Okay, so maybe he didn't. But I knew her first and they both taught me a lot about standing for people who have no power.
As a kid, we were forbidden from buying or receiving Nike products. Because Nike was going through a lot of bad press about the policies and conditions that were applied at their overseas plants. It definitely wasn't the only company to so egregiously violate the human rights of their workers, but it was the most public, and my mother decided the best way to take a stand was to boycott their products, even if it was only one family in a sea of over 250 million. I remember in the seventh grade ~1997, Nike really taking off, and kids drawing the famous Nike swoosh over everything; you couldn't walk twenty feet in my middle school without seeing it on a backpack, a shoe, a binder, a notebook, or even etched into the stalls in the bathroom. It was a fad that I wasn't allowed to participate it, for reasons I didn't fully comprehend, other than my mother saw them as human rights abusers and refused to allow their product into her home.
As I entered high school, I took on her view after learning more about the use of child workers and the horrid working conditions they were forced to live in. Several of my classmates told me 'at least these kids have income they can take home, would you rather their families have nothing?' which is a rather fallacious argument, as I'd rather these kids' parents be able to learn a human wage and these kids be able to have a childhood, and no kid should be forced to work under horrid conditions to make ends meet for their family. Trying to twist it any other way is trying to justify why it's okay in any way, shape, or form for these children to endure what they are.
About 2001, Nike came out and admitted that they'd messed up and used child labour. They then went a step further and said they weren't sure how to end the practice, or if they'd be able to. One step forward, two steps back. Shortly after that, my mother came home with a pair of Nike shoes and I was horrified. She proudly proclaimed that she wasn't going to, but they were 'only $5,' which to her, was apparently the right price for undermining her entire value system, and pretending that some fairness had been applied to society. I'm incredibly lucky that she didn't do this when I was far more impressionable and hadn't made up my own mind that sometimes quiet protests are the only protests that we can take.
The idea that morality is fluid, and that ideas can be put the test came hard with the release of a book called Nobodies, which details the use of American slave labor in today's national and global economy. I'd always known about migrant workers, and the conditions that they lived in, but Nobodies go after specific examples - oranges in Florida to steel in Oklahoma to even 'made in USA' products that aren't really made in USA and are made under terrible working conditions. And then how does one quietly protest? Boycott the entire world, even the USA? Everything becomes so overwhelming with quiet protests, moral indignation that isn't voiced to anyone, and the act of nothing changing.
Enter Stephen Colbert, who took what my mother taught me and went a step further. Only he did it with migrant workers. And he sat in front of the US Congress and gave voice to people who have no power. Anyone, I suppose, could have gone and did what he did, and then testified about his experiences, but he had a way to give voice and he didn't sit quietly by it. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm sure Colbert enjoys a Georgia peach in August, and the strawberries that roll out in June are to just die for, and in between, he eats his salad as a part of his balanced diet. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe Stephen Colbert has been quietly boycotting produce - that's not the point. The point is that he took his moral outrage and gave it voice. And in doing so, he - if only for a moment - gave voice to the powerless.
Which brings me to Mario*, who is not a orange picker in Florida, or a steel worker in Oklahoma, or a migrant worker across the agricultural US. Instead he cleans the big-box stores, like Cub foods and Target, and the fact that his working for them isn't even a little bit ironic makes me sad. It's sad that it's not even the slightest ironic that stores whose products are secured with unethical labor practices allow their stores to be cleaned by companies whose labor practices are unethical as well. It's also outrageous, and demonstrable affront to the idea that we are a free society. Mario worked for a cleaning company that has no union organization, and whose workers have no power in how they are treated. All these workers want is a code of conduct that would provide really simple, basic things. Things like job security, and a fair wage. I said Mario worked. That's because Mario was [illegally] fired for trying to secure this code of conduct.
$5 is definitely too high of a price to pretend that we are indeed a free and fair society.
*You can read more about Mario and others struggles with cleaning companies and big-box stores here: http://ctul.net/
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