The Slave-Made Prius and the Future of Green, Fair Labor

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which is uniting over 8300 blogs in 147 countries to talk about how climate change affects all our lives.

The creation of "green collar" jobs and "greenification" of production is a scorching hot topic these days, especially as climate change rises to the top of the international agenda. Reducing the environmental impact of production needs to happen in the U.S., China, and everywhere in between. But can we make production greener while protecting the rights of those humans who are doing the producing?

Conrad MacKerron, the Director of the Corporate Social Responsibility Program at the As You Sow Foundation based in San Francisco, CA, asked that question when a recent report from the National Labor Committee alleged abusive working conditions in Japanese factories assembling the Prius. According to the report, a full third of assembly line workers are very low-wage temporary employees and the supply chain that leads to the Prius is riddled with sweatshop abuse and human trafficking. The report also found that two years ago, Toyota, GM and Ford were all linked to human trafficking in making the pig iron for the steel that ends up in their vehicles. Even that staple of the the new, more conscious consumer -- the Toyota Prius -- may have been tainted by slavery.

To me, slave labor being used to make Priuses -- arguably one of the most visible symbols of consumers working to reduce climate change -- is the ultimate sad irony.  That purchasers of the Prius who are making a conscious effort to be greener could be inadvertently supporting slavery is ironic and sad.  And that a car which aims to protect the environment could ultimately harm the people who build it is also terrible.  But it's an important moment for us to remember that just because a product is "greener", doesn't mean the company making it always puts the employees' rights first.  "Green" and "fair" should never be strange bedfellows, but too often they are.

We cannot choose between green supply chains and fair supply chains, nor should we have to. We shouldn't have to live in a world where what we buy destroys the environment or the lives of the people who make it. But to continue to build a progressive vision of the future, we don't just need better environmental and better labor practices around the world, we need an overhaul of the system. We need to change the bottom line and change corporate incentives, so that the many companies who now to rely on fossil fuel and slave labor to create the cheapest possible product have a different aim. But perhaps most importantly, we need the green labor movement and the fair labor movement to focus more energy on working together, and confirm that they need each other to be part of a bigger, better picture: a fairer, greener world.

Photo credit: greenforall.org