I don’t think they particularly see themselves as helpful to the tea growers - they are more about codifying/enacting a “final vocabulary” around their view of environmental sustainability
In the context of a supply chain where the Global North [sic] corp/buyer is at the top, they are defining and enacting “the ethical” and environmental “responsibility” in their standards and their inspections and their certifications and labels and branding, without any real awareness of how these things are already happening, for different reasons, in the context of somewhere like Tanzania where the tea is actually being grown.
Standards development organizations, which include heavy influence from corporations in the Global North [sic], are “codify[ing] values of sustainability that are to govern practices” p825
Not much on the context of CSR or the history of these SDOs and why they exist.
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