As America braces for the 150th anniversary of the civil war, the California-based Not for Sale Campaign claims “there are more than 30 million slaves in the world today – more than at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.”
This November, the Not for Sale Campaign and the International Labour Rights Forum launched a new iPhone app, Free2Work, to help consumers reduce their “slavery footprint” by delivering product ratings as they shop. Read the full article in the Guardian
For the last year I have been trying as much as possible to buy local, buy Fair Trade and Organic products, but unfortunately it’s difficult once you get out of food to find products that are made in the USA and if made elsewhere that are not using slave labor. Free2Work an organization makes it easy to support companies that support sustainable manufacturing. You can go on their site and look up what companies do what. Now they have just come out with an iPhone app, so you can check it out when you are shopping. For instance they have rated The Gap a ‘B’, you can find all the information on the site
I just gotta tell ya
- 27 Million Slaves In The World Today
- 300, 000 Slaves in the United States
- Over 14,000 People are human trafficked into the USA every year
- Income from Human Trafficking=$39 Billion in 2009
- Slavery Is Not Legal Anywhere in the world
- $90 is the average cost of a human slave around the world
- The average age for a girl to enter prostitution is 13 years old
- Slave Holders use the following terms: debt bondage, bonder labor, attached labor, restavec, forced labor, indentured servitude and human trafficking
- Human trafficking exists in two main types. One is labor trafficking and the other is sexual trafficking. However, apart from the above-mentioned two, there are other examples of human trafficking, such as involuntary slavery, domestic slavery and forced labor.
- Child trafficking is one of the world’s major problems. Every year 1.2 million children are trafficked by different agents. The traffickers bring children and engage them in factories, mills and brothels. It is a worst form of child labor as defined by ILO (International Labor Organization). Here the traffickers recruit, transport, transfer children for the purpose of exploitation
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Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!
So… is Apple going to point out their own usage of sweatshops to build their electronics with this app? Somehow I doubt it.