Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Los Angeles is the nation’s garment production capital and the city’s second largest manufacturing sector, yet workers face injustice, usually associated with the developing world, right here in one of the largest cities in the United States. Jessica Aldridge interviews Mar Martinez from the Garment Worker Center a worker rights organization leading an anti-sweatshop movement to secure social and economic justice for tens of thousands of Los Angeles garment workers.
One of Africa’s most rare-minerals-rich countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, has endured Belgian colonization, slavery, and continuing atrocities, where militant groups control the extraction of “conflict resources.” The tech industry turns these extracted raw materials into components of mobile phones and computers. Yet the cost is deadly.
On the Caribbean island of the Dominican Republic, tourists flock to pristine beaches, with little knowledge that a few miles away thousands of dispossessed Haitians are under armed guard on plantations harvesting sugarcane, most of which ends up in US kitchens. Watch the documentary film, “The Price of Sugar.”
Chocolate often originates from the hands of children working as slaves. In Côte D’Ivoire and other cocoa-producing countries, an estimated 100,000 children labor in the fields, many against their will. Action taken now demands that Hershey “Raise the Bar” on their fair trade labor practices.