Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Joe Fesh and Bangladesh - Jon Kay gets it right

Dear CBC ... please lay off Joe Fresh
This was the worst accident in the history of the garment industry ... Almost every CBC show I’ve heard singles out Joe Fresh, identifies the Executive Chairman of Loblaws Companies by name, and laments the fact that he has not decided to come onto CBC airwaves to confess his company’s sins. ...

... This feels wrong to me: There are 3-million textile workers in Bangladesh, working at tens of thousands of facilities, many of which no doubt are also in a poor state of repair.  For activists, I see the logic of naming and shaming particular retailers. But the only difference between Joe Fresh and thousands of other Western companies that follow standard low-cost Western outsourcing practices is bad luck. 
... A building collapse is just one of many ways to die in a nation such as Bangladesh. Someone who’s laid off from a textile job surely won’t die in an industrial accident. But penniless and improvident, they might then be forced to watch a child expire from malnutrition or an otherwise preventable disease. Which is worse?
Peter Foster recently said something similar in Lessons for Joe Fresh from Bangladesh.

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