labor costs make up just 2 percent of that.19 Most workers get just pennies for jeans that might retail for hundreds of times more. Some argue that exploitation is the price of economic development, or that such wages are adequate in industrial China, but cheapness isn’t the only choice.20
Zipping up their jeans, students aren’t thinking about sweatshops or the politics of free-trade zones. They’re not thinking about the largely female workforce, bused into factories from rural villages, and housed in company quarters. Shopping for clothes in America can be a form of “sweatshopping,” but there’s no suggestion of that in our malls, catalogs, or labels. Trying on jeans in the store, customers are implicitly asked to forget the water, soil, oil, chemicals, and human labor used in their fabrication. As all Americans look for new jeans, we’re asked to make environmental decisions—and ethical decisions—without any relevant information.21
Jeans are so common on campus that Joe and Jo College hardly ever think about them. But, like our other clothes, they help us think about our place in the global commons. If we want to think globally and act globally, jeans would be a good place to start.
The Nature of Laundry
As an artificial skin for humans, clothes get dirty. They capture spills from the cafeteria, effluents at the party, dirt from the floor, stains from the grass, and the smell of sweat. So students occasionally need to take their clothes to the laundry, where fossil fuels power machines that use chemicals to clean them. Like other consuming routines, doing the laundry is a form of ordinary consumption that we’re so used to, and bored by, that we can’t see the tangle of cultural assumptions spinning in the washer. We hardly ever think of ourselves as consumers in the Laundromat or the laundry room, but a significant amount of American consumption, especially energy consumption, comes from precisely such normal and unnoticed routines—forms of the inconspicuous consumption that is structured into our lives. Once again, as in the bathroom, our cleanliness dirties the planet.22
In the past twenty years, spurred in part by federal regulations and Energy Star standards, manufacturers have made washers and dryers a lot more efficient, but a dryer will never be as efficient as a clothesline. The clothesline was an old-fashioned technology that used solar power to dry clothes. People used implements called clothespins to attach clothes to a rope strung between two poles. On a good day, the clothes dried quickly and picked up the fresh smell of outdoor air (which is now synthesized in the scents of detergents and fabric softeners). On rainy days—or in winter, in cold climates—an outdoor clothesline was useless, so people rigged lines indoors. Still, for reasons of predictability, profit, and progress, consumers became convinced that clotheslines were “old-fashioned,” and quickly opted for the mechanization of the drying process. American colleges followed suit, providing students with the appliances they had learned to expect at home.23
A 2006 French study examined the life-cycle costs of a single pair of jeans, and found that washing, drying, and ironing accounts for 47 percent of their environmental impact, using about 240 kilowatt hours of electricity a year—equal to the energy used to power four thousand sixty-watt light bulbs for an hour.24
Thankfully, reducing resource consumption in college laundry rooms is no harder than changing habits of body and mind. Practically speaking, colleges and universities could buy or lease the most efficient washers and dryers, and complement them with clotheslines and drying racks. Culturally, students could also begin to change their expectations. Students like Joe and Jo College have grown up with a rising tide of TV commercials for whiter, brighter, cleaner clothes, but they could choose to remember that cleanliness wasn’t always next to godliness until members of the Cleanliness Institute—funded by Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, Armour & Company, and Unilever—realized that, as association executive Roscoe Edlund said in 1930, “The business of cleanliness is big business,” and that cleanliness was a great way to sell soaps and detergents. Students could resist this brainwashing by washing clothes—especially outerwear—less than current cultural expectations demand. They could embrace the smell test, as well as the sweet smell of clothes dried in fresh air. Less laundry, too, would extend the life span of clothes—agitation and tumbling result not only in clean, dry garments but also in lint, the common name for the fluff that used to be clothes. In short, saving rivers of water, acres of cotton, and pounds of chemicals is as simple as asking one question at the end of the day: “How dirty are these jeans?”25
Making New Clothes
In a 2005 essay that won the Elie Wiesel Prize for an undergraduate essay in ethics, Yale University student Sarah Stillman argued that while our clothes may be made in China, our clothing system is made by us. Focusing on young women, sweatshops, and the ethics of globalization, Stillman wrote how “teenage girls [in other countries] are increasingly bearing the burdens of globalization while reaping relatively few of its tremendous rewards.” Taking an inventory of her own room, she found that she was complicit with labor practices that she opposed.
1 Nike T-shirt: Made by company that employed Martha for five cents a shirt.
1 Adidas soccer ball: Made by company notorious for antiunionism, low wages, and abuse of young women workers.
1 Barbie doll, legs missing: Made in China by Mattel, in factory much like Li Chunmei’s. Average worker age = 14.
2 pairs New Balance sneakers: Chinese workers there are paid 18 cents an hour and forced to live in crammed 12-person dorm rooms.
“Somehow,” Stillman noted, “we’ve become submerged in a system that genuinely repulses our ethical sensibilities.” Alarmed by the gap between her expressed values and her operative values, Stillman joined students and other activists to protest the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a neoliberal trade agreement that limits labor rights, human rights, and environmental protections in the interest of free trade. As a woman, she chose to do her part to protect other women—and the Earth—from the destruction that can come with the creativity of capitalism.26
What Stillman and other activists are up against is the systematic ignorance fostered by globalization, and the misinformation marketers present to consumers. But what if we countered the half-truths of ads by requiring a full-cost accounting on our clothes? A new system could require retailers to reveal on garment tags not just where products were made, but who made them and how much these workers earned. It might also demand that retailers post pictures or videos of their factories so we could understand the ways our consumption affects the production process. With this sort of information we could make the simple decision to buy our jeans at places that pictured the environmental costs of cotton, and from companies that offered organic goods. We all know that feedback affects how we act in the world, so why not insist on truth in our feedback loops, instead of the glossy promises of deceptive advertising? Why not let us see the connections between social justice and environmental justice? Informed consumption is the foundation of good capitalism, so who could deny the logic of such a demand? By lobbying our legislators to pass just one law to require such information, we could take real responsibility for our remote control of the social and environmental impacts of clothing.27
