The ethics of consumerism?

A few weeks ago I was on my way to the office. The auto driver, with a veteran's premonition, stopped the car a few blocks early. "Get out here," he told me. I climbed out. We were a block away from my office and at first I was annoyed to be getting the old Delhi auto run-around. Then I saw a parade had stopped traffic on the street ahead, which was one of Delhi's arterial roads. No wonder the driver hadn't wanted to drive into the thick of it.

In my new guise as an intrepid and with-it young reporter, I leaped into action and joined the parade of protestors who were holding up traffic. There were at least a thousand of them, I tagged along with the tail end. As we huffed and puffed our way through the capital, I managed to get a story out of these guys: they were mostly women, underpaid labor in various hospitals and factories around town. When I say that these women occupied the lowest rungs of India's social ladder, I would not be exaggerating: they were the bed-pan cleaners and the jeans-stitchers, etc.

They explained the principle of the protest. In essence, their trade union had put together a protest, because these womens' employers refuse to grant overtime, paid leave, maternity leave, lunch breaks, etc. A lot of times, when shifts stretched late into the night, the women were sexually harassed by their male bosses.

Even taking their stories with a grain of salt (although why would you take them with a grain of salt?) their lives seemed pretty terrible. If an American employer tried to treat his workers in such a fashion, he'd find himself on the wrong end of a Congressional inquiry pretty fast.

Majority of the three thousand women in the protest worked in garment export. Let me explain: many companies that make jeans and shirts for the American and European market have these garments cut, sewn and inspected in India, where labor costs are much lower. The Indian government encourages the owners of these factories. Several of the delegates worked in a factory that makes Lee jeans. This brought me up short, although it shouldn't have. Because I've worn Lee jeans.

As a college student and later as a journalist, I've often written about the crime of human trafficking. I'd like to think that the men who visit trafficked women don't know, or don't realize, that the prostitutes they're visiting are often kept in violent and inhuman conditions. Of course, most of the men do know, and they don't care. Like everyone on Earth, I condemn these men from the bottom of my heart. If they didn't provide a market, if they weren't willing to look the other way, human trafficking wouldn't exist.

What bothers me in India, every day, is the mounting and obvious evidence of my own American hypocrisy. We in America like to assume that we are a nation of civilized people. At a first and casual glance, India seems less civilized - more dust, more shouting, more rush. But all these things are deceptive. So much of what Americans consume comes out of this dust, shouting and rush. Many of our goods, from jeans to energy drinks, are produced under conditions that we would never tolerate in America. This is, of course, not exactly breaking news.

My point is this. It's easy to condemn a man who visits a trafficked prostitute, but the majority of trafficking victims are trafficked for labor. And the majority of laborers are not trafficked. But does that mean that we should fund the conditions under which they live? It bothers me now, in a way that it never did before, that so few Americans bother to ask ourselves where our goods come from (and yet we're so quick to condemn the moral failures of other nations and other nations' governments).

The dollar is a powerful thing. It has a very long reach. The average dollar goes to places that the average American probably doesn't think about and couldn't imagine. But to what extent is distance an excuse? If, after becoming aware of the semi-indentured conditions under which some factory workers live, I continue to buy those products, am I any less morally awful than the men who visit trafficked prostitutes and pretend not to know? And if I never bother to ask where my goods come from, then what am I? (I mean these questions seriously, actually. It's one thing for Americans to not give a shit about injustice. But it's another thing for them to pretend to give a shit, and then condemn everyone else who honestly admits that no, they don't give a shit. C.f. Slumdog Millionaire.)

(Also, it's not easy to act responsibly on these convictions. That well-known chain, American Apparel, claims to produce all their clothes on American soil. If I were to buy from American Apparel, I'd be taking money away from sweatshops and putting it into the pocket of AA's CEO, a man who masturbates in front of journalists and leches on his underage employees. No wonder Gandhi opted for a homespun dhoti.)