#exploited labour

[t0rschlusspan1k]

Not my usual content, but... yes, I'm tired of AI. FunkyFrogBait is absolutely a phenomenal content creator and I've been following them for a while. I don't think anyone could make a better job than they did in dissecting the issue. And they're incredibly funny and creative too.

Bonus:

[eiravolence]

so many twists in this show but my new favourite is them setting cobel up as such a complete and utter freak for a season and a half only for this episode to reveal she's actually SHOCKINGLY WELL ADJUSTED for what she's been through

[balkanradfem]

Do you think that low birth-rates are a problem?

I think they're the opposite of a problem :)

[hussyknee]

Made in the USA: Wage Theft, Fraud and Hidden Sweatshops

Unrolled twitter thread by derek guy (@dieworkwear)

4 Oct 24 • Read on X

ALT enabled on all images. Video has closed captions but is not transcribed.

Not trying to create a pile-on here. But let's talk about why something might still be made in unethical conditions even though it bears a "made in USA" tag. 🧵

The first thing to understand is that not all workers are covered by US labor laws. You might assume that workers get paid a minimum wage (after all, it says "minimum"). In fact, many garment workers in the US toil under what's known as the piecework system.

Piecework means you get paid not by the amount of time you work but the number of operations you complete. This system should be familiar to many of you. As a writer, I get paid per word. The pay is the same whether it takes me 100 or 10 hours to write a 1,000 word article.

My situation is fine bc I get paid enough to eat. But for a garment worker, the pay structure can be peanuts: three cents to sew a zipper or sleeve, five cents for a collar, and seven cents to prepare the top part of a skirt. These are real numbers for LA-based garment workers.

Piecework is how companies skirt minimum wage laws. Among labor organizers, the term "wage theft" refers to the difference between what a worker should have earned under min wage laws and what they actually earned through the piece rate system.

This system is incredibly common. A 2016 UCLA Labor Center study showed the median piece-rate worker in Los Angeles scrapes together $5.15 per hour—less than half the state’s mandated minimum wage. Labor conditions are also very bad: poor ventilation, dusty air, rats and mice.

A Federal Department of Labor investigation the same year found that 85 percent of Los Angeles garment factories were breaking labor laws. In 2016, these violations amounted to $1.3 million in back wages owed to 865 workers in a sample of 77 factories. This is wage theft.

In 2021, labor organizers won a fight to get piecework banned in California. But two years later, it's still incredibly common. I interviewed an LA-based garment worker who toils 12 hrs a day for $50. She sleeps in the corner of a kitchen. From my article in The Nation:

Currently, there's a new fight get piecework banned nationwide through the FABRC Act. I would link, but Twitter throttles threads that have outbound links, so I would prefer if you Google how you can support this legislation. Or follow @GarmentWorkerLA for more info.

The other reason why a "made in USA" tag may not mean much has to do with how the label is applied.

When you see this label inside your garment, what do you assume? Think about this before moving on to the next tweet.

The Federal Trade Commission has pretty strict rules on who gets to apply that label. For clothes, the item has to be cut and sewn in the US using materials that were made in the US. The FTC tries to match its rules with the common understanding of what "made in US" means.

If you're a giant company like Levi's or LL Bean, you may have lawyers who are advising you on these rules. This is why you see labels like "imported," which means the item was made abroad. Or "made in the US from imported materials" when they can't meet the MiUSA standard.

But it's incredibly common for companies to violate FTC rules. In 2022, the FTC fined the pro-Trump brand Lions Not Sheep $211k for labeling their t-shirts "made in USA" when the shirts were actually imported from China and other countries.

The company was basically importing blanks from China, ripping out the "made in China" label, screen printing the shirt in the US, and then applying a new screen-printed "made in US" label. CEO Sean Whalen claimed he was being persecuted for his pro-Trump views.

But the whole thing started bc Whalen made a video about how his customers are price sensitive, so he imports blanks from China. That's what kicked off the FTC investigation. So while this mislabeling is common, it's hard to get caught unless you make a video about your crimes.

The truth is that making a t-shirt in the USA according to FTC standards will result in a relatively expensive garment. Heddels and Velva Sheen both produce shirts in the US from US grown cotton. The first is $26; second is $90 for a two-pack.

Once you add things such as screenprinting—or if you want a more unique cut and not just basic blanks—the costs go up. This is why Bikers for Trump sourced their merch from Haiti. They knew their customers would not pay an extra $8 for true made-in-USA production.

Today, there are countless companies that make merch for other organizations. They source their t-shirts from a variety of places—some made in the US, most not—and then screenprint a design and fulfill orders. This way, the other org doesn't have to do any work but marketing.

When you see a screenprinted t-shirt for $20, ask yourself: Where was the material grown? Where were the yarns spun? Where was the cutting, sewing, and finishing performed? Where was the screenprinted done? What were the wages and labor conditions along these steps?

I'm not a nationalist, so I don't prioritize American jobs over foreign ones. But I do care about fair wages and labor protections. Just because something was made abroad doesn't mean it was made in a sweatshop. Just because it was made in the US doesn't mean fair wages.

Paying more for a garment is also no guarantee of ethical manufacturing. But when the price of a garment is so low, you leave little on the table for workers. Just because you see a $20 t-shirt that says "made in USA" doesn't mean it was made fairly.

Please don't harass the person who posted that original tweet. My intention is not to cause harm or stress for anyone. Only to help shed light on what goes into garment manufacturing, fair labor, and labeling. Hopefully, you will consider these issues when shopping.

For the inevitable question: "How do I make sure my clothes were made ethically?" This is very difficult to answer in a thread. My simplest answer is that we should elect pro-worker politicians, fight for pro-labor laws, and empower unions so workers can advocate for themselves.

--------------------End----------------------

TL; DR: Doesn't matter if it's the US, if it's not union it's probably a sweatshop. And not all merch is priced high because of fair labour conditions (looking at Taylor Swift and Beyoncé). Look for supply chain transparency.

[thebellekeys]

"i do not dream of labour" is one of the worst pseudo-marxist taglines that western leftists have co-opted because when you ask them what they do dream of, they say traveling, studying, and creating art. broski, who's flying the plane to take you to prague? who's the security at the library with the texts you're studying? who are the clerks in the museum showcasing your art? like bro, you do dream of labour. you just dream of someone else doing it so you don't have to! you merely want to outsource the labour and make it invisible.

[thinkingimages]

Excerpt from 'Road of Bones' by Jacob Aue Sobol

Running 2031 km from Yakutsk to Magadan, the “Kolyma Highway” has a dark past. With untold numbers of Gulag prisoners buried beneath the highway, the “Road of Bones” continues to claim new lives every year. In literally one of the coldest parts of the inhabited world, the Kolyma region’s residents seem to exist in pure defiance – it is this way of life, these people surviving under extreme conditions in the shadow of a gruesome history, that I wish to engage with and portray.

From 1932 to 1953, millions of victims of the Soviet repression were sent to forced labor camps in Siberia. 80 of Stalin’s Gulag camps were established in the Kolyma region alone holding a mixture of ordinary criminals and political prisoners from all over Europe. One of the largest Gulag operations was the construction of the 2031-km-long “Kolyma Highway”. Built by prisoners who were literally worked to death, it connected Magadan with the mountainous interior, opening up the region to gold mining while at the same time connecting it to the outside world.

Untold numbers died constructing the highway across the frozen ground. Buried where they fell, the prisoners’ corpses were often incorporated into the foundation of the road to protect it from the permafrost, giving the road its most common nickname: Road of Bones. Prisoners said that there was one body for each tree cut down to clear the forest...

+ images/further reading: https://phmuseum.com/projects/road-of-bones-1

[ravenroseglaive]

‘Liberation Day’ Is Looking More Like a Disaster

[queerbauten]

the “missing the point” meme except it’s for the Interstella 5555 rerelease, and the point being missed is “of course the notoriously shambolic anime industry is using AI to upscale a film; Daft Punk were almost certainly unaware (or, at the very least, unable to do anything about it); none of this would be surprising if you were paying attention to the actual issues with AI and labour” in favour of “I can’t believe Daft Punk would use AI :(“

[nando161mando]

Harrods refuses to engage with the workers or the United Voices of Labour union representing them. The company has been in the spotlight over serious allegations of rape and sexual abuse against its former owner, Mohammed Al Fayed.

https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/12/04/harrods-workers-vote-for-xmas-strike/

[susansontag]

No thoughts on AI as such, but I wonder if it would be a surprise to this user to find out that the introduction of complex machinery into manufacturing/industry resulted in the exploitation of a larger subsection of the population, as many more people could now work in certain industries (who couldn’t before) due to machinery making it viable eg more women and child wage-labourers.

My point being that machinery, the technological innovation of the time, could have been used to make workers lives easier under a non-capitalist model, but that didn’t happen because capitalism must have growth and must realise profit. And you can’t do that without the surplus labour of workers. Anyway.

[hussyknee]

(alt included)

Showcase example of why I am deeply skeptical of Eat The Rich types. Too many of y'all are like this fuckhead who has no clue what rich requires eating.

Also for context: Ron Perlman has been acting since 1975. Studio exec Bob Igor made $27 million last year from Disney alone, just one of his streams of annual income, which includes but is not limited to stocks, real estate and consulting.

[river-of-wine]

Andrew Ryan did not become a parasite HE WAS ALWAYS A PARASITE!!! BY HIS OWN DEFINITION!!!! HE WAS ALWAYS A PARASITE!!!!!

[radicalfacts]

radical facts - short feminist facts

#patriarchy

Women's unpaid Labour

Worldwide, women and girls perform 12.5 billion hours of unpaid labor every day. This work adds $10.8 trillion to the economy every year.

With this unpaid "shadow-labour" alone, women contribute as much as 6.6 percent to the global GDP.

It exceeds the combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s , including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.

(Data via Oxfam & ILO)

[ahalliance]

rewatching severance s2 and in e1 mark w. talks about how his branch got shut down which reminds me of how in the finale the MDR department that we know was set to be shut down once cold harbour was completed . which to me at least implies that mark w. and gwendolyn y.'s department had a similar cold harbour-esque situation that in their case was finished bc why else would their whole department have been shut down

[queen-mabs-revenge]

communist generative ai boosters on this website truly like

[where-are-the-ninja-today]

weren't the ninja in their teens when they started?

I swear they looked just a few years older than me at the time, and I'm pretty sure they're like. In their twenties now??

— @totally-anon-corvid

(hope this is alr, don't know ur HCs for the Ninja's ages so if you hc smth else uh ignore this)

(from a moot of yours lol)

yeah I'm pretty sure 🤷‍♀️ they were REALLY YOUNG like probably 13-14