My thing is that there’s a minimum price for fairness, and then there’s products that present themselves as being marked up for fairness that don’t actually benefit the people a fair price should benefit. Your best bet is to do some research into what the minimum fair price something is, and then look for something that price from a local economy.
Unfortunately, this is next to impossible. The systems in place favor us never knowing where anything comes from, and the research tools we used to be able to use to find fair prices (internet search) have been broken for this purpose for nearly 10 years (not just AI bullshit, but all those SEO pay to play bullshit listicles that even infect real human driven testing processes like The Wirecutter and Gear Lab). I think there’s even an argument to be made that AI is an intentional device to steer us into a digital dark age where finding real trustworthy information is nearly impossible.
sonori@beehaw.org 6 days ago
Ya, I agree people should be getting a fair wage, I just don’t see how a tax on products sold more directly helps with that in this case. People will just shrug, say it’s still cheaper than the same model on Amazon, and buy it all the same. A company is always going to try and pay the lowest price they can while pocketing the rest, and the best you can typically do is help the workers bargain for more.
I mean things like BDS can work, but they have to be targeted very carefully and specifically to get a board of directors to take a specific action, and the wider the net you cast the more dilute it gets and the more likely companies will call it the cost of doing busines.
US condemnation of the system would probably also have a bit stronger effect if it wasn’t using the same system of minority prison labor farmed out to various companies and saying it’s perfectly ethical fine so long as the people you arrested on thin pretext for race get a few dollars an hour that they then spend right back at the prison.
Put another way, if the EU put the same import tax on products and companies that made things in Mississippi on us because of the general prevalence of undocumented black prison labor in the region, do you think that the we would suddenly change things?
Quill7513@slrpnk.net 6 days ago
Oh for sure. The solution isn’t to raise the price of unfairly priced products, its to introduce the concept of accountability to the world