The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 6 Pleasure in Work

 

 This is the sixth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a short story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on.

This is also the final one of three posts exploring the topic of work within the story and we are using William Morris' three requirements of meaningful work; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself. If you missed the other two you can read the first one it by clicking here, otherwise it's on to hope of pleasure in work...

 

To say that work is good for us sounds worryingly like a right-wing newspaper’s headline and as though it should be followed by ‘and so is national service and the cane’, but in actual fact it is true, albeit for very different reasons than they might like to think. Inevitably many newspapers like to focus on the discipline it instils in our lives, the structure and order, which prevents society from falling apart from too much ‘free time’, the income (no matter how meagre) that means the state can be convinced that it does not have to provide support and the ability for each of us to ‘make something of ourselves’, as though a person doesn’t have innate worth whatever their position or talents.

All this is heavy baggage, to the point where I am almost scared to repeat again that work is good for us, or at least could be. We need to reclaim work from the right and draw on the positive aspects allowing us to show what work should and could be. Morris states that ‘it is of the nature of men, when he is not diseased, to take pleasure in his work under certain conditions.’ Work, when allowed to be undertaken in the right way, under the right conditions and within a community, can be a source of great satisfaction and even joy. It is an outlet for our innate desire for creativity and provides the ability for us to make a contribution to the welfare of ourselves, our families and our communities.

However, this is very different to the jobs that most of us do on a day-to-day basis, whose usual sole aim is make money for the company that employs us, often working under unsatisfactory conditions.  Morris, in a wonderful piece of hyperbole, is categorical in his belief that work like this is a such an affront to our humanity that ‘…it would be better for the community and for the worker if the latter were to fold his hands and refuse to work, and either die or let us pack him off to the workhouse or prison – which you will.’

This notion that our work should be pleasurable is so countercultural that to speak of it seem as though we are not grounded in the real world and instead hopeful of some fairy-tale land. It is an accepted truism of modern life that work for the most part is a chore, and we celebrate the heroic worker who each day rises to do battle in the name of commerce. Busyness is the great virtue. Ask someone how work is and watch as their face takes on the expression of great hardship as they tell you just how and why their work life is so busy. And no doubt it is true, but we celebrate this as virtue and something to be proud of, until the breaking point comes anyway. Try telling someone you are not busy and that work is pretty relaxed when they next ask and watch their reaction. Work has to equal suffering and noble is the worker who does not shirk.

But why shouldn’t work be pleasurable? What is stopping it? Morris suggests that actually true labour, as required by nature, is inherently pleasurable and satisfying and that anything less than that is distortion and corruption by those benefiting from our labour. To seek a new way of working is only to try and find the natural balance that nature provides.

 Morris talks of the ‘ornamental part of life’ and it is easy to restrict our thinking to design or patterns or even craft, when actually I think he is trying to express something much broader; no less than the richness of life. It would be a richer experience to make a jumper than to purchase one, for all the reasons we have explored. To care about the materials and their source, to think about the design, to actually spend and invest time in making it, is all part of the ornament of life or to put it in fashionable language part of an authentic life. To engage with others in learning and sourcing or making materials, is part of the ornament of authentic communities. It is the rejection of the utilitarian, which argues with it’s own logic called economics, which says that it is easier and cheaper to buy one made using labour and materials sourced from abroad, utilising the differences in expectations or tolerances of living conditions.

An ornamental life is one where we live with fewer, but much more beautiful things, endued with genuine creativity and love. In a moving passage Morris tells us that we can judge the conditions under which something was made by it’s ‘mark of pleasure’ and that to return that to our work will shine through as a ‘gift to the world’ in the things we produce. This is the great gift of craft and perhaps it’s defining mark.

"Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and pleasure in work by the workman was a matter of more importance still, for it stamped all labour with the impress of pleasure."

 I think for me one of the most exciting things about Morris’ critique of society and our treatment of the environment is it’s ultimate positivity, which contrasts strongly with much of the current discussion, characterised (particularly by those opposed) in terms of what we must ‘give up’. There is no getting around this inconvenient truth, but what Morris says is that actually much of this isn’t as good as we think and that a rebalancing, far from being a negative asceticism, can lead us to a much richer future. It’s this promise, this focus on the positive changes we can make, that makes his writing so attractive and I think contemporary writers and commentators engaging in these issues could learn a lot from that; we have to pull apart the status quo, but we must also present a viable and crucially an attractive alternative. Morris does this and shows that by restructuring our societies we can ensure that everyone has equal share of true wealth:

“Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful - all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth.”

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 5 Hope of Product

This is the fifth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a short story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on.

This is also the second of three posts exploring the topic of work within the story and we are using William Morris' three requirements of meaningful work; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself. If you missed the first one you can read it by clicking here, otherwise it's on to hope of product...

The twin concepts that Morris gives us of hope of product and hope of pleasure in making that product are, for him, closely related; in fact we could say that it is this very closeness that is at the heart of the arts & crafts movement, and which strikes so many of us as so radical even now. Nonetheless in this article I want to try and tease them apart a bit and focus on hope of product, the idea that our daily efforts should result in something meaningful and useful, which helps meet our needs.

What did you make today I wonder? What will you make tomorrow? The answer to these questions might be quite simple; perhaps you made a loaf of bread or a chair, if you’re a baker or chairmaker. If it isn’t bread or furniture, perhaps you made something else useful, a lamp or a book, a film or a bowl. Maybe you did. But I suspect you didn’t.

On the other hand you could be a nurse or doctor and so you made someone better or comforted them. But even this is quite rare.

Instead I wonder if you did what most people do? Make money; not for yourself, but for the person or persons who employ you.

We all know that someone who works in a high street clothing store doesn’t make clothes, instead their job is to sell clothes or, to be more precise, to encourage you to buy clothes from their shop, rather than the one next door. Think about it next time you go into a clothing shop; what does the assistant actually do, other than encourage you to buy, ensure the clothes are on the rack for you to buy and then take your money?

The same is true for Hugo in our story of course. He doesn’t make mobile phones, he may pretend to advise customers based on their needs, but actually his job is to persuade the public that they should buy from his shop rather than the other three down the street and that you should spend as much as you can. His product is profit for a group of people he is unlikely to ever meet.

What a market economy does (even in its most basic form) is replace the link between what you need and what you then produce. So if I needed a bowl, in a non-market, non-exchange society, I have to make one. And of course for most of human history this is how life worked, but slowly over time (long before capitalism) people started to specialise in making certain things, like bowls, and it maybe that they would make them for certain part of the day/week/year and then exchange the bowl for food or other essentials. However, I think it is fair to say that it was a very, very long time before this transformed into a situation where people only made bowls and never made things or grew food to meet their own needs, which of course is where we find ourselves now.

Another crucial difference is that the bowl maker has need of his bowls – nothing leaves his hands that he could not use or own for his own use. Compare this with the current situation where so many workers are producing goods they could never afford to own or have no use of.

 And so we move onto a capitalist system, where the average worker has two products; whatever it is they do or make and the products that they buy to meet their own needs, with the money they are given for their work. This ever increasing disconnect between the two – the genuine needs you have and the tasks you perform on a daily basis – was a concern to Morris and should be a concern for us now.

Morris, in a wonderfully Victorian passage, describes the situation Hugo find’s himself in:

‘…living as they do on wages from those whom they support, [they] cannot get for their use the goods which men naturally desire, but must put up with miserable makeshifts for them…’

Even if we follow this thinking of a market economy and call the product of Hugo’s labour the money he earns with which to buy a jumper, that is only enough to buy one of poor quality. The jumper is entirely constructed from cheap materials (e.g. cotton) and hence quickly becomes misshapen and worn. The stitching is perhaps weak and done in such haste that it did not catch all along the seams. Because it is mass produced it is made to ‘fit’ as many sizes as possible and so hangs a little on him. But the alternative, a properly fitting jumper, of good quality, made over time from excellent materials would be unaffordable to Hugo. And this is exactly the point Morris is making. He continues:

‘…[they] must put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with course food that does not nourish, with rotten rainment [clothing] which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of nomad tribe, or the cave of the pre-historic savage.’

The language has changed, but sadly the situation Morris describes has not. Our Bangladeshi worker will almost certainly live in substandard housing, that may well make a tent look plush. She may well be clothed in, at best, her traditional clothing made in a sweatshop in her own country or at worse second-hand clothing the west no longer wants, and yet each day she walks to make jumpers she could never afford. Her actual product (the jumper) is poor and her rewards so meagre that her own living (her product) is pitiful.

Her housing is not made from scrap because it is effective at keeping out the weather and elements, it is because it is cheap. It is cheap housing, because that is all she can afford. It is not unheard of for those in developing countries to have to raise a mortgage to afford a few sheets of corrugated iron to use as a roof.

As ever Morris describes it best:

‘But it is a waste of time to try and express in words due contempt of the productions of the much praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be enough to say that this cheapness is necessary to the system of exploiting on which modern manufacture rests. In other words, our society includes a great mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity compels them to make slave-wares whose use is the perpetuation of their slavery.’

How often have you bought something, only for it to break, not work or just be horrible to use, or been constrained by money to buy something you know will not last? True quality is such a rare thing in our societies that it is almost impossible to find, and, when we can, the market system makes the time and care it requires unaffordable. This is one of the key problems that craftspeople face; how can their product, which often takes so many hours to produce, ever be affordable to the general population? And so instead we are presented with cheaper imitations to help us make believe that our lives are richer than they are. Some of this we can counter ourselves; buy less and buy quality, make it yourself so that you don’t have to pay for the time it takes and buy second-hand – where quality doesn’t often reflect the price. And we should do these things, but let us be clear that this is tinkering at the edges, our current system cannot allow us all to reverse this system of cheap manufacturing it relies on.

Planned obsolescence has become a much more widely understood term since Annie Leonard’s excellent ‘Story of Stuff’ (if you haven’t watched it do), but it’s true that in a consumer society, that works by citizens buying new products constantly, the idea of something of quality, that lasts, is against the very principle of the system. And so in short, things have to brake, have to be cheaply made, so that you buy new ones. This is also the reason for constant innovation, as it brings new products to the market – replacing those before. Considered refinement of quality and reliability is much lower down the pecking order than “new!”.

Let us come back to our story and just review where we are. Our Bangladeshi woman’s hope of product is extremely poor, whether we are talking about the poorly made jumper she could not afford, and which she has no emotional attachment to or the meagre shelter, food and clothing she can afford with the money she makes from working at the factory.

Hugo, of course, doesn’t actually make anything, his product is simply profit for his ultimate employers; his ultimate personal product is the jumper that will last one year, which he has no input into the making of and which he has very little emotional attachment to.

And what of Mary? Well her product is very different to the others, because she is able to meet her own needs, through her own effort and skills. The end product is one of excellent quality, fitted to her size and shape, of her own design and suited to her needs. Because of this she has an emotional tie and investment in it, which enriches her experience of owning and wearing it.

Morris isn’t saying (and neither am I) that each of us should be capable of making everything and meeting our every need. In fact Morris berates the fact that he has to learn so many crafts, a situation he blames on the way society is constructed. And this leads us nicely into the next blog post, hope of pleasure in the work itself, because we need to reconnect our work with the needs we are trying to meet and create a society where people can develop their skills to create beautiful products, of real quality, for their communities own needs.

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 4 Work & Rest

This is the fourth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

Out of the blog posts I am doing on The Foolishness of Craft I think these next three are the ones I have been looking forward to the most. They give me a chance to delve into and share some of the work of William Morris, whose great understanding of social and environmental issues should be more widely known. Like Morris, I feel that the nature of what work is, and should be, is the great lynch pin that holds together an understanding of how we might organise ourselves, putting sustainability of both people and planet first and yet provide for our needs in a fulfilling and enriching way.

John Drinkwater, writing as early as 1912, said of Morris that he understood that anyone who is ‘overworked, or employed all the while in degrading work… cannot be [themselves]’ and that Morris’ philosophy is that ‘in bringing back joy to their daily work… [we could put our] feet on the first step towards… true dignity and pride of life.’

Perhaps William Morris’ key writing on the subject of work is in ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, a speech first given in 1884. He opens with a paragraph that even today strikes one as being true. He says: 

“It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful …and that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it - he is "employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure…” 

Compare this with Iain Duncan-Smith, the British Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, writing in early 2012 and defending a system that required young people to work for multinational companies, for no pay, in order to receive their meagre job seekers allowance. 

“We find a commentating elite which seems determined to belittle and downgrade any opportunity for young people that doesn’t fit their pre-conceived notion of a ‘worthwhile job’… I doubt that I am the only person who thinks that supermarket shelf stackers add more value to our society than many of these ‘job snobs’… they should learn to value work and not sneer at it… [I] passionately believe that work in all shapes and forms can be valuable” 

The article is helpfully illustrated with an image of Terry Leahy, former CEO of Tesco, stating (misleadingly) that he started out cleaning the supermarket floors.

Mr Duncan-Smith, for pretty obvious reasons, is seeking -  like Morris’ “well-to-do” – to bolster a sense of phoney respect for those who stack shelves in Tesco shops. But is really what we want people to be doing? Is it really snobbery to suggest that each of us has it within us to use our genuine skills, talents and enthusiasms to make a worthwhile contribution to society? You only need shelf stackers if you have large shops and big businesses. A small deli or local shop doesn’t employ a shelf stacker. The owner puts the food on the shelf, often doing so to make it attractive. But that is only one part of their role, they have to know what local people like, have to understand food and, in the best shops, when food is in season and what works well together. We need food. We need somewhere to go and get our food and we need someone who knows about it. But society doesn’t need shelf stackers – only big businesses do. It is this transformation, usually through small scale, local, production and distribution that creates work that is meaningful and fulfilling, away from the divisions of labour.

The same attitude often prevails with regard to work in so called developing nations; I have lost count of the number of times I have raised questions regarding working conditions in certain countries, only to be told that they are lucky to have jobs and that the alternative for them is a life on the streets. And yet surely in the C21st after 6 million years of human development, 2.5 million years of using tools, 140,000 years of long distance trade and 5,000 years of writing, we can come up with a better system of organising ourselves than one where the only two alternatives for so many is poverty or slavery.

But let me stop there, because perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself, a little steamed up, a little too political – there is time for that – but for now let us just reject this notion that any job is a good job, and instead recognise that with more thought the tasks that we spend the greater part of our waking hours performing can bring real satisfaction and worth to our lives.

So with that in mind let’s return to our tale.

Morris is clear that work should have three elements in order for it to be ‘useful work’; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself and that these be in ‘some abundance’. In the rest of this blog post we are going to explore the ‘hope of rest’ and in further posts the other two.

Even the wonderfully romantic Morris might suggest that I have painted an overly rose tinted picture of Mary sitting in her garden knitting the jumper, as though she had not a care in the world. In his article he says that “whatever pleasure there is in some work, there is certainly some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of stirring up our slumbering energies to action”, which is a lovely image and one I suspect most of us can relate to. He continues ‘we must feel while we are working that the time will come when we shall not have to work’.

I firmly believe that such relaxed and enjoyable work as Mary’s knitting is possible and viable, but if she were forced to knit for long periods of time and not allowed a break what joy could there be in it? It is surely the freedom to pick up and put down (within the confines of what nature requires – e.g. the warmth of the jumper), that allows it to be pleasurable. Mary, of course, represents the ideal, free from contractual commitments to do as she wishes, but what of Hugo? There is still the hope of rest, once the shop closes he can stop and relax. But not until then – he has agreed when and where his work shall be undertaken and is kept strictly to that, with serious repercussions if he didn’t. Here rest does not necessarily come when it is needed, it comes when it is allocated; when it suits the employer. Within many jobs (mainly public sector) there is a genuine need to ensure continuous staff presence (e.g. fire service, hospitals etc), but it is hard to suggest that all work needs to be like this, where rules are set to suit the commercial interests of companies.

Morris goes further; rest is not enough. It is the quality of that rest that is also crucial. 

"The rest, when it comes, must be long enough to allow us to enjoy it; it must be longer than is merely necessary for us to recover the strength we have expended in working, and it must be animal rest also in this, that it must not be disturbed by anxiety, else we shall not be able to enjoy it. "

 I do not think that there is enough stimulation or interest in Hugo’s job for him to give it much thought when he has left for the night and we can be assured that his rest is indeed uninterrupted by work stress. But what of his boss? The constant phone calls from his area manager, demanding to know why sales for that quarter are down and informing him that his shop is now the lowest ranking in the county. This personalisation of his shop’s performance leads to a great deal of stress; which fails to simply vanish when the key is turned at night. There is rest, but this is not an anxiety free rest; it’s hard to switch off, tough to let go. Relationships at home strained by still speaking and acting as though in the shop. Course work brought back and studied in front of the TV; a pass needed to ‘get on’, if only those damn sales figures would improve. The next morning comes and he doesn’t feel much better than he did the night before – but still, it will be the weekend soon.

This is the modern malaise of the middle classes and Morris, in one of his more reflective moments, would perhaps recognise some of this in himself. But really this passage was aimed at the mass working classes toiling away in factories in slave like conditions. The last 130 years have moved these factories, but not capitalism’s need for cheap labour or it’s disregard for the conditions of its workers. Our Bangladeshi garment worker knows no rest. She has no hope of rest. What precious little time she spends away from the factory is either spent walking to and from work, looking after her family or sleeping. She cannot choose to work or when not to; she has to work every moment she can to feed her family and her set hours can be extended at a moments notice. Sleeping on the factory floor is no rest. How far removed her life seems to Mary’s or even Hugo’s.

Even this first condition, which Morris sets, casts into sharp relief the differences under which work takes place and we need to be radical in demanding true freedom and hope of rest; simply replacing the garment workers extreme lack of rest with Hugo’s boss’ middle class anxiety is not enough (even if it is an improvement). Morris, without using the word, is proclaiming that rest is a basic human right, a basic human need and a society that cannot provide it does not take seriously the sustainability of it’s people and needs urgent reform or revolution.

In the next blog post I’ll be exploring Morris’ second condition, that of ‘hope of product’ and we’ll see just how each of the characters in tale fares (although there are no prizes for guessing beforehand…)

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 2 Hugo’s Materials

This is the second of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

Hugo’s Materials 

The materials that Hugo’s jumper is made of are a little more complex and the main material is cotton (60%)… 

It’s not for nothing that cotton has been called ‘The Worlds Dirtiest Crop’ and the shear scale of the environmental, health and social impacts are hard to take in. To start with, think of the number of items in your home that are made from it; bedding, towels, curtains, clothing, tea towels, dishcloths, furniture coverings, cotton wool - the list goes on and on. In fact cotton farming covers 2.5% of the world’s cultivated land. Of course that’s not an even distribution – I don’t see much of it growing here in Britain, despite the fact that Europe accounts for 20% of global cotton consumption – instead 75% of world production is grown in the developing world by 99% of all cotton farmers.

So why is it is so dirty? Conventional cotton growth uses a lot of pesticides, 16% of the worlds total release in fact, and these are some of the most hazardous pesticides ever produced. In India, where a third of all global cotton is grown, cotton accounts for 5% of land cultivated, but uses 54% of all pesticides used in the country.  As is mentioned in the story, Aldicarb is so strong that one drop absorbed into the skin can kill a person, despite this in 2003 almost 1 million kilos were applied to cotton grown in the US alone and it is used in 25 other countries throughout the world. The US have now moved to ban it by 2018, but in other countries, where such regulatory framework does not exist, its use will almost certainly continue.

Because of the conditions in the countries it is grown in and the low prices paid for the cotton, farmer workers lack the appropriate equipment and protection to apply pesticides. At least 1 million farm workers require hospitalisation each year with pesticide poisoning, according to WHO. And it’s not just the farmers directly who suffer, as the poisons pollute the land, water, food and air of the local communities. Children are often the first to be affected, as homes are built close to the fields and pesticide containers left lying around or reused. Of course in many countries children are directly involved in the cotton production and help harvest the cotton or even work in the fields whilst spraying is happening.

Cottonseed, more or less a by-product of the cotton industry, is fed to animals and used to make oil, both of which can then contain levels of pesticides, and tests by a university in Poland found them in the cotton clothing itself.

But it is not just pesticides that go into cotton production; it also takes up to 130g of fertiliser to grow 450g of cotton in the US, the production of which is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The run off from nitrogen-based fertilisers in particular causes problems with watercourses and wells etc, as it dramatically increases the growth of algae and other water borne plants.

Which brings us neatly on to water usage. It takes around 2,720 litres of water to produce enough cotton for one t-shirt. That’s equivalent to what you or I might drink in 3 years. The Aral Sea has shrunk to 10% of its former volume due cotton production, which is not surprising when you consider that Uzbek cotton farms alone consume over 20km³ of water every year. That is equivalent to the entire domestic usage of Britain (i.e. in homes) for nearly 6½ years. Access to clean water in Uzbekistan has actually fallen from 94% in 1990 to 82% in 2004 and of course a number of countries border the Aral Sea (I mention Kazakhstan in the story) and face similar problems.

Organic cotton is certainly better than conventional and obviously bans the use of pesticides and herbicides. Nonetheless the issues around water usage, monoculture (growing just one plant over a wide area), transportation and low wages remain. 

…30% of the jumper is Nylon… 

It is much harder to obtain concrete independent information on the impact of Nylon production than it is cotton, a point noted by Kate Fletcher in her book Sustainable Fashion and Textiles. Obviously the fact that it is a petro-chemical based material, that is non-biodegradable and that cannot be easily recycled means that it has quite a bit going against it from the outset. The process of manufacture is energy intensive when compared with other materials and also produces high levels of Nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas far more damaging than CO². Although it is going back a bit, a single Nylon plant here in the UK in the 1990s was thought to have the global warming impact equivalent to more than 3% of the UK’s entire carbon dioxide emissions. 

Finally, like Mary’s, the jumper is also made of wool (10%)… 

The conditions at the giant ‘wool factories’ in Australia can be quite horrendous and no doubt many people who conscientiously buy free-range eggs and chickens would think again about high street jumpers if they knew the conditions under which the wool was produced. Until recently (June 2012) some sheep were kept in individual pens, 24hrs a day, 7 days a week for up to 5 years. No operator now produces wool under this system, but it is still not illegal and nonetheless many sheep raised for fine wool are housed in groups, indoors at all times and kept hungry, as sheep with a lower body condition produce better wool.

Because of the low welfare conditions and breeding priorities, some sheep are prone to fly strike, this leads farmers to perform an operation around the time of sheering called ‘Mulesing’. Essentially this is removing parts of the sheep’s skin and happens without pain relief. At the very least the industry should be working to get some form of anaesthetic approved, that can used during the procedure. The Australian government had promised to phase out Mulesing by 2010, but under pressure from the industry this pledge was abandoned.

When the wool is ready to be shorn, the speed at which this is done, on a piece payment basis, means that welfare can become second to getting the most sheep through in a day.

At the end of what is considered to be the most productive period for wool, the animals are sold for meat. Clearly Australia doesn’t have sufficient demand for such a large number of animals and so many are sold abroad. It is really hard to find any independent, referenced information on the conditions under which this transportation takes place, most of the commentary comes from vegan websites and it would be nice to find a more independent source. But nonetheless, it is hard to image the live international transportation of animals, in both lorries and ships, happening in very hot countries without welfare issues occurring. One source suggested a death rate of 28%. If anyone does know of serious research or investigative pieces on this, please do get in touch.

The wool is then washed at a high-volume processing plant, using a range of processes to remove effluent, pesticide residues, fat and other waster material. A typical wool-scouring plant can produce as much effluent as a town of 50,000 people and contaminated sludge from global wool production exceeds 930,000 tons annually. Some wool is then treated using a chlorine process to make it smoother and even machine washable. However, this process is so toxic that it is banned in the US, the waste products being deadly at levels below 1 part in a trillion. Nonetheless this processing does take place around the world, on products then imported into the countries that have banned it on their own soil. 

All these materials were then transported from around the world to Bangladesh for spinning together and dying… 

I don’t want to cover transportation too much here, as I would like to do a separate blog exploring localism. For now let us just recognise that these disparate materials need to come together from around the world and be transported to Bangladesh for spinning and dying.

A review of the local press in Bangladesh gives a confusing picture; certainly the government seems to be taking some action on contamination of water by dying effluent, but still one gets the impression that, just as in the rest of the world, mere environmental concerns should never come in the way of economic development.  The Daily Star is buoyant on the possibilities for Bangladesh in its textile industries, but grimly notes at the end of the paragraph that these same factories are ‘are hugely blamed for surface water pollution’. Of course it’s not fair to pick on Bangladesh, The World Bank estimates that 20% of global industrial water pollution comes from the treatment and dying of textiles. Sadly much effort seems to be directed towards removing the colour from the waste water, but not necessarily the actual toxins or heavy metals, making it harder to tell when the water has been treated. Again the dying and processing of fabrics takes quantities of water, particularly soft knitwear like Hugo’s jumper.

 Reflections...

 Of course I have chosen here the worse case scenario, although the actual materials and their quantities came from a jumper I picked almost at random from a high end high street retailer. I have not been to Australia, Uzbekistan or Bangladesh in researching this article. I have not witnessed first hand the issues I have written about and I am only presenting the research I have done, bringing it together in one place. Some of the research I would suggest is from very reliable sources, Compassion in World Farming for example, whilst others come from a much more ideological stand point, such as the vegan information on the shipping of livestock.

I am sure that in some places in Australia wool is produced on a large scale commercial basis on farms that that many people would find acceptable. Likewise it is highly probable that some cotton, particularly US and Australian Cotton, is no where near as socially and environmentally damaging as plantations in developing countries. The problem is that often we just don’t know the conditions that a piece of clothing was produced under; it’s hidden behind a façade of glitzy marketing and almost impossible to untangle.

However, for the most part I think the evidence is really the process itself and for me I don’t need further evidence of abuse within the process. To give an example; nylon cannot be sustainable because it’s a plastic made from a finite resource, oil, that cannot easily be recycled. And although it’s important to raise the awareness of incidents of pollution arising from accidents or deliberate toxin release, I don’t need them to know that Nylon is not a good thing. Likewise with transport; you could have the most natural and organic wool farm in Australia, with fabulous welfare conditions, but whilst it’s there and the consumer is in Britain, that’s not a sustainable way of producing clothing. It’s the process itself that is unsustainable, besides any social or environmental abuse within it.

Of course much also rests on what our own view of what is acceptable. I am a vegetarian and so the idea of animals being slaughtered after a long journey is something that concerns me, but a meat eater may say that this is a sensible use of the animal after its useful wool producing life and that to simply kill it on site and not eat it would be a waste.

The other striking point is just how much danger and pollution the west outsources to developing nations. Can you imagine the uproar if the sort of industrial pollution took place in our rivers that dying yarn for our jumpers causes in Bangladesh? Likewise we ask countries to use products and processes that we ban in our own countries, because we deem the effects are too dangerous for our own people.

Just thinking about these issues makes us more sensitive to them and I know from my own experience that quite often once the genie is out of the bottle, once we understand the impact of clothing manufacturing for example, you cannot put it back and it becomes very hard to knowingly support companies that are causing so many global problems.

This has turned into a much longer post than I had anticipated (well done if you are still reading!) and I am aware it’s rather negative. The second half of this, which I have decided to post as a separate blog post perhaps after the weekend, is much more positive and explores Mary’s approach and all the exciting materials we can, and should be, exploring for a more sustainable future.

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 1 Needs

 I have been really touched by the response to my last blog post, which was a fictional account of two people’s approach to obtaining a new jumper. It contrasted the impact on the environment, communities and individuals of buying one from a high street chain and making one from local, sustainable materials. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

Because of this interest I thought I would write a series of blog posts exploring some of the themes that came out of the short story and go deeper into the issues, motives and also solutions that it touched on. I would love this to be a conversation and I do not pretend to have all the answers or even to fully understand all of the questions, but I hope that these offerings will be a springboard for your own reflections. 

Needs 

…imagine it is September here in England; the short nights and slight chill let us know that winter is on its way. Two people decide that they are going to need a new jumper to see them through the winter and keep them warm. 

We all have needs. Your needs maybe different to mine and mine in turn will be different to an older lady or a very young boy, but nonetheless there exists a set of physical and emotional requirements that each living person has. Some of these are what we might call base needs; shelter, food, air and water, the fulfillment of which is essential to life itself, others are what makes that life worth living and include love, intimacy, community, creativity, achievement and a sense of self worth.

In the story Hugo and Mary both need a jumper to fulfill a very basic need, that of warmth. Without sufficient layers in the colder months of the year we would get cold, which leads to discomfort, illness and, in extreme cases, even death. And so we can say that both Hugo and Mary have a very legitimate need.

To fulfill this need almost any jumper would do, so long as it provided some insulation, that would be enough. However, this creates a great problem for clothing retailers; if every jumper essentially does the same job in keeping you warm, why should someone buy your jumper and not the shop next doors? Even if we include an element of design into the mix, there are only so many takes on a classic woolen jumper and if we were to go and buy a man’s navy blue jumper from every clothing shop on the high street and line them all up, I dare say they would look pretty similar (or for a more modern way of doing this, try putting 'Navy Blue Jumper' into Google image search).

A further problem for a consumer economy is that actually our needs are pretty simple and fairly basic, requiring only a limited number of purchases. Yes, we need clothes. But how many? What would a basic wardrobe, which could comfortably see you through the seasons in your country, look like? You need shelter, but again what could you actually live in? How small a house would it be practical and comfortable to inhabit on a day-to-day basis? Finally food. What would it cost if we ate using fresh local fruit and vegetables, supplemented with small amounts of meat. Whether or not you wish to live like this is not the point, instead we could live in such a simple way and of course a great percentage of the world’s population does, without any choice.

Many of the higher needs we have; love, intimacy, community, creativity, a feeling of self worth, need not cost anything at all and can be achieved without any (or a least a minimal) consumer consumption.

And so capitalism is left with a real problem; here is a system that is built on the consumption of goods and yet the people do not actually need all that much to live, and that which we do need could almost be obtained from anywhere, with one shop often being no better than another. The response from companies is multi-faceted and we’ll explore more of them through the blog posts, but for our purposes here, looking at needs, we can focus on three: 


1)    Their first approach is to expand, through marketing and increasing cultural perception, what constitutes our basic, essential needs. Let’s take the example of food; clearly this is an essential need, but is it essential to be able to freeze food at home so that we can eat it out of season or eat frozen ready meals? Most people would consider a freezer an essential item in the home – I certainly don’t know of one without one, including my own. And yet this is a very modern, western, perception. How long have we had freezers in homes? 60 years? Our Grandparents lived without one and how many households throughout the world still do? And yet I even feel uncomfortable writing this, as though it is some sort of heresy.  But it’s true – freezers are not a need, they may fulfill many pleasant wants (ice-cream, easy meals etc.), but by perceiving them as a need we distort the reality and this can stop us from engaging with the impacts they cause in their manufacture and use, simply because we believe life to be impossible without them.

2)    The second deliberate distortion is using much higher needs to sell us basic needs, so that we confuse the two and cannot see that there is another way of meeting the base need. We touched on this before, with the navy blue jumper. If all navy blue jumpers are pretty much of a muchness, how can a shop get you to buy their jumper? The answer is by appealing to your sense of self or at least who you would wish to be. Fill a shop, magazine, advert with images of beautiful people, all having impossible levels of fun in gorgeous locations; then get them to look down the camera and ask, are you one of us? Finally offer the chance to join this exclusive club for the price of a jumper, the logo on the breast pocket proudly proclaiming your membership – yes, you can think as you walk home, I am one of you. The need for a jumper (for warmth) is almost forgotten; much greater is the need to be accepted, to belong, to feel your own self worth.

None of this is to say that we don’t have a genuine need to feel accepted or to belong to a community or a sense of our own worth; these are vital. But using consumption to meet them is like eating sweets when you are hungry, it’s a lovely burst of sugar that makes you feel as right as rain for about 5 minutes, before you suddenly realize you are hungry again. 

3)    Finally they create needs that we didn’t even know we had. The example of this that makes me laugh the most are those home-wares catalogues. Who knew that we needed a separate machine to make popcorn, waffles, rice, poached eggs, steam veg, open tins (or wine bottles), chop herbs etc. In the story Hugo gently mocks his customers for their phone, so that they realise just how much they need to upgrade and get all the latest features.

All this is an attempt to cloud our perception of what our needs really are, to muddy the waters so that we judge not on the reality, but on a perceived perception of what our needs are. Hugh and Mary need a jumper to keep warm. They should feel comfortable in it and it should look nice on them. By being able to pare it back to this, both of them can make decisions based on this reality, rather than marketing hype or social norm.

I don’t want to touch here on the nature of work, as I want to leave that for another post, but it is interesting to note that Mary, in making her jumper, is actually meeting her own needs for creativity and self-esteem, through it’s creation. It is not that she is only meeting her needs through the ownership of the jumper, but in the actual process of making it. This is a very different to approach to Hugo, for whom only the acquisition and ownership is meeting his needs.  The sad fact is that in this manufactured confusion of needs, many of our genuine needs actually get forgotten or remain unmet; the need for creativity, for a feeling of being able to look after oneself, accomplishment, of being able to live without negatively impacting on others.

It’s not going to be possible to make everything that modern capitalism makes available to us in affluent countries, to do so would take many more lives than we have. We have to accept that a homemade life is going to be one where we do have less and we need to find a sense of contentment with that. We need to start with a careful consideration of what our real needs are, away from the marking hype of the high street, glossy magazines and TV adverts. If all this sounds a little stark, back to the dark ages living, then I apologise because it needn’t be – actually there are great riches to be had from meeting our simple needs in an original and creative way.

The whole story about Hugo and Mary is really about two different ways of meeting a genuine need. A small snap shot of two people making decisions. Because ultimately much of our lives are taken up with meeting our needs and morality is the choices we take in doing so. Much depends on the consideration we are able to give to others in the process, but also the patience and courage to break from the accepted norm.

The Foolishness of Craft

Craftwork makes no practical or economic sense. Whatever it is that a craftsperson is making could be made quicker by the use of machines, modern materials and (in a western context) cheaper by using labour from abroad. Therefore we should not be surprised that the modern view of craft is that it is a romantic attempt to return to a 19^th century world we have long left behind and which few of us would actually like to return to.

Let’s take an example and imagine it is September here in England; the short nights and slight chill let us know that winter is on its way. Two people decide that they are going to need a new jumper to see them through the winter and keep them warm. The first, let’s call him Hugo, works in mobile telephone sales and earns £15 per hour. He has seen a nice high fashion jumper from a shop called High Street Fashion Co, with the logo staring large on the front breast. The jumper will cost him £80 and so it will take just over 5 hours work to be able to afford it.

Mary on the other hand is an experienced hand spinner and knitter, able to knit herself a jumper. It will take her 12 hours to spin the wool and around 15 hours to knit the jumper. It is a simple woollen jumper, similar to Hugo’s, but with no logo.

On the face of it is it any wonder we reject craft and embrace the modern consumer dream? Both of them get a jumper, but one has to work for 5 hours, whilst the other has to work for 27 hours. Hugo could earn enough to buy 5 jumpers in the time that Mary has made just one. Surely we should get down on our knees every day and thank our lucky stars that modernity has dragged us out of the dark ages and such drudgery?

But if we dig a little deeper for a moment and examine each stage of making Hugo and Mary’s jumpers the picture is much less simplistic.

Mary’s jumper is made from local undyed organic wool, it has travelled from a field in the village (via the sheerer who worked at the farm) and has been washed in nothing more than soap and water.

The materials that Hugo’s jumper is made of are a little more complex and the main material is cotton (60%), which was grown in Kazakhstan, where the water needed for cotton production has caused the Aral Sea to shrink to 15% of its original size. This means that the local farmer no longer has any water to irrigate his food crops. The cotton wasn’t grown organically and so was sprayed with Aldicarb a pesticide so powerful that one drop absorbed into the skin can kill an adult. Nonetheless this it was applied by a man using the most basic of equipment and safety protection, because of the low price being paid for the cotton; sadly he eventually fell ill from the exposure to it and could no longer work, leaving his family in poverty. Despite government efforts some of the cotton was picked by children, paid pitifully low rates of pay.

30% of the jumper is Nylon, which is a petrochemical substance that creates nitrous oxide in its production, a greenhouse gas around 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It was produced in China.

Finally, like Mary’s, the jumper was also made of wool (10%), but this was produced in Australia from sheep kept in huge herds, with minimum welfare standards. At the same time as the wool was removed the shearer performed ‘mulesing’ on the sheep, which is where the part of the rear of the animal is removed with sheers and without anaesthetic, to prevent flystrike (which could be prevented if better welfare conditions prevailed). The wool was then washed using harsh chemicals which had to be disposed of.

All these materials were then transported from around the world to Bangladesh for spinning together, dying and turning into Hugo’s jumper. The factory does not remove the dye from the vast amounts of water it takes to colour the yarn, so the river they pour their waste into turns the colour of whatever they are dyeing that day. Not so obvious is the heavy metals that are also in the mix, that pollute the watercourse.

So now both Hugo and Mary have got their materials for their jumper and it’s time to start work on making it. Mary, as we know, is an experienced knitter and freed up from the beginners’ desire to ‘see what it looks like when it’s finished’, she relaxes and actually enjoys the process itself. The spinning is done on a treadle powered spinning wheel that is portable and fits in its own rucksack, so that she can take it almost anywhere she wishes. Likewise of course her knitting, which simply folds up and tucks into her bag. She spends some of the time she is spinning and knitting listening to the radio or watching TV, particularly in the evening; two or three times she takes it to her local knitting group and chats to others. But most of all Mary enjoys being in the quiet (perhaps in the garden) and just focusing on what she it doing. The repetitive action of knitting in particular has been shown to have meditative effects similar to meditation and leads to Mary having lower blood pressure and heart rates.

Although Mary has made numerous jumpers before, she is particularly pleased with the way it is turning out. The time and care that she invests in it turn into a form of love for both the process and the finished item.

Of course Hugo isn’t actually going to make his jumper; his is outsourcing that to a girl in Bangladesh that he’ll never meet. But he does need to work for it. It would be true to say that when he was a boy he didn’t dream of working in a mobile phone shop, but as his Dad had told him when he left school, this is the real world and you have to do what you can to make ends meet, getting your head down to some serious work. So that’s what he had done. For the first few months it was actually quite fun, the thrill of the each sale gave him a buzz that lasted (usually) until the next. But slowly this had faded off of a bit, plus two more mobile phone shops had opened in the town, meaning that sales had dropped and heavy pressure was applied to his boss, which in turn came down on him. Every missed sale had to be explained and justified. His main strategy was to ask what phone they had currently and then, no matter how old or new it was, to gently mock it and its age and recommend that they are missing out on the latest features and to gently suggest how impressed others would be if they had x, y or z phone. To be honest each day now had become rather a combination of boredom and stress.

High Street Fashion Co would rather we didn’t know too much about who or how Hugo’s jumper was actually made and will not reveal details of the working conditions in any of the factories they use or the steps they take to ensure that their standards of factory conditions are maintained, stating that these are company secrets. However, from undercover reports and statements from those who have worked previously in these factories we can build up a clear picture.

It will come as no surprise to learn that it was a young woman who made the jumper. But how young? Well, despite companies promising for years to stamp child labour, there are enough regular reports of it happening to assume that the average wardrobe contains a number of garments made by them. Invariably when it gets uncovered producers react shocked and promise to, yet again, stamp it out. The problem is child labour is cheap and people like High Street Fashion Co want cheap clothing.

In actual fact, although young, the woman who made Hugo’s jumper wasn’t a child, and indeed has a young family of her own. She is paid for 8 hours work a day, but must make a certain number of jumpers in that 8 hours before she will get paid. Almost always she has to work an extra hour or two, unpaid, to make the target. Because of the low wages she will then have to start work doing paid overtime, to help pay the families bills. This means that everyday she will start work at 8am and will not leave until between 8pm and 10pm, before walking home for just under an hour and starting her domestic chores. On ten occasions in the last month she had been informed by her boss that she would have to do a night shift that evening, working until anytime between midnight and 3am. No food or drink will be provided and because of the risks of walking home at that time she instead chose to sleep at the factory. Her wage is £32 a month, whilst it costs £74 a month to run a basic household.

No jumper made at 2 in the morning, when you haven’t eaten for hours, your boss is shouting at you because you are going slower and all you can think about are your children at home, is made with love. It’s just another bloody jumper between you and being able to sleep on the factory floor.

When it is made the jumper is packed with up a thousand identical ones and shipped from Bangladesh to England. From there it is taken almost past Hugo’s house on its journey to a central distribution hub in the North of England, sorted into a delivery for Hugo’s local High Street Fashion Co store and then driven back down the country to a smart looking store that could easily be confused for a nightclub entrance.

Hugo had had a pretty rough day at work; you never sell many mobiles on a damp Tuesday afternoon in September and so he’d sat bored at the counter looking out through the window. He wasn’t allowed to read, in case it put off customers and he had played all the games on all the phones. Time passed so slowly. His boss was grumpy and had shut himself away in the office after a phone call from the area manager. There was only one thing Hugo could think of and that was that tonight he was going to get that new jumper from High Street Fashion Co and frankly that would make everything all right. Actually better than alright.

Mary sat in her garden and put down her needle, she had just finished sewing together the panels of the jumper. It needed now to be pressed, but it was complete. She held it up and assessed it. It wasn’t 100% perfect, to her experienced eye she could see one or two stitches that were a touch looser than others, but no-one else would notice. Yes, she was pleased with it; content.

The winter came and both jumpers kept their owners warm over the colder nights. Then one day in early spring a strange thing happened to both jumpers, on the same day. Hugo was running a little late for work and rushed through the store in the hope that his boss would not notice. He caught his jumper on a sharp edge of a display rack and pulled one of the threads of his jumper. He cursed, but actually forgot about it for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until later that evening as he was undressing that he remembered it. He looked at the jumper; it hadn’t washed well as the colour had faded in the first few washes and because it was cotton it had also misshapen quite a bit. Oh, well he thought, I have wanted to get that new one anyway, it only cost £80 and I got a winters use from it. He threw the jumper into the bin and it joined the 900,000 tonnes of clothing waste that gets thrown out every year in Britain. Its final resting place was in a landfill site; the cotton and wool disintegrated into the soil, but the nylon stayed just where it was for at least a 1,000 years.

On that same day Mary was walking through her garden when she too caught her jumper, this time on a rose bush. She too cursed, but wasn’t about to forget damaging a jumper she had spent so long working on. She went inside and repaired it using some of the same yarn she had knitted it from. The repair was invisible and as strong as the original knitting. Despite regular use Mary’s jumper lasted for almost 10 years, before finally one day she decided that it had really seen better days. She placed it on her compost heap where it rotted down into an excellent soil conditioner, which she eventually spread on her rhubarb.

Viewed in this way craft becomes a modest, but achievable and practical response to a whole host of global issues and problems. It allows us to provide for our needs without doing so at the expense of others on the planet. The act of making becomes a gift not only to our own creativity and emotional wellbeing, but also a gift of love towards the rest of humanity. I care for you, even though I have never met you, so I am not going to ask you to work in such conditions so that I can have a jumper to wear. I’ll make it myself.