Foot Work Quotes

“The power of celebrity endorsement is largely the promise of transference, that a celebrity’s wealth, achievements or attractiveness will somehow be transferred by wearing the trainers they have been shown promoting. It is a promise of a connection to a person or lifestyle, where no possibility of a real connection likely exists.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“Dalits and Muslims have also been targeted, beaten and murdered by hard-line Hindu cow-protection activists, who falsely accuse leather workers of killing cows.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“EU rules exist to prevent exposure to CMR chemicals (substances classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic and toxic for reproduction). The EU has restricted chromium (VI) since 2015; no leather goods that come into contact with the skin are allowed to have a concentration higher than 3mg per kg.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“The Hazaribagh tanneries killed all the fish in the Buriganga River. They created the fifth most polluted place on the planet.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“Native elder once told me, and I have seen similar sentiments elsewhere, this thought: When you hunt, ensure that the animal does not see you. Otherwise you will be feeding fear to your families.’32”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“They think you can undo these things that are happening, but many of them you can’t. In biological terms, you don’t get a rainforest back.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“Acknowledging this is not for the faint-hearted: ‘If you really wanted to end capitalism, you would end the exploitation of animal labour,’ he argues. ‘Capitalism is so built upon the exploitation of animal bodies and labour, that to break that element of capitalism, would break capitalism.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“In this process the global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all cars, planes, trains and ships put together.4”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“life had become a ceaseless cycle of production and exploitation, the promise of a new life having given way to mechanised physical toil and the mental strain of endless repetition.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“This means expensive brands have not been subject to the same level of scrutiny as high street brands, but scratch the surface and for many luxury companies the issues might well be the same.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“What an exorbitant price tag does reflect is a larger surplus value – profit. This surplus could ensure decent wages for factory workers, the people who create the value with their labour. But what happens instead is that two stages of production, distribution and branding, take approximately 60 per cent of the final price of a shoe.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“Online fakes range from the terrible to the almost imperceptible. The ability to create convincing replica shoes comes from skilled shoemakers who have worked in factories for years, moles who sell designs and materials to counterfeiters, factory workers who throw shoes over the factory wall and even official factories which switch to producing replicas by night.20”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“From the 1760s, thereabouts, is when shoemakers started putting labels in shoes, little paper labels that they would stick inside on the lining on the insole,’ says Rebecca Shawcross, senior shoe curator at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery. ‘They’re all individual and they basically say who the maker was, and where they were based. With this new increased market opening up an audience for ready-made, it was like advertising themselves.’ This information, along with pictorial trade cards, allowed customers to repeat buy from the same makers. It allowed craftspeople to show off and be acknowledged for their skills.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“Homework is the world beneath the first, second and third tier of subcontracting. A world of supply chains that descends far below any kind of regulation or factory inspection system. A world that goes ignored.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“This move into Africa is part of the same thing – it’s their move into their next frontier.’62”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“What we do know, however, is that the shoe industry simply would not exist without the systemic exploitation of women.”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“22 but conditions in European factories can also be extremely poor. In eastern Europe shoe workers are paid 25–35 per cent of an estimated minimum living wage, often leaving people in a worse position than in China because low wages in eastern Europe are not matched by low living costs.23”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation

“We are on the edge of a cliff not because it is inevitable, but because it is ideological. We live in a world shaped by political decisions which tend to favour the interests of money, not people.19”
― Tansy E. Hoskins, Foot Work: What Your Shoes Tell You About Globalisation