Ethical consumerism - Your money is an agent for change

Everyone lucky enough to live in a democracy is encouraged to cherish their vote.

We are taught to recognise it as our way of influencing events, of having a say in how society is run, of how justice is administered and how social equality is advanced and protected.

Some of us were taught on our mother’s knee that our vote was the way to exercise power and demand accountability. That some of our mothers, some of our grandmothers certainly, could not vote made that lesson all the more compelling.

Today the power of that attractive and defining principle has been greatly diminished. It is further diminished when the choices offered to this country’s electorate are so very alike, so very predicable, and far too often heartbreakingly disappointing.

The devaluation of our vote may have reached a point where we can exert more influence by how we spend our money, how we apply value judgements other than monetary when we buy something. That decisions around our discretionary spend might be as influential as our vote is a pretty grim comment on our democracy and our politics — as is the fact that so many people, through no fault of their own, have little or no discretionary spend to fret about.

In an earlier US presidential election — 1988 — the Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis had a pretty simple rationale on these matters. His infamous “it’s better because it’s cheaper” statement was uncluttered by ethics and may have helped George Bush Sr win the White House. It earned the Greek-American politician the nickname Zorba the Clerk and made him unelectable. This year’s candidates, President Obama and Mitt Romney could not be so dismissive.

Globalisation and the emergence of China as such a powerful economic force have brought the provenance of consumer goods and the impact imports have on domestic economies and jobs to the very top of political agendas. A product’s back story, where it came from and the conditions under which it was produced are more influential than ever and, when our economies recover, may be even more influential.

The dormitory riot involving 2,000 Foxconn Technology Group employees over the weekend pushed the issues around ethical consumerism back onto the public stage. The Taiyuan plant in northern China, where about 79,000 people are employed, makes, among many other things, Apple’s iPhone 5. Workers threatened mass suicides at Foxconn plants earlier this year unless conditions were improved. That the local “public security bureau” could immediately muster about 5,000 officers to bring the riot under control is reminiscent of scenes from Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where police and property forged an aggressive alliance to subjugate starving migrant workers.

Like it or not, every time we buy something we endorse everything about it. Though our objective is to get the best value we can, and many of us have no choice in this, we are at the point where other considerations must intrude. Surely we cannot be blind forever to the plight of those who produce some of the goods that sustain our discredited, damaging materialism?