Week 5-Uyen Ngo

Because I do not shop as often, I must admit, I came into this challenge thinking it was going to be easy. But I have come to realize that fast fashion and unethical fashion is all around me. But I have also realized its not just fashion. I found it difficult that for my trip, it would be so convenient to order everything off of Amazon. Or perhaps drive to a Walmart and get everything done within the night. The way that they treat workers extend for layers on layers, and it happens right in our neighborhoods. It starts from the beginning, the manufacturing, where "rather than working in one- or two-story structure dispersed over a wide area, as in Los Angeles, workers take dilapidated elevators to the tops of tenement buildings of 12 stories or more" (Holstein). And even after that, these workers get scammed as "ten of thousands of immigrants do find work in shops whose proprietors routinely close up and disappear without paying workers weeks' worth of wages" (Holstein).

But the mistreatment does not stop there. It goes onto the retail workers. An example I mentioned would be Walmart. It is no secret that "Walmart has faced issues with its employees involving low wages, poor working conditions and inadequate health care" and "approximately 70% of its employees leave within the first year" (Wikipedia). This is something that I had to constantly remind myself when it came to buying items for my trip. I was focused on just fashion, which turns out is harder to resist from purchasing as it is, but at the same time, I have come to realize that this encompasses other companies that are not exclusively a fashion retailer as well and that despite their cheap and affordable prices, we can not give our money that mistreats their workers on several different layers. 

Works Cited

Holstein, Palmer, Ur-Rehman and Ito. “Santa’s Sweatshop: In a Global Economy, it’s Hard to Know Who Made Your Gift—and Under What Conditions.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart