The Truth Behind the Barcode

It’s often not the first thing we think about when buying new clothes and shoes from the clean comfort of our shopping centres, and yet for the children of many developing countries, working long hours for a few cents a day in run down factories is a sad reality. It’s clear that the true depth of this issue is strongly underestimated by Australian consumers, and the cries for help of these children are being ignored. To give you an idea; the typical working day of a young girl in Bangladesh lasts for 12 hours, with very few breaks and a zero tolerance policy to slacking off or crying, from Monday through to Sunday. Her average pay is less than two dollars a day at best, and the potential of any future prospect for her is trumped by her lack of education, a story that is all too common in these poverty-stricken nations. In third world countries, extreme poverty, overpopulation and unemployment force these children to work to support themselves and their families in buying the bare necessities; a struggle we can only try to imagine. According to statistics provided by the United Nations in 2005, more than a quarter of the global population lived in instances of extreme poverty, and this number is rapidly increasing. In addition to this, due to the extensive outsourcing of products and components used to create products, companies have very little control over the employment standards in the lower tiers of the manufacturing process. In fact, multinational companies, in an effort to minimise production costs and maximise profit, undergo extensive outsourcing of materials in the manufacturing process which inadvertently lead to the masking of child labour incidents in many cases, leaving consumers in the dark about the true origins of the products they buy, as the stories of these exploited children slip through the cracks of mass media and the justice system.

Large corporations like our everyday Kmart, Big W and Forever New chains have global levels of expansion and power which they often utilise to further exploit developing countries and their looser laws, causing their corrupted governments to make further cuts to health, education and employment, purely out of economic desperation. Whilst this issue may seem impossible to address, the United Nations estimates that the cost of reaching the global education goal would be only approximately 1% of current investment in military forces worldwide. So perhaps the issue is not founded in a lack of funding, but in a lack of empathy and fair distribution of resources. Clearly, these children are the victims of a capitalist society founded on passive consumerism, something from which large companies reap the benefits, while others suffer. And in effect, the long term development of these countries is stunted by low income per capita rates, high illiteracy rates and extreme levels of poverty. Not to mention the severe mental and physical health problems which the children are likely to suffer as a result of the shocking conditions they are forced to endure from a very young age. In particular, when children are denied the opportunity to access free and compulsory education, their future prospects are limited and the cycle of poverty continues to worsen. The moral and ethical challenges faced by consumers today is how to help this issue, without compromising the luxuries we have become accustomed to take for granted. Ultimately, this cruel practice is deep seeded within our society and has been normalised in the business empire which only perpetuates the worsening of the issue. Perhaps if we invest in more sustainable products, inspiring change through the companies we choose to support, then these children will be granted the true opportunities they are entitled to as capable and deserving human beings.

#Society