Who Cares?

Last week CTV News reported on an Ipsos poll which looked at the relationship between buying habits and the ethical manufacturing of clothing. They surveyed over 18,500 people in 16 countries, including Canada and the United States. They reported that, “the majority of shoppers are willing to pay a bit more for clothes to help improve conditions in Third World garment factories”. I guess you could say that this was the good news. The bad news is that, “more than 40 percent strongly or somewhat agreed that they don’t really care what kind of conditions employees have to work in and just want choice and low cost.”

Canada fared a bit better than the average but still, among Canadian respondents, 36 percent said “they don’t care about factory conditions or feel any responsibility about where clothing is made.”

What does this mean? Well, it’s pretty simple really. It means that more than one out of every three people you work with … play with … bump into each day JUST DON’T CARE.

Of course there are questions about whether extra money paid would actually get to where it needs to go. There is always that issue and I believe our skepticism on that point is well deserved. But still, to take the position that you just don’t care! How can that be?

To further the indictment, the poll was conducted over a two week period in May shortly after weeks of horrendous visual images coming out of Bangladesh as rescue workers raced frantically to try and find and save any survivors from an eight-story factory building that had collapsed, killing more than 1,000 factory workers, making it the “worst garment-industry related disaster in history”.

There are a lot of people that think that our world is becoming a better and better place to be. They see the social, political and judicial changes taking place around us as victories for mankind that signal our upward and onward movement to become what we should be; that man is evolving and society is becoming more and more enlightened and …

I just don’t see it.