John Oliver Is Giving Fashion CEOs A Really Dodgy Lunch To Make Them Care About Sweatshop Labour
"I want you to look at this suspiciously cheap food which lands on your desk tomorrow and I want you to fucking eat it."
Earlier this week a group called Fashion Revolution led a global campaign asking people to question #WhoMadeMyClothes? With thousands displaying the labels of their clothing and getting in direct contact with the brand’s management, it seems like a promising step towards transparency and a move which proved people are increasingly interested in supporting an ethical production process.
But as brands like H&M continue to prosper despite their previous use of sweatshop labour — not only did their first Australian store take up a space the size of a small mall, it had 3,000 people desperately awaiting it on the first day — it seems like there may be a disconnect between this kind of principle and the allure of cheap prices.
To counter all this, John Oliver’s taken a more aggressive tactic: publicly shame and berate companies with known connections to sweatshop labour, question the hypocrisy of the media spruiking their stuff, and shove cheap seafood in the CEO’s faces. It’s pretty effective.
As a person who has bought many curiously cheap t-shirts and absolutely regretted eating mysterious piles of dumplings over the years, this one is gonna linger on my mind for a while.
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If you’d like to read more about how our local brands fare, Baptist World Aid published their yearly Australian Fashion Report a few weeks ago. Spoiler: it gives you one more reason to never set foot in Lowes.