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The man is the face of a $120 Million brand that employees 100's of people all over the world. At this point, I highly doubt he has too much say over what factory conditions should be like. Not even Steve Jobs had that much pull. I realize this is a terrible comparison because Apple has stockholders and RO is private, but there are many fingers in RO's pie, not excluding Adidas. Lets just enjoy it while it lasts.
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You mean he can't specify in a contract with his manufacturers to ensure they pay a specific hourly wage to their employees if he were willing to pay the difference in cost?Originally posted by BodyDouble View Post
Implying Rick's going to sell his company soon?Lets just enjoy it while it lasts.Comment
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Originally posted by LelandJ View Post
I'm no authority on Rick and the business side of things, but I believe that point has already been addressed regarding his lowering costs in order to make $120m over $100m in the last year.
And I'm not implying anything, but it's safe to say that Rick has other interests and hobbies that i'm sure his current enterprise will happily endorse, like the Hotel Michele wants to build. I'd say he's pretty satisfied with all that he's achieved in fashion.Comment
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I see, thought you meant doesn't have power to "say."Originally posted by BodyDouble View PostComment
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No, I meant it would be very difficult for him to constantly oversee what is going on in the factories, in addition to running a $100m enterprise.Comment
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Right, it would require a factory to work exclusively for RO or only along with other fashion companies willing to pay a non-poverty wage, which perhaps don't exist in the world of RO's volume.
Pertinent and holistic passage by Eisenstein to root issues:
The idea of property occurs naturally to the discrete and separate self. Just as Cartesian objectivity divides the world into self and other, property divides it into mine and yours. Just as Galilean materialism insists that only the measurable is real, so economics denominates all value in money units.
The urge to own arises as a natural response to an alienating ideology that severs felt connections and leaves us "alone in the universe." Shorn of connectedness and identity with the matrix of all being, the tiny, isolated self that remains has a voracious need to claim as much as possible of that lost beingness for its own. If all the world, all of life and earth, is no longer me, I can at least compensate by making it mine.
It has been said of infants, "Their wants are their needs." The same is actually true of adults too, except that the want has been so distorted that its object can no longer satisfy the need, but may even intensify it. Such is the case with greed. Greed is not some unfortunate appendage to human nature to be controlled or conquered. It arises from a hunger for identity—for the richness of relationship from which identity is built. Ironically, following the pattern of any addiction, indulging in greed only exacerbates the underlying need, because enclosing more of the world into the domain of mine separates us all the more from the connected interbeingness for which we hunger.
Perhaps this realization can temper our judgmentality toward the greedy. The next time you witness greed, see a hungry person instead. The next time you feel greedy yourself, take a moment to touch the wantingness, the existential incompletion, underneath that greed. The same goes for selfishness generally, that constricted feeling of wanting to manage and control the world outside the self so as to turn it toward the self's benefit. Selfishness in all its forms seeks the benefit and inflation of a self rendered artificially small, a self which is in fact an ideological construct.
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Money is the instrument—not the cause, the instrument—by which our separation from nature, spirit, love, beauty, justice, peace, and community approaches its maximum.
Immersed in the logic of money, we actually see this separation as a good thing. If that seems an outrageous statement, consider what is meant by "financial independence" and the closely related goal of financial security. Financial security means having enough money not to be dependent on good luck or good will. Money promises to insulate us from the whims of nature and the vicissitudes of fate, from the physical and social environment. From this perspective, the quest for financial security is but a projection of the Technological Program into personal life. Insulation from the whims of the environment (which is to master it, to bring it under control) is the age-old quest of technology. And its fulfillment (perfect control over nature) also means perfect security, the elimination of risk.
The campaign to make oneself fully free of the whims of fate, of the vicissitudes of nature, and of reliance on one's community can never actually succeed (just as the Technological Program can never succeed in its campaign to fully control nature), but the semblance of success may persist for some time: the all-American upper-middle class suburbanite with a good job (plus the resumé to get another good job if something should happen), good health (plus plenty of insurance should something happen), diversified investments (just in case), and the rest. Such a person is, in a very real sense, not dependent on anybody—not on any specific person, that is. Of course he is dependent on the farmer who grows his food, but not on any particular farmer, not on any individual person. The goodwill of any individual person is unnecessary because he can always "pay someone else to do it." He thus lives in a world without obligation. He is beholden to no one.
Not only is perfect independence (financial or otherwise) forever beyond our grasp, it is an illusion cloaking an even greater dependency. It is not the dependency that is dangerous though—it is the illusion. It is the illusion that separates us from, and thus allows us to destroy, so much of what we actually depend on. What does it take to pierce that illusion? Usually it takes a crisis: an encounter with death as described above, or another of life's catastrophes such as divorce, bankruptcy, illness, humiliation, or imprisonment. We stave these off as long as possible with our programs of management and control, but eventually one or another finds its way into even the most secure fortress of self. These events transform us. We let go as we discover that the only lasting, dependable security comes from controlling less not more, opening up to life, loosening the rigid boundaries of self, letting other people in, and become tied—that is more dependent, not less—to a community of people and the community of nature.
As above, so below. Each of these personal crises has a collective counterpart that humanity is facing today. In our depletion of natural resources—soil, water, energy—we face bankruptcy; in the breakdown of our communities and the rending of the social fabric we face divorce; in the mounting ecological crisis and the threat of nuclear war, we face death. The conventional response is to try to hold everything together, to maintain the illusion of independence by extending it still further. It is to remedy the failure of control by applying even more control.
The importance we place on independence from the social and material world has deep roots in our basic mythology. In the fundamentally indifferent universe of Newton or the fundamentally competitive world of Darwin, independence from the rest of the world is surely a good thing. By owning more and more of the world we make it safe, make it ours. We gain mastery over the random forces buffeting us, and we maximize the resources available for our own survival benefit.
This chapter explores the ways and means by which money has been the instrument of the destruction of love, truth, beauty, spirit, nature, and community. At the conceptual level, reductionistic science foretold their disappearance several centuries ago, for all exemplify the eliminated Galilean secondary qualities that "when you take it apart are not there." Money, the unit of account for the reduction of life, has brought reductionism into the daily realm. This chapter tells the story of our impoverishment. My goal is not to make you bitter, however palpable my indignation. My goal, rather, is to raise your expectations and inspire within you a sense of lofty possibilities. By identifying what has been lost, and how, we may forge a path to its recovery. I am speaking to your sense of disenfranchisement—whether you are rich or poor, powerful or oppressed. Indeed, the disenfranchisement I speak of may be even more extreme in society's winners, for two reasons. One is that the impoverishing dynamics of money are often more advanced in their lives; the other is that the vacuity of society's rewards is all the more evident for having acquired them. No longer can the pursuit of them obscure the hunger for the lost wealth of connection and being.Comment
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Bruno Pieter stopped his label and launched honest by.
You can find where what is produced, and how much it cost.
It's crazy, he's even traced the origins of the label thread and calculated how much the hang tag cost.
http://www.honestby.com/Comment
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