I like to hit hard with my titles and this one is pretty hard hitting! After my last attack on Why I Hate Television, I thought it a good idea to turn my attention onto the training shoes abomination that is going on in this world and not enough people are speaking out about it. Well, guess what I’m gonna do right here, right now!
Trainers, or training shoes as they probably should be correctly known as are made by some pretty high powered global companies like Nike, Adidas, Reebok and all the rest. They sell in the stores for some pretty fancy prices too! Which would be ok as the quality of some of them is pretty good so upon first glance the average person would think, “well they got a high price tag, so they must be well made” and they wouldn’t be too far off the mark.
What Mr and Mrs average don’t tend to realize is that those trainers with their fancy price tag were made in a sweat shop (a common term for a small, dingy, hot and overworked factory) somewhere in a far eastern country by a bunch of very poor people who probably makes less than a dollar for working a very long day. Often that can be 12-14 hours depending upon how cruel and swinish their slave driver employer happens to be. Those fancy trainers that were made for a few lousy cents are then sold on to the big time companies for massive profits. The same swine employers smile while they slip the ill-gotten profits into their well-lined pockets.
Yet these big companies still buy those trainers for less than a few dollars a pair.
Then they ship them here to the US, Canada and to Europe and sell them to the stores at a huge mark-up profit. And then the stores add their own huge mark-up. And you and me, well more correctly you (because I won’t touch them) end up paying often over a hundred dollars for something that kept a very poor person in poverty and that cost less than a dollar to actually make.
Stinks, doesn’t it?
Well it’s been stinking like rotting fish for a very long time and still only a handful of well meaning folks are lending their voice to this abomination. I can’t think of any other way to describe this unbelievable abuse of human beings for the profit of some evil slave driving bastards that run these sweat shops.
Well the good news, if you can call it that, is that some smaller companies are beginning to listen to those voices as they get louder and are moving production away from the far eastern sweat shops and buying them for a fair price from workers co-operatives that pay the workers a fair wage and don’t make them work such long hours. I say it would be good news if only more of the bigger companies would follow suit. Some are starting to but its too little and too slow.
Will this story have a happy ending?
Well I hope so, but knowing how greed and power corrupts the weak minded, where one sweat shop closes another ten will open and if they don’t make trainers, then they’ll probably switch to making something else. Like fake designer bags or fake vans shoes or fake designer shirts or whatever!
At least while all this fake rubbish is flooding into the markets its giving the big companies a nice well deserved headache!
Edwyn Prose 