cairns in half a year. So electronics
must be subject to ethical scrutiny. Or consider food, like so simple a thing as chocolate. It was brought
to my attention during Holy Week that the cocoa industry relies
heavily on child slavery in West Africa. In a particularly startling
quote, one former slave said that “when people eat chocolate,
they are eating my flesh.” Whilst that is allegorical, it
points to an underlying reality, which is that most of the cocoa in
the world comes from West Africa, and substantial portions of it are
produced by people who are effectively slaves, often child slavery.
These examples are ones I am using just to illustrate a basic point:
our purchasing choices are exerting global influence that aid and
create systems of injustice, and furthermore, there is no easy
opt-out. I did not even have to include the environmental effects of
our actions, existing though they are. Even the hermits and monks
that I said were “out of the system” are really so out of the
system that they are not truly helping, either, because they are not
consuming.
I wish I had some sort of solution to this problem. One, very
idealistic one, would be to universally improve working conditions so
that purchasing anything would mean purchasing fair trade goods and
services. Then there could be no “migration” of labour from a
fair scenario back to an unfair one. That is not going to happen
over-night, if ever, though working for fair working conditions is
not therefore useless, it is just to be considered within an
economy which gives incentives to exploitation because it is what
makes money, that is to say, within a system where, from the
perspective of the producer, fair trade in one place is a push to go
somewhere else.
Clearly, we can make use of the “inefficiencies” of the market
and buy fair trade wherever possible, since in reality what will
happen is that a balance will be shifted towards countries with low
working conditions, rather than a complete displacement of all
factories to such places. So, for instance, if Bangladeshi workers
rights were respected, then there truly would be a overall
benefit. We must simply not be naïve enough to think that the
response of the multinationals will be simply to pay more and
offer better working conditions. And evidently, we need not consume so much in the area of
electronics, where really, we gain very little from having the latest
phone or music device. Goodness knows what effects that will have on
the economic balance, though it will avoid formal cooperation in the
evil of funding a bloody civil war.
Really, though, I have no solution, not even a proper guideline. Buy
free trade where possible! But that's not in itself enough. Consume
less where possible! But that will not be enough. The way that
systems are set up allow for no easy solution which will promote the
common good.
1Not
always, actually. I have gotten new clothes from Vinnies. But let us
stick to the second-hand case, and ignore the
charity-shop-but-first-hand case.
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