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Ethical Business: Part of theTribe, or Separate but Equal?

December 11th, 2008 | posted by Daniel

Getting a new blog off the ground is challenging. (Just ask the 4 million or so lowest ranked bloggers on Technorati.)

The challenge is often made easier once you can find your niche. From there it’s a simple matter of creating useful content and developing relationships with fellow bloggers and readers.

With the Ethix Merch Blog, though, we are facing a somewhat more daunting task, which is that our niche – activism, the labor movement, the Sweatshop free movement, and the economic justice movement – is populated mostly by non-profit organizations and individual bloggers.

Blogs operated by small businesses like ours can easily feel left out in the cold. This is not a complaint, I realize, that is likely to fall on sympathetic ears. Over the years, activists and community groups on the left have had their hands full as businesses busted unions, greenwashed their products, sent executive salaries through the roof, and took away health and retirement benefits from workers. These behaviors and many others have contributed to a palpable mistrust bordering on disdain for anything resulting in profit.

I have no doubt that the Ethix Merch Blog will ultimately be able to muscle its way through this resistence and find a place alongside the not for profit blogs. But the resistence itself, I think, is cause for concern.

Far be it from me to suggest that incalculable damage hasn’t been done to individuals and to the very fabric of society as a result of nefarious business practices, both here and abroad. In fact, these practices are the reason why Ethix Ventures exists. If sweatshops and environmental negligence weren’t the norm in our industry, I’d probably be writing bad novels and Kevin would be hawking peanuts at Red Sox games just to be close to the action.

My point is that there are good guys out there in the business world. Many people out there devote hour upon hour to the fight for economic justice, and we count ourselves among them. (You can believe me when I tell you our salaries are comparable to what folks are making in the nonprofit world.) We are just approaching the problem from a different and equally important angle. The cynicism and resistence we encounter by virtue of being for-profit, while understandable, is misdirected.

I hope that one of the byproducts of this blog will be that more activists take special care before categorizing any given business as friend or foe.
 

Progress Works in Mysterious Ways

December 1st, 2008 | posted by Daniel

 

Everyone who works their heart out for social and economic justice knows that injustices will never go away on their own. A movement - a hard-fought combination of community organizing, bold action from our political leaders, and external events (usually tragic) - must be painstakingly brought to life before real change occurs.

Abstractly, you wouldn’t necessarily think to look to people of faith to be on the front lines of these kinds of movements. After all “faith based” could mean that you trust in a higher power to distribute justice however and whenever that power sees fit.

Yet in every morally righteous struggle that takes place around the world – to end the practices of human trafficking, starvation wages, discrimination, and environmental destruction, just to name a few – people and groups of faith are present and accounted for, working right alongside secular groups to take matters into our own hands. (Perhaps such faith-based activists see themselves as agents of their higher power, or perhaps they believe they’ve been given free will to shape a just world.)

I wanted to use this post to highlight one of the ways that a faith-based organization, The Presbyterian Church (USA) is making a real difference right now, and I’ll end the post with a mini-directory of links to other amazing work happening in the faith community.

Enough for Everyone

This is PC(USA)’s comprehensive and well-publicized strategy to help Presbyterians transform their role in the economy. Want to make a financial investment? You’re directed to an international microlending program called Oikocredit.  Want to work with your church to save energy and reduce global warming? Just become an Energy Steward Congregation. Wondering where all that coffee comes from that you’re drinking during meetings or after services? Sign up for the Presbyterian Coffee Project, an effort to pool the resources of the Presbyterian community to provide significant support Fair Trade Coffee through Equal Exchange.

This statement from the Enough for Everyone website sums up the motivation:

“At the heart of Enough for Everyone is deep concern for global and economic justice and a commitment to live out our faith in Jesus Christ with integrity.”

Making change is never easy. Having built a path toward justice, PC(USA) now faces the challenge of making sure that member churches walk that path.  We wish them the best of luck.

Here are some links to a few outward-looking spiritual or faith-based organizations and blogs who have joined the global, inter-faith movement for social, economic, and environmental justice.

Muslim Public Affairs Council

Progressive Jewish Alliance

Progressive Christians Uniting

Catholic Relief Services

FaithInPublicLife.org

The Center for Progressive Christianity

The Buddha Diaries

Council on American-Islamic Relations

 

 

Merchant Adventurers

October 21st, 2008 | posted by EthixMerch

 

Ethix Merch Team

Welcome!
 
The purpose of this blog is to add to the growing conversation around socially responsible business. Around the web, activists and concerned citizens are constantly pointing out how businesses – through worker exploitation and environmental destruction – too often ignore their responsibility to society beyond providing a product or service that people will buy.  
 
Our company, Ethix Ventures, is a team of activists who have come together to launch an experiment: can you change business from the inside, out?
 
Certainly, it is important to advocate for regulations, law enforcement, monitoring and boycotts of the worst actors in our economy – the giants of industry who have made a killing by making their workers sweat and by spoiling the air and waterways. Our close allies at ILRF and Sweatfree Communities are vigilant in attacking the problem from this angle.
 
Some of us will also need to climb into the trenches of the marketplace and painstakingly craft an alternative business model, and that's where we come in.   
 
Part of this blog’s mission will be to chronicle our efforts to clean up the custom merchandise industry. We hope that it will demonstrate how much easier it is to make change when businesses themselves are actively engaged in the process. And we hope it will provide a useful case study for others attempting to enact the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) in their own businesses.  
 
Our blog will also be repository for resources and commentary about the global movement to end systematic worker exploitation and environmental destruction. We’ll highlight the most interesting and cutting-edge efforts – undertaken by activists, entrepreneurs, journalists and bloggers - to ensure that business has an eye out for the common good.
 
We welcome and rely on your participation to make this blog fun, interesting, and useful.
 
Thanks for reading!
 
Kevin, Chris, Pierre, John, and Daniel
 
P.S. Please subscribe to our blog by clicking here.

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Share Your Story

October 21st, 2008 | posted by EthixMerch

 

How did you or your organization become interested in sweatshop free merchandise? What are the most important ethical criteria for you - Union Made, USA Made, Fair Trade, Eco-Friendly, or something else - and why? 

This is a place for you to share your story and browse through those submitted by some of our other clients and friends in the sweatshop free movement.

What is Sweatshop Free Merchandise?

October 20th, 2008 | posted by EthixMerch

 

20081021_sweatfree

One of the most frustrating parts of helping to clean up the global supply chain is the lack of consensus about what it means to be “sweatshop free.”
 

A couple of examples:
 

Teamsters AND Turtles, Blue AND Green, and What it Means to Be a Socially Concious Consumer

October 20th, 2008 | posted by EthixMerch

 

Which is more important to protect - labor or the environment? Is it better to be blue, in solidarity with workers, or green, in tune with the environment? 
 
Unfortunately, this is a question that socially conscious consumers often need to ask themselves. Why? Because an organic or locally-made product often comes with no legitimate guarantees for workers, and because a Union Made or Fair Trade product often comes with no specific environmental protections.
 
This is unfortunate because both people and the environment require equal protection. No company should rest on its laurels just because it offers a people-friendly OR eco-friendly product. After all, these two ethical criteria are ultimately interdependent.
 
A sweatshop free product that damages the environment also harms workers, whose own lives and whose children's lives will be among those affected by environmental catastrophes. Those catastrophes can be local - involving toxic agents in raw materials that workers unwittingly work with - and global - contributing to phenomena like global warming.
 
At the same time, an eco-friendly product with no protection for workers also harms the human environment. Put simply, it should matter if workers producing environmentally-friendly products are exploited in their workplace.
 
Socially-conscious consumerism need not be an either-or proposition. This is just common sense, and because it is common sense, manufacturers of eco-friendly products often casually declare themselves to be "sweatshop free," even while offering no democratic voice to their workers, and without facilitating the independent, transparent monitoring of working conditions. These suppliers are engaging in what might be called "bluewashing." They are trying to convince the consumer that all is well within the four walls of their companies - that happy workers are producing, without duress, for the environment.
 
Likewise, "worker friendly" manufacturers, who do offer bona fide guarantees of basic rights, sometimes enage in "greenwashing" tactics to mask the negative environmental impact of their manufacturing process.
 
One of our main goals at Ethix Merch is to promote ethical product lines that embody respect for both people and the environment. At the same time, however, the scope of these product lines is limited. They can't yet meet the full range of needs of the socially-conscious marketplace.
 
That's why we offer as much candid information as we can about a wide variety of products. Where applicable, our product pages point out the independent organizations who certify products as "Union Made," "Employee / Worker Owned," "USA Made," "Fair-Trade," "Organic," etc. To the extent that producers and consumers make use of these independent certifications, and rally around the certifying bodies with the most independence and transparency, we can move toward a business climate in which environmental and basic worker protections are finally the rule, rather than the exception.

 

Our Tribe

October 19th, 2008 | posted by EthixMerch

 

20081020_Tribe_color

 

We like using the world "tribe" as a metaphor, because of what it evokes - people united around a common goal (namely, to survive and thrive), and taking on different but equally-important roles in order to accomplish that goal. 

Ethix Merch belongs to a tribe of people and organizations working to build a sweatshop free and environmentally sustainable world. The tribe includes activists, non-profit organizations, student groups, religious groups, elected officials, consumers, and businesses. Each of these subsets of the tribe approaches the collective goal from a slightly different angle, and deserves support and solidarity from the rest.

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