Great questions! Please follow up during the interviews. I am also curious about your experiences of traveling to Naluwan via various transportation methods. Are there different senses of place when you travel by car, by train, by foot?
The positioning that you have to choose, and that Bono gets to choose, between livable working conditions and wages vs HIV treatment - forecloses possibility of HIV treatment AND acceptable working conditions.
Forecloses critique of the industries’ unethical work conditions - because they are “proven” by inspectors to have good working conditions, and the bodies of the HIV worker-patients who are treated are proof of the goodness of the corps
Worker resistance is foreclosed because they know they depend on this “ethical” reputation to even have industry in their country, which is needed for survival because of past extractions and present oppressive global trade conditions
Bind that the workers are in - they have to perform the ethicalness and pretend their working conditions are ok when inspected because they know that their job (and the whole country’s export industry) depends on this performance of ethicalness and goodness of the factory
Performed Inspections provide proof, as do their HIV-treated bodies
Bono - celebrities promoting - people and at the stores purchasing/consuming branded RED products - blatantly baking “ethical” into the branding of consumer goods.
Obscure bad working conditions with success of HIV treatment
ALAFA - while genuinely caring about workers’ health, they have made a decision on their behalf that this HIV treatment is what matters, and their working conditions don’t matter; same for Bono of U2 as an example celebrity here.
Fails on the worker’s understanding of responsibility to care for the sick - violation of moral order because factory makes you sick
Rejects and sidesteps responsibility for horrible working conditions (exposure and unlivable wages, no maternity leave, insecure) - focus instead on the HIV, for which they claim they have no responsibility, the HIV was already there, so they are responsible for treating those who are their current factory workers, giving them drugs and treatments that help them to be productive bodies, give them trainings that responsibilize them for getting the disease
The ethical is something you can enforce with these performed audits
The ethical is something consumers buy that’s branded and ethically produced - the ethical production is “no sweat” and also made by people whose suffering the profits can go to help
Celebrities and emotional and political sovereignty: “The vague network of forces for which Bono acts as spokesperson decides that HIV treatment is more important, and by extension, that labor violations, work rights, poverty, occupational health risks are less urgent forms of social suffering” -p474
ALAFA, a PPP organization, also makes this decision for the workers
ILO as well, as the inspectors
CSR through humanitarian fetishism, humanitarian consumption of ethical production, ethical industries or ethical production zones, where up the supply chain the brand buyers demand suppliers down the chain be “ethical” (while still demanding obscenely low prices, so of course it’s not possible).
Ethical production zone against the race-to-bottom for garment manufacturing - instead of the labor being cheap they are sick in a way that the corporation can treat to its own benefit while gaining moral capital - it is a PPP so there are many “stakeholders” paying for different things
Celebrity involvement - consumers of humanitarian products
"'Environmental Justice and Cumulative Impacts' is intended to create stronger environmental and land use policy tools at the local level to prevent and mitigate additional pollution associated with a variety of development and redevelopment projects. It also addresses environmental justice by helping to prevent Newark, which has a disproportionate number of low-income and residents of color, from having a disproportionate number of polluting projects placed within its borders" (Hislip par. 1).
"showed a graph developed by environmental justice community organizers, which detailed the differences between communities that experience pollution versus the predominant race of those communities, which showed that as the number of people of color or the level of poverty in a neighborhood increased, so too did the cumulative impacts. In New Jersey, the amount of pollution you experience is directly correlated to your income and skin color" (Hislip par. 5).
"She explained that zoning laws in Newark are slowly changing, including rezoning and getting rid of outdated rules that were grandfathered in. But the impacts from the pollutants that were allowed to run rampant are very evident. Before Newark’s zoning laws were updated in 2012, the last time they had been updated was in 1954 and therefore had little regard for quality-of-life issues. The Ironbound district later became a hotbed for environmental justice movements due to its adjacency to industrial areas. Many heavy pollutants that were planned for this area saw heavy protest from EJ activists, like automobile shredding plants and chicken crematoriums" (Hislip par.8).
"The ordinance itself requires individuals applying for commercial or industrial developments within Newark to take the following steps:
The main sources of resilience are: discussing the list of pollutants that are spread across through a demographic structure, how pollutants affect and become more apparent to different race and economic levels; the information about possible new pollutants that could appear due to the addition of new companies; and the reconstruction on the zoning laws in Newark. Additionally, there are numerous environmentalists of all types behind this new addition to the zoning and land use regulations.
The first point that peaked my interest is when Dr. Nicky Sheats brought up the real world example of a powerplant that was placed in the Ironbound District. It's an example of how government standards don't reflect or align with individual standards. I thought this was interesting to see how the people didn't have their due justice in deciding to have a polluting plant in their neighborhood. The other fact that caught my eye is that Newark zoning laws, previous to being updated in 2012, had been grandfathered in since 1954. This goes to show the complete lack of awareness for public health that has resided in New Jersey's History. The last point that truly shaped this article is how steps were being taken to prevent environmental justice issues. Commercial and Industrial developers have to go through the following process when proposing for a building: "
The public has full access to this checklist to weigh in on it and make their voices heard."