Hi All,
I attended a party yesterday to celebrate a new ordinance to make all city procurements 'sweatshop free' - meaning that suppliers would need to meet certain worker rights standards to sell the producs to the city.
I guess that's basically a good thing so I figured I'd show up at the party, which was a nice event full of the usual SF people. Lots of beards, tie-dye shirts, not-exactly-elegant clothing, tattoos and other indicia of leftist bias were seen.
Anyway I had a chance to chat with a purveyor of "fair trade" coffee, tea, sugar, etc. Basically there is a nonprofit organization that certifies products as being fairly traded, again based on treatment of workers, sustainable agriculture practices and the like. The idea is that the organization audits and investigates companies wishing to be certified as fair traders,and if they meet the criteria, they are allowed to put a trademarked logo on their packaging.
For my part I think this is a pretty cool, private sector, market-based way to allow people to directly vote with their dollars for the corporate behaviour they want, rather than through the heavy hand of taxes, regulations, trade barriers, etc.
Anyway I told the folks that they should team up with the libertarians. They were quite taken aback at that suggestion, saying "but the libertarians are for free trade!" -- I tried to explain that using market based incentives was free trade and that an efficient marketplace requires information and transparency to function properly and that seemed to be exactly what they were providing.
So I am thinking it would be nice for the LPSF to draft and send letters of commendation to the various organizations promoting this kind of market-based social responsibility and thereby get a few allies. This is a working model of exactly what we've been advocating for years, it seems.
-DG
Personally, I'm unhappy with the new ordinance and would have voted
against it if given the chance. Taxes are involuntary in the first
place, and spending more than is necessary based on an ethic we don't
all share just adds insult to injury.
The certification program, on the other hand, is a Good Thing, seeing
as it is completely voluntary. I don't have a problem with
recognizing that.
-Morey
Dave,
I appreciate your outreach on behalf of the LPSF. On the other hand, my initial response was basically the same as Morey's -- that the voluntary program was fine, but not the ordinance. Then I thought about it some more, and realized that it's actually quite complicated. I came to the conclusion that it all depends what the standards are, and how they are applied.
If the set of standards were one I agreed with, I wouldn't mind the city government (CG) requiring people it did business with to meet those standards. For example, I would prefer that the CG did not buy products made by state-owned companies -- that's just feeding government. I would also prefer that they avoided buying a product if taxes and tariffs made up a large percentage of the product's price, if they could instead buy a comparably or even slightly higher priced product with a much lower percentage of taxes and tariffs, again for the same reason.
Standards looking at working conditions are problematic, however, if they do not take economic circumstances into account. It would be like requiring that every college applicant come from a home whose parents provided him or her with a home computer meeting certain standards, spent a certain amount of money on food, housing, health care, etc., for the applicant. Obviously parents from a poor family might have trouble meeting this requirement. Similarly, companies from poor areas of the world might not be able to meet the kind of labor and environmental standards demanded and stay in business, when the market rate wages in those areas are so much lower, and standard practices much less expensive.
To be fair, standards should not require that a company in, say, El Salvador, provide the same level of wages, working conditions, etc., as a California company. Requirements for each company should be proportionate to existing market conditions where the company or its facilities are located. Maybe these points could be raised with the "fair trade" folks.
Yours in liberty,
<<< Starchild >>>
DAVID GOGGIN wrote:
Anyway I had a chance to chat with a purveyor of "fair trade" coffee, tea,
sugar, etc.
Good work, David. I love voluntary certification stuff like this; the
Underwriters Laboratory is one of my favorite examples to bring up when
talking with statists. As long as they don�t try to make it mandatory, as
they did in a ballot measure in Berkeley, it�s great.
[As for the sweatshop stuff � I�m torn on issues like this. To the extent
that the City is purchasing or hiring as a proxy for me, I do feel it
should be a responsible consumer and employer. But at the same time, they
buy far too much stuff and employ way too many people, with little or no
pressure to cut back.]
~Chris
P.S. Was that you I saw on the Balclutha last month? (-: