Stop child labor: buy haute couture!

Speaking of Boston's Metro as a tool for getting progressive economic views out to a wide audience: magazine editor Amy Gluckman is now the only member of the Dollars & Sense staff who hasn't published a letter to the editors of the Metro. Last fall, magazine editor Chris Sturr chided the Metro for paying more attention to Boston youth activists' clothing than their message when they testified before the Boston City Council about violence, police conduct, and safety in the city. Last February, editor Dan Fireside opined that of course fooling around with an intern is a much more serious offense than shooting your hunting partner and trying to cover it up. And today, business manager Esther Cervantes responded to an interview with Valerie Salembier, publisher of Harper's Bazaar, in which Salembier advised Metro readers that they could stop sweatshops and child labor by eschewing designer knock-offs (and, of course, spending much more to buy the real thing).

In all the years I’ve been aware of the evils of sweatshops and child labor, never would I have guessed that buying haute couture could put an end to it all. My thanks to Harper’s Bazaar publisher Valerie Salembier (and Metro's Jason Notte) for setting me straight.

When Salembier says that real designer garments are better than fakes because the sweatshops that make the fakes employ "the youngest children," I don't ask how young the children who make the real things are: what matters is that they're not the youngest. When the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition tells me that "counterfeiting is a $600 billion per year problem," I don't ask if that $600 billion would otherwise go into executives' pockets or workers' pockets. And when the IAC reminds me that the counterfeit market is "fueled by consumer demand" for the "cachet [of] the real thing," I don't think about the fashion and advertising industries' role in creating and enlarging that demand.

I also try not to think about better ways than buying designer clothes to shop responsibly: like buying fair trade, buying second-hand, and buying less. And donating the money it saves me to real anti-sweatshop campaigns. Because by dressing up their concern for profits in the guise of concern for labor conditions, Salembier and her anticounterfeiting campaign reveal themselves as the worst fakes of all.

Resources

• The Business and Human Rights Resource Centre offers a library of articles on sweatshop labor in high fashion.


• From The Observer, an article on sweatshop and child labor in decorating Indian couture.


• Dollars & Sense on sweatshops: Sweatshops 101 and Nike to the Rescue?


• And for those of you looking to really shop ethically, No Sweat apparel offers a handy and extensive resources page .