Friday, 6 Apr 2001

SANTA FE, N.M.

Friday is my day to review the week’s activities, catch up on any priority tasks that still need to be done, and think about the next steps we need to take in our campaign work. Yesterday afternoon we had a staff conference call for an hour. Because our permanent staff live in seven different cities across the country (Little Marais, Minn.; Duluth, Minn.; Superior, Wis.; Minneapolis; San Francisco; Los Angeles; and Seattle), weekly conference calls are necessary to keep up communications and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of our work.

This week’s conference call focused on the Starbucks campaign. Simon Harris, our Starbucks coordinator, reported on his conversations with activists from the U.K. and Canada, who are enthusiastic about spreading the campaign internationally. Tom Taylor, our Midwest field coordinator, and Connie and Craig Minowa, our field support people, spoke about Organic Consumers Association’s outreach efforts to Green Party chapters across the U.S., our attempts to involve students from the United Students Against Sweatshops network, as well as our special effort to recruit volunteers from the deep South. We agreed to make a special push during Earth Day week, 15-22 April, to get volunteers to leaflet Starbucks outlets across the country.

Simon and I reported on our successful meeting last week in San Francisco with a group of organic farmers to establish a new OCA campaign this fall, called Clothes for a Change. The basic idea is that we will develop a national public education campaign on the public health and environmental hazards of chemical-intensive and genetically engineered cotton production, as well as the injustice of a global system of garment sweatshops. Besides just criticizing what’s wrong, we’ll promote the marketplace alternatives: organic cotton and hemp clothing, made in a non-exploitative, “Fair Made” manner.

The Clothes for a Change action plan will include the following: (1) Boycott the clothing and shoe products of companies employing sweatshop (non-Fair Trade certified) labor; (2) drive genetically engineered cotton and other fibers off the market; (3) phaseout, as rapidly as possible, chemical-intensive production of cotton and other fibers; (4) convert at least 30 percent of all clothing in the U.S. to organic and sustainable fibers (cotton, hemp, and others) that are Fair Made by the year 2010.

Our allies and we are making tremendous headway in terms of building up a nationwide alternative food network. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said for clothing and shoes. If Americans are what we wear, then we, even rebel youth and boomer progressives, are corporate. The fashion statement we’re apparently making with what we wear is that we don’t care. A look at the labels in our clothing or the logos on our shoes indicates that the brand name bullies, the transnational giants in the garment and apparel industry, reign supreme. Walk into any department store or clothing retailer and look for a label that says “Union-made in the USA with organic cotton (or hemp).” Search through rack after rack, in store after store, but you aren’t likely to find an organic/Fair Made alternative that embodies both ecological and social justice principles.

There are no U.S.-produced, union-made, and organic or transition-to-organic clothes or shoes on the market, period. Do unions just not care about ecological production methods or the literal “sweatshops in the
fields” which characterize most of the cotton farming and fiber production around the world — even in North America? Do most green or natural-fiber clothing and fabric companies feel that “bottom line” considerations make it impossible to deal with unions or to put a priority on producing garments in the U.S.? Do anti-sweatshop campaigners believe that it doesn’t matter if cotton workers are poisoned in the fields, if small and medium-sized cotton farmers are swindled by large corporations who pay them next to nothing for their products, as long as factory garment workers get a better wage? Our Clothes for a Change movement will be built along the lines of our Starbucks campaign, which simultaneously raises issues of economic equity and ecological sustainability.

Patagonia has an all-organic clothing line, but the clothes are neither union-made, nor, for the most part, produced in the U.S. Levi-Strauss in the past has blended organic cotton into their jeans, but it doesn’t tell its customers about it. Even though there is a mass consciousness developing, especially among millions of politically aware youth, that overseas sweatshops are bad and that transnational corporations like Nike, the Gap, and Wal-Mart are making obscene profits off these non-union overseas sweatshops, there is no real mass-market alternative (except for buying used clothes and shopping exclusively at rather expensive outlets like Patagonia) for those who wish to cast a vote for sustainable clothing and social justice. It’s true that hemp clothing and organic cotton products are out there, but for the moment they are nothing more than a tiny niche in America’s $200 billion annual clothes market.

Underlying Americans’ lack of “clothes consciousness” is a near-total lack of awareness of the life cycle, if you will, of our clothing and all the other everyday products containing cotton fiber (food products, tampons, bandages, baby diapers, mattresses, bed linen, etc.). Most people have been conditioned since childhood to worry about what they look like. This is partly why consumers spend billions of dollars every year on clothing items and personal care products. But most consumers are unaware of the fact that cotton is one of the largest (3 percent of all agricultural land in the world), most destructive (25 percent of all toxic pesticides, including many of the most poisonous, are used on cotton), and exploitative (in the cotton fields and in clothing sweatshops) industries in the world. The history of that non-organic T-shirt, pair of jeans, shirt, or underwear that you’re wearing inevitably involves environmental destruction, harm to animals and fish, exploitation of workers (often children and women), not to mention pollution of the mind — relentless corporate advertising that tells you to buy, buy, and buy. Underlying the multibillion dollar garment and apparel industry are the endless Madison Avenue images and commercials with the same spiritually and ethically deadening message: Clothes make the man and the woman. The style and cut of what you’re wearing is more important than who you are inside.

Clothes for a Change will be one of our next major campaigns, along with a nationwide campaign to change school lunches and school curricula on food and agriculture, called SOS — Safeguard Our Students. Unfortunately, to launch these campaigns will cost us a lot of money. So the major thing I’m doing today and all next week is fund-raising: writing grant proposals, calling funders on the phone, and basically making the case that we’re making great headway but we need a campaign war chest that matches our aspirations for building a stronger and more powerful organic consumers movement over the next few years.