Last week I added a link to Paul Krugman, the NY Times columnist, and today he won the Nobel prize in economics.
Coincidence? Or does the path to the Nobel prize run right through here?…
Saturday The Toronto Star featured a family that has decided to not buy nonessentials for an entire year. They’ve joined The Compact.
Members of The Compact commit themselves to not buying anything for an entire year. Sure, if everyone did it our economy would collapse, but I think it sounds like a pretty cool social experiment.
From the Star:
…the group decided to launch a social experiment. They wouldn’t buy anything new for 12 whole months. They hammered out some exceptions: food and drink obviously, medication and other health essentials, work necessities and safety requirements, like new car tires. Everything else they would borrow, buy second hand, or just do without.
Heck, given this economy we all might be doing this anyhow!
The Compact has a blog and a
From WAIW?:
In 1992, Dateline NBC aired footage from inside a garment factory in Bangladesh, featuring a Wal-Mart production line where kids as young as seven were operating machines and trimming garments. Wal-Mart argued that the people of Bangladesh are extremely malnourished and that the individuals that appear to be seven-year-old kids are actually adult Bangladeshis whose growth has been stunted.
And a recent headline in Businessweek: “Wal-Mart Supplier Accused of Sweatshop Conditions.”
Basically, the hardworking folks at SweatFree Communities uncovered a factory that supplies Wal-Mart with some of their “Faded Glory” line. The report showed that employees of the factory are forced to work 19-hour days. Wal-Mart has been self-inspecting the factory, but the visits are usually announced and the factory makes preparations and puts on a good show for the inspectors.
I have a few comments and questions:
– Self-policing isn’t the way to go.
– Is this a situation where Wal-Mart is indirectly asking, “Lie to us.”
– Cases of child labor have been greatly reduced in Bangladesh. But kids under 14 (minimum working age) sometimes lie to the factory to get a job. Workers lie to factories; again, a possible lie-to-us situation. Factories lie to retailers. When people are desperate for a job, factories are desperate for work, and brands are desperate for cheap products, this kind of thing is bound to happen.
– How ironic is the name of Wal-Mart’s brand “Faded Glory?”
– It will be interesting to see if Wal-Mart and Sweat Free Communities are able to work together to right this situation. I kind of feel like they won’t be able to. And this is the problem. I don’t think progress can be made in worker’s rights unless retailers and activists work together.
The press release from SweatFree Communities is below the cut.
Julia Keller of the Chicago Tribune has an interesting article about the Nobel Committee commenting on American Literature.
Here’s an excerpt from her column:
Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which chooses the Nobel Prize for literature. Engdahl said that the United States is “too isolated, too insular” to match Europe’s output of masterpieces.
“Europe still is the center of the literary world,” he declared to The Associated Press.
And then she poses a disturbing question:
So is it true that our literature is as subprime as our mortgages?
Falling from prominence: Our economy, our literature, Budweiser. What’s next baseball and apple pie?…
Got some great news today…
Most Barnes & Nobles stores are going to be carrying WAIW. This is really cool on so many levels. Now whenever someone asks me, “Where can I buy your book?” I don’t have to say “I dunno.”
It’ll be great sending them some place other than a website. While shopping online is convenient, it’s not nearly as much of an experience as strolling through a bookstore’s shelves.
I predict that the first time, if not every time, I find my book on the shelf in a store, I’ll be majorly geeking out….
Keren Gottfried a student journalist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, is reporting on an interesting ethical dilemma on campus. The school’s book store is selling T-shirts for $10. Six of those dollars will go to fight cancer. That’s a great cause, few would argue, right? Wrong!
A group of students is questioning where the shirts came from and under what conditions they were made. Great questions, right? Right! The fabric was made in the USA, sent to Honduras where it was sewn, shipped back to the USA, printed, and eventually found their way into Wilfrid Laurier’s bookstore. Can all of that traveling be done for $4, some of which is profit? Maybe, but the labor expenses need to…
Moonrat of EditorialAss is raffling off editorial services to raise money for a friend diagnosed with cancer. You can win advice on everything from a query letter to a full manuscript review. The deadline is tonight at 8pm so you better sign up soon if you’re interested….
Two-and-a-half years ago, no more than 60 some posts into what is sure to be a lifetime of blogging (yes, this is a cry for help), I posted a rather mundane tid bit about Hummels. Since then, the occasional Hummel-o-phile (that’s what we’ll call them, sounds nicer than weirdos) stumbled upon the post and asked me for advice and then berated me when I did not get back in touch with them in under four hours:
Posted by Anonymous…
this web site is ??? i have had no response to my question, i don’t think you have anyone inquire about anything here since 2006, so i’ll move on, thanks for nothing
Thanks for nothing! And that means a lot from a person who has actually received a hummel as…
I grew up outside of Union City, Ohio, a town one-quarter the size of Wasilla, Alaska, where Sarah Palin hails from. My high school was literally in the middle of a corn field. Once a year we had a drive-your-tractor-to-school day. I speak with enough twang that people often think I must be from the South. Heck, I wrote a book that featured 13 “fellas.”
As I watched the VP debate last week, I saw a little of myself and my neighbors in the way Palin spoke. Whether or not that I value being spoke to in a way that I can identify with or not is not important here. Let’s just say that when I talk in public I usually turn down…
A UK site, The Grocer, reports on a recent survey with some interesting findings (I saw this first on Impacct Limited):
– 92% of consumers are willing to pay extra for a product perceived to be ethical
– 76% said they would choose products benefiting people rather than the planet.
– 65% of shoppers are prepared to pay an extra 10p (approximately US $174,762) or more, according to the report by market researchers Feel.
But before we put the British consumer on too high of a pedestal…
– 66% thought economic issues such as price and quality were most important, 23% said their priority was social issues and just 10% first considered green issues.
There’s nothing wrong with consumers putting price and quality first – granted, I would have liked…
