Consumerism, Tax, Working Conditions, Jobs, Waste, Cotton, Washing costs, Style Guide

People ethics

• Over-advertising & consumerism
  The shirts in the photos just above are highly advertised, well distributed & well displayed to people who can't afford them. The system is to buy the T shirts cheaply & sell for several times more, spending the difference on advertising to increase consumerism. This has been named by a recent parliamentary commission as one of the factors that increases the danger of riots. It is a habit that began when the pound was over-valued & cheap container shipping had just become possible in the 1980s
  
  Riotstopper T shirts can't work in a system that advertises to those who can't afford, such as unemployed dads with bad education who get pestered by children, as someone says in a video below. At £4 wholesale including VAT & delivery, these T shirts at this price don't pay for high street shop; certainly not for Footlocker marketing department.
  
• Tax
  The shirts just above were part of a riot that costs a lot to UK taxpayers in prison probation and the rest. Companies that buy and sell internationally are better placed to avoid tax. Even if they want to pay the maximum, most of their supply chain is in fast-growing economies in the far east. The industry has just published a report trying to justify fashion's contribution to the economy, but the report is a fig leaf. It is not seriously convincing.
  
  Riotstopper T shirts are woven and made near Leicester, out of yarn made in Europe and the UK. More of these links in the supply chain pay taxes towards public services.
  
• Working conditions
  Working conditions in UK textiles are similar to working conditions for the people who buy them in the UK, which seems fair. The worst case of illegally bad working conditions, recorded by a BBC undercover reporter, showed staff talking about social security & free access to doctors. These conditions are beyond the boasts of fairtrade T shirt manufactures in the far east, which are summarised at the bottom of the riotstopper.htm page. Something in our education here in the UK makes us think that a fairtrade T shirt is a better ethical choice than a UK-made one, but that something is just wrong or open to a bit of challenge and discussion.
  
  Meanwhile the factory that made riotstopper T shirts has been trading since 1906 and would have been discovered by now it it was doing anything so blatantly illegal. Riotstopper T shirts have a price which is easy to justify as paying for reasonable working conditions, reducing the temptation to shoplift that applies to the mainstream brands like Nike.
  
• Jobs
  The vacancies board on the left is the one outside the factory that makes these T shirts. If you buy advertised T shirt brands rather than locally-made ones, the prospects for factories like this are to manage a shrinking market, or to close. The last few people left working in a factory are often very capable and likely to get other jobs, so if the factory closes these other jobs will be denied to potential rioters. Meanwhile the factory space often goes for housing development.
  
  If local production becomes trendy, starting with your purchase of a T shirt, then more people get a chance to try the work and find out if they're good at it or they like it. Somehow this is linked to rioting. The last similar riots in Tottenham in the early 1980s happened at another time of very high youth unemployment. Then as now most of the rioters were young. So a good jobs market has something to do with helping people grow-out of rioting earlier. Jobs are also the subject raised at public meetings about causes of riots. Lastly there is a very positive thing about a range of different kinds of jobs that helps everyone by giving more people a chance to find something they're good at. This is a quote from a textbook on making clothes:
  "production people are smart in a different way; it's spatial, mechanical and kinetic ...the best production people are often high school dropouts, who perform poorly at interviews"

Buys cheaply, sells expensively behind very good well-lit displays in every high street showing the unemployed what they can't afford: a good way to provoke a riot.

The margin goes on advertising to the same unemployed people to suggest that branded goods are the norm. A recent UK government report calls this wealth creation.

Advertised brands distract attention from the neighbourly habit of buying local products in the part of the world where you live: if Nike and Adidas are more cool; Rosebank slippers sell less..

Clothes people on all incomes. The only catch is that if you are only able to afford value brands, you become self- conscious and want to buy an adidas hoodie to go with them.

Benefits to workers can happen because of a trickle-down effect leading for demand for education & development. Or not. Without condoms, pensions & education, population will tend to keep increasing and workers will remain poor. No tariff system exists to encourage trade with countries that have pensions or secondary schools, or even democracy.

Reduces problems in a list of countries that the fair trade foundation called 3rd world decades ago - some of them now boasting space programs but without universal

• pensions
• education
• health services
• votes
• human rights

Overpopulation is normal in such countries, as in Victorian Britain, because women have less power & large families help look after parents in old age. Fairtrade does not address this problem as a system of tariffs against bad governments would do.

UK employment law applies but is easy to get-around. Declining interest in UK-made goods from customers is the main problem with factories closing or working short-time.

In part this is a result of a conventional wisdom that manufacturing does not matter, for example in the selection process for London Fashion Week. The success of advertised brands alongside fairtrade and organic clothing also distracts from the benefits of UK-made goods.

Workers are free to join a union. Community is an unusually good one but other unions's standard of help is not reported and the large ones use no-win no-fee lawyers on commission.

Not always known. There is probably a corporate social responsibility statement. Some UK companies have joined ethicaltrade.org to co-ordinate the kinds of claims they make.

Taxpayers subsidise this through a Foreign Office but are not allowed to see the detail.

Government report says about £3m a year subsidy for London Fashion Week out of regional development money, which is meant to help people like the 2011 England Rioters:

 "3.3.4 Marketing
Given the importance of brand in the fashion industry, it is important to consider the promotional activities that retailers, in particular, undertake in order to boost sales. Spending on marketing contributes to GVA through the creation of jobs and potential to boost profits. Included in our definition of marketing were advertising, PR, event organisation and the work of modelling agencies.

[...] we are able to approximate the amount that fashion retailers, fashion wholesalers and fashion manufacturers spend on advertising and PR (for more detailed information regarding the methodology and data sources see Appendix B). Overall, we estimate that fashion advertising and related activities create an extra £241 million of GVA. Of this, £184 million is related to the promotion of clothing and footwear, with the remaining £57 million linked to other products. Chart 3.6 summarises the breakdown of the results by product."

"So you're blaming the riots on the marketing department of Footlocker for what happened in London?"

"That's the way this whole... this whole country works: you know what I mean? It works on a madness." [evidence above]

Made in UK - Amnesty - Human Rights Watch - EthicalTradeorg #U - AZO - VOC- Jobs

UK          2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10    11    12
EU          34   35.5 36.7 38   39   40.5 42   43   44.2  45.5  47  
US male     3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10   11    12    13
US female   3½   4½   5½   6½   7½   8½   9½   10½  11½   12½   13½