Coach Pham said he was blissfully
unaware of how the tennis uniforms were produced. When I asked the SPA varsity
tennis coach what he meant by this, he said that he got them for pretty cheap
from a large company, so they were probably from a sweatshop, but he liked to
remain ignorant to this. He would rather not find out exactly how they were
made so he wouldn’t have to feel guilty. This apathetic attitude runs rampant
in America. The information is out there, but consumers don’t want to spend
their time searching for how to be more ethical shoppers. I asked coach Pham if
he would consider changing this shopping style to buy more ethically produced
goods. He said of course he would like to, but not at an exorbitant cost that
could also jeopardize the quality of the gear. So I decided to get to the
bottom of our collective shopping decision, and see if I could fulfill our
coach’s goals.
A4 is a large athletic apparel
distributor, which claims to be a family business despite clothing over eight million athletes last year. For the past
few seasons the SPA tennis team has racked up a bill of about $2,500 with the
supplier each season, according to coach Pham. He selected the company for
three main reasons. First and foremost, the cost. I asked Pham if he was
responding to push-back from the parents of if he just was seeking the lowest
cost possible. He said he had never gotten much push-back, but he thought that
might be because he always had pursued the lowest price. The second reason was
the quality. He had order gear from other cites previously but had been
disappointed with the longevity and comfort of the clothes. The final reason he
liked this company so much was the freedom of design they allowed him to
operate within. With these valuable traits, the first thing to figure out was
how bad A4’s production was.
A4’s story is typical of many
large-scale American clothing companies. They started out as a small family
business, printing T-shirts, but as they grew, they had to find a way to
continue meeting demand while making a profit, and thus turned to overseas
factory labor. Their main production is sourced in Taiwan, a phone
representative told me, and was not able to comment as to the working
conditions in the factory. I couldn’t find any further information about the
working conditions, but I think it would be fair to label to A4’s products
“unethically produced,” as they are made by “factory labor in Taiwan,” or in
other words, a sweatshop. My assumption was confirmed by parents of players on
the team who expressed dissatisfaction that the uniforms were made in such poor
circumstances, but several admitted that they weren’t surprised. Their logic
mirrored coach Pham’s earlier sentiments: that the goods were cheap, good quality,
and order in bulk, leading parents to the assumption that the clothes had to
come from some sweatshop. Their newly voiced disapproval puzzled me at first
when I informed them of where the gear came from, as most seemed to already
know some fraction of this truth.
Most accepted the unethical nature
of the situation reasonably out of their control as the coach designed the
clothes and ordered them, they paid a relatively cheap price, and the players
celebrated the clothes. This isn’t to say that any of the parents or players
were opposed to change, simply that they were apathetic to the situation, as so
many Americans are when it comes to such large issues. When a reasonable
solution was proposed to parents and the coach, all welcomed it. Finding a solution
in this again of technology wasn’t hard, either. All the information was as
easily accessible to me as any of the parents or coaches, but the problem was
that none cared enough to look, to investigated, and to figure out where our
team fit within the bigger picture. Within minutes I had found my way to a cite which could refer me to the most
ethical athletic gear companies from which to wholesale buy custom products. In
a few more I had assessed which companies could provide comparable products to
A4, and with a little more time I cross-referenced their prices and found a
good fit for our team. THTC scored a 15.5 out of 20 on an
ethical production scale, and could meet all the criteria out lined by my
coach. It makes clothes of the same material (if not a higher quality version
of the same material), and received good reviews for its product durability meeting
the EPEAT Gold Standard for product quality. The price was also entirely
reasonable, as the shirt prices - which cost about $20 from A4 –
were only marginally increased to as little as $22.5, but as high as $30. This
price increase, which was as small as 12.5% was seen with across all products
from this same distributor, as sweatshirts would cost
around $57.5, while A4 would market a similar product for $50, with a suggested
market retail value of $60.
It
isn’t so hard to be ethical. There was universal consensus among the tennis
community that buying our clothes from a sweatshop was morally irresponsible.
However, most members of this morally conscious community were under the
impression we were buying our clothes from sweatshops. This inherent
contradiction points out the larger problem associated with ethical shopping.
Most people just don’t take it upon themselves to research how to effectively
shop ethically, and that means first discovering where they already shop unethically. It took less than an hour
for me to solve an annual $2,500 problem with nothing more than a computer and
a cell phone. Armed with this information, it is my hope that the tennis
community will consciously shift our spending habits to shop ethically. The
final question raised is what shopping ethically entails. This blog and the
current media surge have portrayed ethical shopping as buying clothes not
produced in sweatshops, but this only addresses some of the concerns. It also means
that the tennis team should probably stop infringing on Nike’s copy-written
swoosh by printing it on all of our A4 merchandise. It also means being aware
of unethical clothes like Urban Outfitters’ racist Native American lines, which may be produce
sweatshop-free, but still violate the principles of being an ethical shopper.
All these problems are easily combatable however, if the more profound issue of
apathy towards the situation can first be addressed.
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