#Supply chain

[victusinveritas]

[reasonsforhope]

"Nasir Mansoor has spent 40 years fighting for Pakistan’s workers. Whether demanding compensation on behalf of the hundreds of people who died in a devastating 2012 factory fire in Karachi or demonstrating against Pakistani suppliers to global fashion brands violating minimum wage rules, he’s battled many of the country’s widespread labor injustices.

Yet so far, little has improved, said Mansoor, who heads Pakistan’s National Trade Union Federation in Karachi... Regulations and trade protocols look good on paper, but they rarely trickle down to the factory level. “Nobody cares,” Mansoor said. “Not the government who makes commitments, not the brands, and not the suppliers. The workers are suffering.”

Change on the Horizon

But change might finally be on the horizon after Germany’s new Supply Chain Act came into force last year. As Europe’s largest economy and importer of clothing, Germany now requires certain companies to put risk-management systems in place to prevent, minimize, and eliminate human rights violations for workers across their entire global value chains. Signed into law by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in January 2023, the law covers issues such as forced labor, union-busting, and inadequate wages, for the first time giving legal power to protections that were previously based on voluntary commitments. Companies that violate the rules face fines of up to 8 million euros ($8.7 million)...

...As governments come to realize that a purely voluntary regimen produces limited results, there is now a growing global movement to ensure that companies are legally required to protect the people working at all stages of their supply chains.

The German law is just the latest example of these new due diligence rules—and it’s the one with the highest impact, given the size of the country’s market. A number of other Western countries have also adopted similar legislation in recent years, including France and Norway. A landmark European Union law that would mandate all member states to implement similar regulation is in the final stages of being greenlighted.

Although the United States has legislation to prevent forced labor in its global supply chains, such as the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, there are no federal laws that protect workers in other countries from abuses that fall short of forced labor. That said, a proposed New York state bill, the Fashion Act, would legally require most major U.S. and international brands to identify, prevent, and remediate human rights violations in their supply chain if passed, with noncompliance subject to fines. Since major fashion brands could hardly avoid selling their products in New York, the law would effectively put the United States on a similar legal level as Germany and France...

The Results So Far

As of January, Germany’s new law applies to any company with at least 1,000 employees in the country, which covers many of the world’s best-known fast fashion retailers, such as Zara and Primark. Since last January [Jan 2023], German authorities say they have received 71 complaints or notices of violations and conducted 650 of their own assessments, including evaluating companies’ risk management.

In Pakistan, the very existence of the German law was enough to spark action. Last year, Mansoor and other union representatives reached out to fashion brands that sourced some of their clothing in Pakistan to raise concerns about severe labor violations in garment factories. Just four months later, he and his colleagues found themselves in face-to-face meetings with several of those brands—a first in his 40-year career. “This is a big achievement,” he said. “Otherwise, [the brands] never sit with us. Even when the workers died in the factory fire, the brand never sat with us.” ...

-via The Fuller Project, April 2, 2024. Article headers added by me.

Article continues below, with more action-based results, including one factory that "complied, agreeing to respect minimum wages and provide contract letters, training on labor laws, and—for the first time—worker bonuses"

With the help of Mansoor and Zehra Khan, the general secretary of the Home-Based Women Workers Federation, interviews with more than 350 garment workers revealed the severity of long-known issues.

Nearly all workers interviewed were paid less than a living wage, which was 67,200 Pakistan rupees (roughly $243) per month in 2022, according to the Asia Floor Wage Alliance. Nearly 30 percent were even paid below the legal minimum wage of 25,000 Pakistani rupees per month (roughly $90) for unskilled workers. Almost 100 percent had not been given a written employment contract, while more than three-quarters were either not registered with the social security system—a legal requirement—or didn’t know if they were.

When Mansoor, Khan, and some of the organizations raised the violations with seven global fashion brands implicated, they were pleasantly surprised. One German retailer reacted swiftly, asking its supplier where the violations had occurred to sign a 14-point memorandum of understanding to address the issues. (We’re unable to name the companies involved because negotiations are ongoing.) The factory complied, agreeing to respect minimum wages and provide contract letters, training on labor laws, and—for the first time—worker bonuses.

In February [2024], the factory registered an additional 400 workers with the social security system (up from roughly 100) and will continue to enroll more, according to Khan. “That is a huge number for us,” she said.

It’s had a knock-on effect, too. Four of the German brand’s other Pakistani suppliers are also willing to sign the memorandum, Khan noted, which could impact another 2,000 workers or so. “The law is opening up space for [the unions] to negotiate, to be heard, and to be taken seriously,” said Miriam Saage-Maass, the legal director at ECCHR.

Looking Forward with the EU

...Last month [in March 2024], EU member states finally approved a due diligence directive after long delays, during which the original draft was watered down. As it moves to the next stage—a vote in the European Parliament—before taking effect, critics argue that the rules are now too diluted and cover too few companies to be truly effective. Still, the fact that the EU is acting at all has been described as an important moment, and unionists such as Mansoor and Khan wait thousands of miles away with bated breath for the final outcome.

Solidarity from Europe is important, Khan said, and could change the lives of Pakistan’s workers. “The eyes and the ears of the people are looking to [the brands],” Mansoor said. “And they are being made accountable for their mistakes.”"

-via The Fuller Project, April 2, 2024. Article headers added by me.

[dispatchesfromtheclasswar]

[reality-detective]

BULLETIN: The Panama Canal Has Stopped! Forty percent (40%) of the Global Supply Chain came to a halt today as the Panama Canal shut down. Ships are presently stuck on both the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean sides of the canal because the FRESHWATER lake, which supplies the locks between the two oceans, has suffered a drought and can no longer fill the locks to allow ships to sail through the canal.

Because of the severely reduced freshwater supply, Ships are being ordered to travel with 40% less weight to deal with less water. The Panama government said these restrictions will last at least 10 MORE MONTHS.

This is causing delays in shipments from Asia to the East coast of the United States This is also causing oil shipment delays from the Middle East and India (Bharat) to the West Coast of the USA.

Get stocked up NOW.

Hal Turner Remark: Let me see if I understand this . . . The Panama Canal has the Atlantic OCEAN, on one side, and the Pacific OCEAN on the other side, and somehow or another, we're supposed to believe they've run out of water to operate the canal zone? Why not use salt water through the canal zone? Let me guess . . . . the environment?

Are You Prepared? 🤔

[thethinkingman]

[thedowntown500]

Garmet Print Denim by Proenza Schouler

Screen printed front and back, the details are hand painted by artisan garment painters.

[fake-destiel-news]

Source

[sisyphussister]

is it just my eating disorder or should the agricultural society of america not have a say in how many calories the average person ought to eat per day?

[spiderfreedom]

i notice a lot of tumblr users seem convinced apple is the only company that uses unethically sourced electronics materials and foxconn, and i'm sorry to say that's not true

every nintendo console since the gamecube has been produced by foxconn

sony's playstation consoles are produced by foxconn

the xbox consoles are produced by foxconn

like basically every major tech company you know of has worked with foxconn, xiamoi, nokia, sega, google, the blackberry

and that's just foxconn, that's just the people putting the stuff together. (to read more on this, I strongly recommend the book "Dying for an iPhone", which is a history of Foxconn and Foxconn's relation with Apple)

resource extraction is an even uglier game with fewer players. I'm sure you guys have heard about the congolese protests recently due to the mines expanding

nothing about the technology supply chain is clean or ethical. now, lots of supply chains are unethical and involve slavery or exploitation in some way or another - see the supply chain for textiles. but whereas an especially motivated and well-off person could buy from small farms for wool, the capital requirements to extract rare earth metals are so large that only large firms can afford to do so. firms with no incentive to increase the price of these operations by voluntarily caring about safety or ethics. the countries that are being extracted from are so poor and exploited that they have no real way to fight back, either.

i know we've all grown up with console wars and mobile phone wars and nintendo vs sony vs microsoft, nintendo vs sega, android vs iphone, but i'm sorry to say that it's all marketing, and all these companies play the dirty game of forced labor in their supply chain.

i can't tell you what the solution to this because 1. i am not an expert in international business? and 2. when transnational entities get involved, things very quickly become way out of the reach of what an ordinary citizen or even groups of citizens can do. foreign policy and business is out of our sphere of influence.

that's not to turn everyone into doomers, but to give perspective. there's no ethical console war here. if you're a student and you want to make this your career path, study economics, law, transnationalism... I recommend the book "Challenging the Chip: Labor Rights and Environmental Justice in the Global Electronics Industry," which is from 2006 but still relevant. (if you are in university, check jstor, your uni may have the book!)

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

The Uk has been written out of the EU travel and supply chain decisions. We are out in the cold as a result of the lies of Brexit lies.

[jbfly46]

The modern economy rests on a single road in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The road runs to the two mines that is the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.

Besides powdered sodium hydroxide, anything with a a pH level greater than 8 could ruin the quartz. Having the entire western world rely on computers that rely on a single quartz mine, that could easily be damaged incidentally, is literally asking for it.

[solarpunks]

Our lives are caught between climate change, pandemics, wars, market crashes, biodiversity collapses, and supply chain disruptions. The new normal, it seems, is one where apocalyptic narratives predominate and where precarity is to be expected or even embraced. Many efforts to head off catastrophe, meanwhile, often seem inadequate to the task, embracing status quo politics or hanging their hopes on salvation through technological disruption. What, then, would an anti-catastrophic project that takes our myriad crises seriously but does not fall into the trap of catastrophic thinking look like? The aim of this project is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe – how it is defined, analyzed, and deployed – and anti-catastrophic practices in an attempt to envision alternatives to our present.

againstcatastrophe.net

[reasonsforhope]

"A new community housing development in the Bronx will feature a cool piece of kit: an on-site aerobic digester that can turn 1,100 pounds of food scraps into 220 pounds of high-quality fertilizer every single day.

Built by Harp Renewables, it’s basically a big stomach filled with bacteria that breaks down food scraps and wasted food into their component parts, and in the future could be a standard part of all apartment units as the amount of food waste in American reaches 30% of the total mass of all trash collection.

The Peninsula, organized by Gilbane Development Company, will feature 740 units of affordable housing, 50,000 square-foot light industrial space and equal sized green space, and 15,000 feet of commercial space, all of which will send their castaway comestibles right into the digester...

Fast Company reports that Christina Grace, founder of a zero-waste food management company, helped plan the design and implementation of the digester into The Peninsula, and helped organize a 40% grant from the city to pay the $50,000 upfront cost.

“The goal is for this material to work its way into the community garden network in the Bronx,” [Christina Grace, who helped plan the design] told the magazine, adding that she expects it to pay for itself over just a few years. “We see this as highly replicable in both commercial and residential venues. We know there’s a need for fertilizer.”

Producing fertilizer right there in the city reduces the need for it to be trucked in from afar, chipping away, even if just a bit, at NYC traffic.

Big problem solver

Perhaps uniquely beneficial to New York City compared to other spots in the U.S. is that the digester will have a significant impact on the Bronx’s share of the city’s rodent problem.

Those who’ve watched the Morgan Spurlock documentary Rats will understand why that’s significant—while those that haven’t will have to imagine what living in a megacity where rats outnumber people by around 8 or 10 to 1 looks like.

Another big problem the bio-digesters could potentially help is pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Fertilizer is a big emitter of all three of the most-targeted GHGs. Fertilizer, like quarry dust and ammonia is, like so many commodities, often imported from countries who specialize in its production, such as Norway, but also Russia and Ukraine, whose conflict has recently highlighted the fragility of the supply chain with sharp increases in prices...

Bio-digesters by design keep the CO2 and methane in the fertilizer produced, rather than it entering the atmosphere.

For these reasons and more, the aerobic bio-digester is slowly making its way into residential and industrial spaces around the country.

GNN reported on an enormous bio-digester at the heart of the D.C. advanced resource (sewage) recovery center outside the capital, and on the use of bio-digesters on Australian pig farms which are helping reduce the environmental and psychological impact of the effluent produced from such operations.

Harp Renewables tweeted how happy they were to have installed their bio-digester in the town of Cashel, Ireland.

Expect to see more stories like this pop up around the globe."

-via Good News Network, March 17, 2022

Note: Obviously gentrification bad and "affordable housing" is sometimes nowhere near as affordable as it should be, etc. etc. That said, this is such a fantastic use case that I felt I had to post it anyway.

[thoughtportal]

economic degrowth

[reality-detective]

Supply chain disruptions were inevitable 🤔

[thethinkingman]

Loaded this thing up yesterday a cool 5 1/2 hours after the appointment time. Due to that little bit of Monday luck we lost our Ohio highway patrol escort. The next available time for them is 2 PM today so we are just chilling. This will definitely throw a monkey wrench in our first thing Thursday morning delivery in Gulfport MS.

#peterbilt #oversize #heavyhaul #supplychain #transportation #trucker #trucking #travel #cdl #cdllife #bluecollar