Kelsey Timmerman's Blog, page 83
June 15, 2009
Ehrenreich on “Recession Porn” and poor still not getting by in America
Recently Author Barbara Ehrenreich revisited some of the people she wrote about in her book Nickel & Dimed to see how they were faring in the current economic climate. She writes about them in a recent Op-Ed in the NY Times:
The current recession is knocking the working poor down another notch — from low-wage employment and inadequate housing toward erratic employment and no housing at all.
She says that the media is obsessed with “Recession Porn.”
the story of an incremental descent from excess t
June 12, 2009
Barbie has more rights than the 16-year old girl who makes her
John Ruggie, UN expert on human rights, on supply chain monitoring:
Just about everybody, at least off the record, will tell you that monitoring doesn’t work and auditing of supplier factories doesn’t work because people cheat.
Ruggie is quoted in Women’s Wear Daily. The piece goes on to mention that 70% of the factory audits are flawed and that the most viable option of monitoring and training lies with the Fair Labor Association.
The National Labor Committee was all over this report and makes a
June 11, 2009
iPod contest coming soon
I’m hammering out the details on the upcoming iPod giveaway. Details should be up Tuesday. Big stuff in the works for next week. Lots of awesome posts coming.
Nike blasted by Australia’s Channel 7 News
I wasn’t aware that Made in Malaysia might mean made by imported, forced labor. The story below shows Bangladeshi workers crammed together. Their passports are confiscated and they earn $5 per day.
Click Here To view Nike Human Rights Investigation!
Look, if $5 per day is at or above the average wage, I don’t have a problem with it. But every worker should have the right to go to their employer and say, “take this job and shove it!” When an employer confiscates passports and manages to workout
June 10, 2009
Where Am I Wearing? Cotton
I know what you are wearing.
Maybe your computer cam is on, you think.
Maybe I’m standing behind you.
Or maybe I know what you are wearing because we’re all wearing it — cotton. (In fact, the first person who proves they aren’t wearing any cotton — nudity excluded — I’ll send a copy of my book “Where Am I Wearing?”). My shorts are 75% cotton and my shirt is 70% organic cotton. Socks = all cotton.
I know what you are wearing and by checking the “Made in Labels” you know where you are wearing, but t
Have a look around
Today is the unofficial launch of the new site. We’re still tweaking some things but would love to hear what you think. Next week is the official launch and we’ve got a bunch of fun stuff planned including the iPod giveaway.
A big thanks to BootsnAll
Since early in 2007, BootsnAll.com has hosted this blog for free. Today all that changes.
In high school and college I never knew anyone that had or even wanted to throw a few possessions in their backpack and head out for a few months to a foreign land. Call me sheltered, but at the time I wondered if people even did this sort of thing. When I started to float the idea with family and friends, most of them never knew either.
Enter BootsnAll and their community of friendly travelers. Their mess
June 9, 2009
Goodbye old blog
Hello new one…
Tonight at midnight things will get shiny.
See you tomorrow.
Garment Workers asks: “Does the labor behind the label matter to you?”
I stumbled upon a profile of a woman in Bangladesh who has worked in and around the garment industry for decades. Today she works to give the workers a voice, help secure loans for and educate them.
When I was in Bangladesh I met some former-garment workers turned organizers. It’s right up there on the list of thankless jobs. In many cases, including this woman’s, the organizers have been blacklisted and couldn’t return to the industry if they wanted to.
How much to push before they price their
June 8, 2009
At Home in Utopia
With GM and Chrylser going bankrupt there’s a lot of blame that gets directed towards unions. Unionized labor at GM costs $71 per hour. In comparions Toyota has no unions and their labor cost is only $47 per hour.
Joann Muller wrote a great piece in Forbes on why the unions aren’t to blame. She writes that one of the major expenses GM faces aren’t employees being paid that much more than the workers at Japanese automakers, but the legacy costs.
it’s misleading to suggest that Detroit autoworker
