this is the crucial point. boycotts only hurt workers unless they are done in concert with a labor struggle where, for example, they are on strike already. and it's unfortunate that consumption-focused efforts that see themselves as "progressive" don't appear to grasp that one.
on that note, i find that web site joe sent more and more repellant: i saw the recycled bottle cap belts and got curious because my ex's brother is an artist who makes stuff out of recycled cans and bottle caps. he has a nifty coca-cola santa sitting on a john wielding a plunger that i always liked. wondered if there was any connection, so i read the promo to Little Earth which makes belts from recycled inner tubes and bottle caps. no, doesn't seem like Jamie would *ever* be in pittsburgh.
they brag on about the diversity of their employees in the same way that a grocery chain store does. "hi, welcome to Wegman's. We support our multicultural community by providing you with jobs... yadda". i mean, come on, it's just really sick to try to capitalize on the fact that you hire refugees, immigrants and welfare-to-work candidates. excuse me? did you cut those folks some of the cash you get for trying to capitalize on their brown faces? you know, the kind of money you'd pay to an actor to play a person of color in a commercial? ahhh, i see, you pay them fair wages according to the copy. sure. yeah. right. what the heck is fair here? oh, you pay them $10 an hour instead of $6.00. well fuckmedead ain't y'all a generous lot! at 32 hrs per week (after lunch breaks), that's <17k per year. that's poverty wages for a family of four. well, if Mr. and Mrs. Former Ski Instructor are living on that kind of an income, yippy for them, then they're not totally daft. and, even if they are, gimme a break since Mr and Mrs. FSI had some capital that they probably managed to get when they were living on twice that kind of income. so, they managed to purchase their major consumer goods, save, buy a home... something Guatamalen refugees will be hard pressed to do, even at $10/hr. which was what people consider a 'living wage'.
i guess it wouldn't have been quite as nifty to talk about hiring a fifty year old steel worker who lost his job back in 84 right? nowhere near the allure of a refugee.
that's why some of the green, anti corporation nonsense is so repulsive. it's capitalizing on the unreflective leftish politics of liberals like that of a feminist lawyer i encountered recently.
she says she pays her housekeeper well. probably not, since "well" here is and ought to be similar to what she makes. because if she should be able to afford a housekeeper then so should the housekeepers of the world because being a lawyer doesn't make you any more entitled to have that kind of assistance than a housekeeper is entitled. but it can't possibly be similar to what she makes since there is nothing on the lard's green earth to convince me ms feminist lawyer would be willing to fork out that kind of cash to have her house cleaned by someone else. nothing on earth justifies the kind of discrepancy between her wages and that of her housekeeper. and all from the mouth of a feminist lawyer ranting on about how men have sloughed off the dirty work on women all these years.
"i pay my housekeeper well."
really? you pay your housekeeper 40k a year then? niftykeenokewlo!
criminy. this kind of feel good crap stultifies the left in some sort of bizarre arrested development, like the ithacans who take advantage of farm tax breaks because they raise sheep thereby decreasing the property taxes that pay for public schools or failing to realize how nifty it is to get 50 acres and a house for 100grand or so because some poor farmer had to sell because she couldn't make it raising dairy cattle anymore. niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.
</bitchin'rant> kelley