Translator: Norma Wong Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
First, I'd like to dedicate this talk to the memory of Jim Ridley,
who's a fantastic newspaper editor, alright.
(Applause)
And an even better person.
He taught me a lot about story telling
so if you like this TED talk, say a prayer for Jim.
If you don't like this TED talk, just keep that to yourselves.
Alright, to get this started,
I am going to need your help with a very quick "show of hands" survey.
I can see most of you underneath these hot, bright lights.
Who here has bought a laptop, smartphone,
or tablet computer device in the last year?
That's a lot of people, okay.
It's more than I thought, but I'll keep going anyway
How about a gold product: baubles, bangles, beads, that kind of thing?
Gold products?
Not that many fancy people here.
What about a glass of tea?
Who has bought a glass of tea, hot or iced?
That's good.
And finally, frozen shrimp.
You get them in the freezer section, obviously,
got a lot of shrimp lovers, delicious wrapped in bacon. OK good.
So, pretty much everyone in this room,
myself included, although I wasn't raising my hand,
raised their hands during my annoying little survey.
And that's great because it means we are all complicit
in what I am about to say and show to you.
As a foreign affairs producer of the PBS News hours in Washington,
it's my great privilege and pleasure
to help tell the stories of people who live in other countries,
and make some of the products that we buy and use everyday.
And I want to introduce you to a couple of those people.
I'll show you a short clip from a piece that I wrote and produce last year.
These pictures where shot by Larry Price
of the Pulitzer Centre for Crisis Reporting
[Video] Narrator: These best friends,
Duku and Yoyo, eight and ten years old
earn just a few dollars a day, everyday,
mining gold in Sulaweisi, Indonesia.
Yoyo's mother thinks it may be all they ever do.
Yoyo's mother: I have a plan to get out of here, just no money.
Narrator: Duku and Yoyo have worked the mines for two years.
They don't get many breaks, they don't have any toys,
and they are not in school regularly.
Yoyo's mother: Yoyo can read a little, but Duku cannot,
because he hasn't gone to school yet.
Narrator: When asked if he'd rather be in school, Duku just shrugs
and gets back to work.
Other children labor underground,
unfortunately well suited for this grueling labor.
Tiny tunnels, tiny bodies.
Alright, that was also my voice on the track there.
Commodity analysts I have spoken with and interviewed say about 15 per cent
of the global gold supply
comes from small artisanal mines like the kind we just saw in Indonesia.
This is also a photo by Larry Price of another artisanal mine.
It is not just gold.
Every product I mentioned in my annoying little survey
has a strong connection to slave labor, child labor, forced labor,
or at least some absolutely terrible working conditions.
The US Department of Labor keeps a list of products made overseas,
manufactured by slaves and children
There's more than 350 products on that list,
and some of them are available at supermarkets and shopping centres
right down the street from your house.
According to the United Nations,
between 20 and 35 million people live in slavery today,
Five million of them are children.
Just as we all play a role in consuming the goods,
that these children and slaves and trafficked people make,
it's time we start playing a role in how these goods are made.
Now, TEDx is all about ideas.
And I have got an idea about what each of you can do to help fight this.
But first, you need to know a few things.
Right off, if you look at the US Department of Labor's list
of slaves and child-made goods,
you may not recognize a lot of them or use a lot of them.
I sincerely doubt many people in this room
have consumed beef from the African nation of Chad,
at least I really hope not.
But that tall, cool glass of sweet tea you had with lunch,
or the piping hot mug of Assam Breakfast Blend
you started your day with?
That's a very different story.
The United States get a lot of our tea from India,
where it's grown on this massive farms called "tea plantations."
Each leaf is picked by hand by tea pickers.
According to academics, researchers, and journalists
that have visited these plantations, they are horrible places.
The workers, they live on the plantations,
they live in ramshackle huts with holes in the roofs, right next to open sewers.
This slide is from a bunch of researchers at Columbia University.
You can see on the right,
you see water source, top right there,
that's the water source they use for cooking and washing,
on the left, that's an open sewer.
It's just a pit of human waste.
Same deal down here.
On the right, you've got open sewers,
and on the left, where food is being prepared.
These are right next to each other.
The workers on these plantations make about $3.50 a day,
but it can be less if they don't meet their daily leaf picking quota,
and some of them, of course, are children.
Then there's the frozen shrimp, I mentioned.
Last fall, the Associated Press produced a series of reports
on the Thai shrimp fishing industry.
Men from all over Asia were trafficked, sold into slavery,
forced onto these boats,
and worked for days on end.
Worked until they drop dead in some cases.
When they did,
their corpses were just thrown over the side of the boat.
Back on land, they were kept in cages so they wouldn't escape.
This is a photo of a Thai shrimp slave in a cage from the Associated Press.
The shrimp they harvested from the deep ocean
ended up in freezer sections of grocery stores
that you have absolutely heard of.
In this state, in this country, and in the UK.
Some of it also went into pet food, into cat food, specifically.
Some of the cocoa you may have drank this winter might have come from leaves
picked by west African children.
The soccer balls your children kick around on the weekend
might have been hand-sewed by someone else's kids in China or India.
There's palm oil from Indonesia
made by children and adults who live in debt bondage.
This is an old problem, and it's not new.
I mean, in the history of the world,
has anyone ever wanted to live or work, excuse me, in a coltan mine?
Of course not.
And it's very, very hard to avoid these products, even if you could.
I host a podcast for the PBS News Hours called "Shortwave."
It is all about the connection of foreign affairs and American life.
I interviewed one of the researchers from that Columbia team,
that worked on the tea plantation study in India.
He told me there is no such thing as "fair trade tea."
Sure, there are organizations
that will label a product or a supply chain as "Fair Trade,"
but that's not often indicative of anything.
He was on plantations that had the fair trade label,
and he saw children picking leaves.
On other plantations with no such labels, he didn't see any kids.
We've had this problem for a long time,
and it hasn't always been an Asia-Africa issue either.
1906, The Jungle, a novel by Upton Sinclair
about the terrible conditions in American factory life.
1960, Harvest of Shame, legendary TV Newsman and my hero,
Edward R. Murrow, makes a documentary about agricultural workers,
who pick fruits and vegetables in Florida.
It aired on Thanksgiving day.
I would argue that to this day,
the people who pick our fruits and vegetables
still do so in terrible conditions, for not a lot of money.
So this is an old problem.
But what's new about this old problem, is the scale.
The US is one of the largest importers of goods and services from other countries
in the world.
There is a very good chance that every stitch of clothing
you have on right now, comes from some place else.
Some place with not strict labor laws, or if it does have strict labor laws,
they are not very well enforced.
The interconnected nature of the modern global economy is such
that every purchase you make puts you in direct contact
with hundreds, maybe thousands of workers in that supply chain.
Our impact as a nation, your impact as individuals,
isn't only felt when American bombers goes some place to blow something up.
Decisions you make about what you buy and where you buy them
can have an impact on families nine and a half time zones away.
So what can you do?
When I first start reporting this stuff, I just kind of threw up my hands.
I was like, "Forget about it
I am moving to a cave in the woods,
I am going to subsist on sustainably harvested jute leaves,
and we are going to fashion our own clothes out of sisal twine."
My wife was not into that option.
You may have different results with your significant others.
And when I started telling other people about what I was learning,
ruining cocktail parties and dinner parties,
telling everybody about where their bacon-wrapped shrimp came from,
I almost always get a pledge of a boycott in return.
I always get the,
"Alright PJ, no more tea for us. We are coffee family from now on!"
Fine, fine.
That's as far as it goes.
But here is the thing about boycotts; they have unintended consequences, right?
Successful boycott lowers the price of the good that is being boycotted.
That means that people who make it,
even if they'e not making much to begin with, and they're probably not,
are going to be making less.
Second, in some cases, some of these jobs,
not the slavery conditions,
but the hard labor, dangerous, low paying jobs,
may actually be the best wages available in that region.
Also, some of these companies, the global corporations,
are so big and their supply chain are so complex,
they may not even know what kind of labor is at the bottom of that supply chain.
This is complicated stuff,
but that does not get you off the hook.
Which brings me to my strategy:
Just pick one.
Just pick one product in your life
made by slaves, or children, or trafficked persons.
Just pick one product like that in your life.
It doesn't have to be the most important product in your life,
but it should be something meaningful,
something that you use at least a few times a month.
Just pick one product
and learn everything you can about that supply chain.
Check out the US Department of Labor's website,
find out why that product is on their list.
Maybe it's not on their list, but on another of the many lists
kept by nongovernmental organizations, other countries, and the UN.
Speaking of the UN, check out the UN's International Labor Organization.
They may have done a study, research, or produced papers on this supply chain.
They almost certainly have, they are very thorough.
Google around, find out what the lives of these workers are like.
find out how they ended up doing these jobs,
and where they come from.
International Labor Organization, they do great work,
a lot of research and studies on these kinds of supply chains.
Learn about the people themselves.
How did they end up in these positions?
Often they are trafficked people who come from places where there's conflict,
famine, that kind of thing, and they are looking for an opportunity.
Someone shows up in their village with a truck and says,
"Who wants a job?"
And they get on the truck, they go away, and they are never seen again.
Their passports are confiscated, and they are forced to work.
Research the industry, find out why companies use forced labor.
Is there an alternative labor pool?
What would the cost of your good be if the workers earned a decent salary
and could live in decent conditions?
Maybe there is a non-governmental organization, or a nonprofit
that focuses on this product or supply chain,
or the region in which it is made.
Maybe there is an organization that focuses on these workers,
that tries to meet their needs, improve their lives.
Maybe they are advocating for a solution that already exists.
Maybe you can become an advocate in your community for these laborers
by raising money or awareness through your school, or church group.
Bring it up at your book club.
Maybe there is a connection between these laborers,
the place they are laboring,
or the product their labor produces, and your community.
In my business, in journalism, we call this a local angle
Maybe there is a local angle to this story.
Pitch it to a local journalist, or better yet,
write a guest editorial or a blogpost some place yourself.
All companies hate bad press, let me tell you.
When the Associated Press wrote that series on the Thai shrimp industry,
within months, hundreds of those slaves were freed,
and the shrimp industry and Thai government pledged
to drastically change how they did business.
Another very important step you can take
is to contact the company from which you buy the product.
Tell them you like their product, you like what it does for your life,
but they have to make this right.
The only thing companies hate more than bad press, are mad customers.
Now may be the time in American history
when a single individual can have a greater impact on this issue
than at any other time.
There is a number of reasons for that.
In February, congress passed, and President Obama signed into law,
a bill closing the loophole allowing
goods made by children and slaves in other countries into US markets.
Now there is still a long way to go before this bill fully takes hold.
But right now, law makers and bureaucrats in Washington are debating
just how the bill will take hold, and your voice could be decisive
in the decisions made during those conversations.
There's another bill making its way through Congress right now
called the "End Modern Slavery Initiative."
It was actually introduced by Tennessee Senator Bob Corker.
It would establish an organization in Washington with the goal
of cutting slavery in half among targeted populations.
It would be funded by the US Government as well as international partners
and the private sector.
It has wide by-partisan support.
Now look, I am a journalist.
I don't advocate for, or lobby for
any kind of legislation, or laws, or political maneuvers.
That is not what I do.
But the reason I am telling you about this
is because if you just pick one product, one supply chain, and learn about it,
you can make your own decisions about these kind of legislations and bills
through the lens of that product.
Maybe Senator Corker's bill doesn't help the laborers that you're going to focus on
or maybe it does, but your elected representative doesn't support the bill.
Or maybe you don't like this bill,
and think there's a better alternative out there
our government should take, that a private sector should take.
Well, now is the time to pick up the phone,
send an email, do some lobbying.
It's not as easy as doing nothing.
But there are slaves, women, children
working 20 plus hour days for weeks on end,
making little or nothing,
in very difficult circumstances out there.
And just picking one product and getting smart about it,
is a heck of a lot easier than that.
Thank you.
(Applause)