Are People Willing to Change How They Shop?

On April 24, 2013 a sweatshop in Bangladesh collapsed. It was estimated that 1000 people we’re killed at the time of the collapse and almost three weeks later the search was called off with the body count at 1,127. When the building collapsed they did not know how many people were inside, just that about two thousand people were employed. The building had also been inspected and found unsafe to work in but these facts had been kept covered up by the building manager’s wallet. Here in the US the news kept relatively quiet about the event. Though  I don’t watch the news regularly, in the few times I watched in the days and weeks following the collapse there was never once a mention of the hundreds of lives that had been lost to make the t-shirts on our backs.

Some of the most popular stores today use labor from around the world because it is the easiest and cheapest to come by. In an attempt to better understand the mindset of consumers and their knowledge of the factory collapse we constructed a survey with eight questions focusing on what motivated purchases. Of the 25 people who have taken it so far the results are overwhelmingly similar. Only sixteen of the participants had heard about the collapse and five of them had heard about it through this class. 92% of participants stated that they did not buy clothing based on where it was manufactured and 96% said price affected their purchases. Eighteen people said they would be willing to pay more for ethically made clothing but only two of them said they’d be willing to pay a significant amount more. 67% of people said they didn’t think there were a lot of American made clothing brands to choose from. When asked specifically what motivated their purchases 96% of participants said style, 87% price, 47% accessibility of the product, 8% said ethicalness, and 0% said where it was made, other answers included comfortableness, parent’s approval, and the need for clothes. The two most common answers to what would encourage participants to buy ethically made clothing was price and knowing what products were ethically made.

The simplest action to take would be to gather an easily accessible, easy to use, list of ethically made clothing products. However to actually know if products are being manufactured ethically is very hard. Many of the stores that bought from the factory that collapsed claimed to have ethical factories working for them. It’s possible that the companies believe the factory is safe and the corruption comes in from the factory manager but buying the company’s products still supports the unfair labor.

Looking at how to solve price is a harder problem to fix. Companies are in a constant race to the bottom, trying to get their clothes manufactured for the lowest prices. This is why so many clothes are made in sweatshop conditions. It’s very hard to have ethically made clothes without an increase in price if only for the fact that the people manufacturing the clothes are being paid a fair price let alone that the factory will take more money to upkeep. It’s not easily possible to make ethical clothing cheaper so instead ways to make the buyer pay more have to be thought of. If people can afford clothes that cost more than giving them a reason, like a personal connection to someone who had been living in sweatshop conditions, could force them into paying those few extra nickels and dimes. When it comes down to each piece of clothing that’s what the difference in ethical versus non ethical clothing prices are, usually about a quarter. Raising awareness is the easiest, most critical step in increasing the purchase of ethical clothing, and it’s where we plan to go next.