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> That's probably untrue from the face of it, just from the amount of products and goods that are produced in whole or in part in China. That’s the same way that clothing brands deal with the problem of having their products made in sweat shops. Brand X makes their clothes in sweat shops, there’s an exposé, brand X does an investigation, finds that contractor Y hired subcontractor Z without the right controls in place, and then fires subcontractor Z. But subcontractor Z was just doing business with the actual sweatshop W, and after subcontractor Z is fired, contractor Y hires a new subcontractor Z', which then later rehires W because they’re the cheapest (after the media attention cools down). Round and round it goes. Because there’s such a large chain, from brand X to contractor Y to subcontractor Z and finally sweat shop W, brand X has very weak and indirect control over the conditions in sweat shop W. This is by design, and it’s encouraged by the way our legal system works. Each link is an isolated domain with limited liability, than can be destroyed and replaced separately from the rest. On top of that, jurisdictional issues prevent the arm of the law from effectively addressing sweat shop W from the country where brand X exists, especially since contractors Y and Z might also be in completely separate countries. The economic pressure to be the cheapest encourages people to take ethical and legal shortcuts, to keep plausible deniability you make the supply chain long enough, and then whenever it blows up the blast radius is only as large as a single, replaceable link in the chain. And so we get back to the idea that you can simply satisfy yourself by not personally doing business with China or Russia. The entire system is set up to pander to people who want to do things “ethically” by hiding all of the unethical behavior far away at the other end of the supply chain. You can pat yourself on the back for not buying Kathy Lee Gifford or Nike, but you turn around and buy clothing at prices so low they can only be reliably sourced from workshops with the same terrible conditions. I’m not arguing that the alternative is to turn a blind eye, but I don’t think outrage at individual companies that do business with the wrong countries is a meaningful choice that we can make. I’m not talking about companies like Nestlé, yes, let’s be plenty pissed off at Nestlé. But if we’re going to change this, the reach of the law should be longer. If brand X were liable for conditions in sweatshop W, financially, then that kind of hazard would be priced into all of the contracts all the way down the chain. This is called “extraterritorial jurisdiction” and it has precedent, like Australia’s Crimes (Child Sex Tourism) Amendment Act 1994. |