This October marks the 13th annual Fair Trade Month, a time dedicated to raising awareness of fair trade and promoting the purchase of socially and commercially sustainable products.
Fair trade is a social movement that seeks to ensure companies or producers in developing countries pay a fair wage to workers and enforce fair labor practices, such as safe working conditions and the absence of child labor.
Junior elementary education major Jenna Cruz said she is passionate about fair trade because it seeks to help people living in poverty in other countries.
“They’re doing the same amount of work, so they should get the same amount of money,” Cruz said. “They probably work even harder because a lot of those workers live in Third World countries where they don’t have everything we have here or as cheap as we have it.”
Professor of behavioral sciences and director of the social work program Terry Smith said he urges students to support fair trade and hopes students leave his international social work course with more awareness.
“In some sense, by not being aware of fair trade, we make consumer choices that lead to unjust toil for people, but also poverty,” Smith said. “We contribute to (workers in developing countries) being poor. We really just need to understand the impact of our choices.”
Smith claims that one of the major contributions to poverty in developing countries is the fact that fair trade practices are not implemented and that poverty is foundational to many other social ills.
“When you have poverty, you’re going to have human trafficking,” Smith said. “When you have poverty, you’re going to have child soldiers. When you have poverty, you’re going to have all kinds of atrocities. We all have a part in contributing to that.”
Products that are sold using fair trade receive a certification label that assures buyers fair practices were enforced in the production of that product. Organizations like Ten Thousand Villages and Land of a Thousand Hills sell fair trade certified products from around the world. Online Fair Trade USA allows consumers to research products and even purchase fair trade certified products at places such as Amazon.com.
“Because of the Harding Read, particularly as we looked at slavery, this is an especially important concept for folks to be thinking about,” Smith said. “The fingerprints of slavery are all over a lot of the consumer choices that we make, and fair trade is a way to try to get rid of that.”
Smith said he encourages his students to buy fair trade products as much as possible and ask other stores to do more to carry fair trade items.
“(Buying fair trade) can be kind of expensive, sure, but that’s because the people are getting paid fairly,” Cruz said. “That’s the reason your Forever 21 skirt was only five bucks, because someone wasn’t being paid enough to make it.”
Much like Smith, Cruz said she encourages people to be aware of what they are buying and what goes into making it. She even suggests that people buy products secondhand from places like Goodwill or Plato’s Closet to keep from directly supporting companies that do not practice fair trade.
“It’s good to know where your products come from,” Cruz said. “That product didn’t just come out of thin air, your phone didn’t just happen, someone made that. It’s important to be aware of what you’re taking in or consuming and know someone took the time to make it.”
To learn more about fair trade, visit fairtradeusa.org.
