Anticipazione dal volume collettivo "Europa 2.0 prospettive ed evoluzioni del sogno europeo", Nicola Vallinoto e Simone Vannuccini (a cura di), ombre corte, Verona, maggio 2010.
L’Europa e i diritti degli altri
di Deborah Lucchetti*
“Mi sento così male e stanca dopo un giorno di lavoro che non vorrei più lavorare il giorno successivo. Ma la fame non mi permette di pensare al malessere, il pensiero di vivere con la pancia vuota annulla tutti gli altri pensieri. Noi lavoriamo per salvare noi stessi dalla fame”. The speaker is a woman working in a textile factory in Bangladesh that supplies Wal-Mart and Carrefour, a woman among so many millions of invisible to the machine every day to help overall production of non-stop, one that produces with a hundred million Asian workers employees of the textile industry directly serves our shelves and it probably will never wear, producing for the European market for European companies to European consumers.
This sentence is a sad testimony to the fate of an individual but a social history of class that affects millions of men, women and children in the world, it contains all the heavy contradiction that afflicts our old continent, stretching and torn between a vision of a democratic Europe based on fundamental human rights and universal rather biased towards a market bent to the interests of big business.
According to a recent survey conducted on 2,508 U.S. companies, a minority of firms equal to 28 percent (of which 45 percent belongs to the world of big) adopted policies on human rights and labor, while only 15 per percent have produced a veritable code of conduct for its suppliers. In Europe the figure increases as the 43 per cent of companies have policies on social responsibility compared with 23 percent of the United States, but the percentages drop below 6 per cent when it comes to assessing content and effectiveness of such policies, for example through the adoption of ILO Conventions and the use of monitoring systems and practical application of standards throughout the production chain. Looking better, we realize that the prevalence of companies that adopt policies to protect human rights and labor are those operating in areas heavily exposed to abuse or prominent in mass consumer markets, a sign of what mechanisms are driving corporations to take care human rights impact of their production.
Ten years of liberal policies applied to international trade have encouraged a restructuring of the markets and businesses has led to a new global geography. The progressive reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers promoted by the World Trade fertilized the soil for maximum
movement of goods and capital on a flat planet, conceived as a large infrastructure platform designed to hoard resources, and transform distributed according to the logic of increasing concentration and profit. Read the book
Europe 2.0.
This sentence is a sad testimony to the fate of an individual but a social history of class that affects millions of men, women and children in the world, it contains all the heavy contradiction that afflicts our old continent, stretching and torn between a vision of a democratic Europe based on fundamental human rights and universal rather biased towards a market bent to the interests of big business.
According to a recent survey conducted on 2,508 U.S. companies, a minority of firms equal to 28 percent (of which 45 percent belongs to the world of big) adopted policies on human rights and labor, while only 15 per percent have produced a veritable code of conduct for its suppliers. In Europe the figure increases as the 43 per cent of companies have policies on social responsibility compared with 23 percent of the United States, but the percentages drop below 6 per cent when it comes to assessing content and effectiveness of such policies, for example through the adoption of ILO Conventions and the use of monitoring systems and practical application of standards throughout the production chain. Looking better, we realize that the prevalence of companies that adopt policies to protect human rights and labor are those operating in areas heavily exposed to abuse or prominent in mass consumer markets, a sign of what mechanisms are driving corporations to take care human rights impact of their production.
Ten years of liberal policies applied to international trade have encouraged a restructuring of the markets and businesses has led to a new global geography. The progressive reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers promoted by the World Trade fertilized the soil for maximum
movement of goods and capital on a flat planet, conceived as a large infrastructure platform designed to hoard resources, and transform distributed according to the logic of increasing concentration and profit. Read the book
Europe 2.0.
DEBORAH PADLOCKS , an expert on labor and human rights, globalization and fair trade. President of the Fair. Coordinator of the Clean Clothes Campaign, the Italian section of the Clean Clothes Campaign, a coalition of over 250 international organizations che promuove i diritti del lavoro nell’industria tessile globale. Partecipa alla Rete Lilliput e prepara il controvertice del G8 del 2001. Ha pubblicato I vestiti nuovi del consumatore (Altreconomia, 2010). Siti: www.abitipuliti.org.
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