GEO Module 2 Flashcards
Fast Fashion
Readily available, inexpensive clothing, how fast they become unfashionable, speed & quantity of clothing produced & disposed by consumers.
Conversion Rate
Viewer’s rate/probability of purchase (ex. x10 live shopping)
Commodity Fetishism
Exchange value obscuring social, political & environmental relationships & conditions during production, confusing commodities for being simply things or objects (fetishisms them), they are presented as though they are natural and without history.
Commodities appear as independent and apart from the social and environmental relationships that produce them
Social Relations
Labor conditions, standards (from production to retail)
- The garment industry is one of the biggest and most labour intensive industries, with an estimated of 25-60 million people employed
Wages in comparison to cost of living
- 90% of workers in the global garment industry have no possibility to negotiate their wages and conditions
How much profit is generated & where it flows & to whom
Government policies (e.g. trade agreements, subsidies)
Environmental Relations
Water use
- Daily discharge of printing and dyeing wastewater is 600,000 tons
- Daily discharge of printing and dyeing wastewater is 600,000 tons
- One kg of cotton (= weight of a shirt and a pair of jeans) can take as much as 10,000-20,000 liters of water to produce (1)
Pollution
- As much as 20-35% of all primary source microplastics in the marine environment are from synthetic clothing
Resource Extraction:
- Textile manufacturing consumes 98 million tons of nonrenewable resources—from oil that goes into synthetic fibers to fertilizers to grow cotton, and 93 billion cubic meters of water annually
Greenhouse gas emissions
- 4-8% of the world’s total carbon footprint is from fashion. France, Germany, and UK combined 1.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.
Garbage production
- Nearly 60% of all clothing ends up in incinerators or landfills within a year of being produced. That’s one garbage truck per second!
Proximate Causes/Issues
Overabundance & cheapness of a commodity, opposite to the underproduction & high cost housing module.
Structural Drivers + Researchers
A perspective opens & closes avenues.
- Consumer’s unending demand - Upton-Clark
- Globalized supply chains, hard to trace, complicated - Holdcraft+Skinner & Muhammad & Kent & Dr.Jamie Peck
- Lack of government regulator oversight - Bedat
- Colonialism & patriarchy - Barenblat+Mayer & Dr.Gerry Pratt
- Economic System/Capitalism & Neoliberal Discourse - Sullivan+Hickel & Marx & Pham
History of Garment Sector
Global shift towards outsourced production & materials along long complex supply chains in Global South for the Global North.
Ex. Levi’s Producer –> Brand
- 1960s: 98%-2% of clothes purchased in US produced domestically
- 2000s, clothing prices fell by 26.2% in Europe & 17.1% in the US
- 200-2007 exports of clothes from China to US increased by 18% per year, 21% in Europe
Brands & suppliers have no awareness of each other, production origins are obscured by brands, leading to retailers that can pass on responsibility for labor exploitation down the supply chain with no accountability (Mark Sumner)
- Making it difficult to enact ethical decisions in regards to clothes as no one knows how, where & who produced them
Anu Muhammad
The worker’s conditions.
- RMG (ready made garment) sector exploded in Bangladesh in the 1980s
- No spinning, putting clothes together
- Economy of Bangladesh 80% of exports dependent on RMG - Growth in employment unsafe conditions, low wages & inability to organize
- Cheap Clothes = Cheap Labour
- Wage is not enough to cover living costs - Uneven costs & benefit-capture from the RMG sector: lowest wages for workers, highest to owners, buyers & global retailers
- Richest people in the world are heads of the garment industry
- We are commodities, we sell our labor, fulfilling essential human needs but not for sale - Brands hold enormous power: buyer driven global community supply chain
- Large pressure on suppliers, competition between suppliers to provide lowest cost “Race to the Bottom” at the cost of low conditions, wages & protection
- Laws & policies are better for producers not workers - Growth of sector in Bangladesh didn’t just happen - growth needed policy change
Economic Globalization + Signs of its Rise
Ongoing interconnectedness of all aspects of economic activity at a global scale for hundreds of years which has increased dramatically over the past 50 years.
- Increased international trade & investment
- Growth in multinational corporations (MNCs): organizations that own or control of 40% the production of goods & services in one or more countries in addition to their home country
- Growth in globalized production & labor
Drivers of Economic Globalization
- Decreased costs of transportation: 90% fall in shipping costs 1950s-2015
- Profit seeking by firms in a competitive landscape: firms source production, materials & jurisdictions that can increase profitability, decrease costs from labor, less restrictions on pollution & lower taxes (ex. 1993-2003 → 200 new brands competition. Cost of production in Texas $7 vs China &1.5. With declining profits & risk of bankruptcy → closure of US production, offshoring production)
- Growth of free trade agreements & investments: easier for capital to move throughout globe
- Government Policies: signing & encouraging trade & investment agreements through tax breaks, cheap energy, favorable lending, infrastructure that improve economies through globalization (ex. Bangladesh: duty free import of capital goods for 100% export oriented industries, export processing zones, tax exemptions for export oriented RMG)
- Neoliberal ideas & Policies: unregulated market → efficient economic growth
- Globalization is ongoing, complex, uneven, reshuffling of cards, transforming & contested (rise of populism: simple solutions to complex issues, Clinton G forever vs Trump protectionism (government policies that restrict international trade to help domestic industries))
- Divergence between the political discourse of economic globalization & reality
- Globalization shifts labor geographies: offshoring variants, blue, pink, white, no collar are connected & related, wires laid on top of each other but connected…
Free Trade Agreements
Contracts between countries that set conditions of trade to liberalize: reduce barriers to international trade & investments
Dr. Pratt
Globalization= evolutionary layers that interact with uneven integration of nations –> new capacities & inequalities
Table of 2 Waves of Offshoring: jobs, processes, key actors, geographies & consequences.
Neoliberal Discourse + Key Characteristics & Actors
Main Argument: Markets with less government intervention will have efficient economic growth & most equitable outcomes. Self-interested individuals & formal maximize social returns
Key Characteristics:
1. Trade Liberalization benefits all nations who participate: regions/states should specialize in production for which they produce at a comparative advantage: lower cost than its trading partners
- Poverty & development is best solved through economic growth achieved by freer markets & more integration with the global market: a world integrated through market should benefit the vast majority of inhabitants
- State & international institution should advance policies to support the above through reduced taxes, signing more trade agreements, investments & EPZs
Key Actors:
- Firms: MNCs (Multi National Corporations)
- Governments
- International Institutions: WTO, World Bank, IMF controlled by governments of G7 countries
Neoliberal Discourse Opponents
- “Universal benefits’’ are highly uneven. Globalization is a constant investment & disinvestments, moving & profiteering
- “Friction-free-flows” of globalization is unattainable when it comes to the flow of people across borders, for goods it is fine
- “Global Nature of Globalization” is misleading as capital is not going everywhere, only Global South → Global North
- Export<Import, must produce more to keep balance
- “Stateless” nature is false as globalization is a process actively cultivated by governments
- Race to the Bottom: competing governments shift policies in order to get investments, enter global market, develop out of poverty causing worsening workplace conditions & wages