How Woke Won by Joanna Williams

Author:Joanna Williams [Williams, Joanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: woke, elitism, politics, identity, gender, race, political science, social science
ISBN: 9781739841331
Publisher: John Wilkes Publishing
Published: 2022-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Woke exploitation

Having staff members police and discipline each other is one example of the benefits of woke for business leaders. They may genuinely believe in social justice, but there’s no hiding the fact that woke also serves them well. Promoting woke values as part of one area of a business, such as marketing, can sit comfortably alongside less ethically sound practices elsewhere, such as in the supply chain. In this way, woke values divert our attention from the uglier side of capitalism.

Nike may have partnered with Kaepernick and embraced Black Lives Matter. But the company itself is hardly a bastion of equality more broadly. Chief executive John Donahoe, a white man in his sixties, was reportedly paid $53million in 2020, more than 2,000 times what the firm’s median employee takes home.20 Beneath even Nike’s lowest-paid US employees sit factory workers in China, particularly Uighur Muslims, working in Chinese factories that supply Nike. Despite Nike’s claims to the contrary, reports of working conditions ‘that strongly suggest forced labour’ have surfaced.21

IKEA UK pulled its adverts from GB News in the same week IKEA France was fined €1million, and its former CEO was handed a two-year suspended prison sentence, after a French court found the company had spied on its employees for several years.22 Nivea also responded to the Stop Funding Hate boycotters and withdrew its ads from GB News. It had previously come in for criticism for selling skin-whitening cream to women in Africa.23

Time and again, we see that a range of ethically dubious practices sit alongside corporate virtue-signalling. Indeed, the exploitation of workers who are paid less for their labour than the revenue they generate is not simply an immoral blunder – it is built into the very workings of capitalism. Woke business leaders want us to forget that, in its most basic principles, capitalism has changed little in two centuries. They hope that tweets about the evil of immigration controls will persuade us to look the other way.

The problem with woke capitalism is not that consumers are being conned into believing that corporations are moral exemplars. Rather, there is often no contradiction between displaying woke values in one arena while engaging in ethically dubious practices elsewhere. We have grown used to world leaders and business magnates preaching about the need to cut carbon emissions before boarding private jets. By the same token, Ben & Jerry’s apparently sees no contradiction between tweeting about the need for open borders while buying from suppliers that underpay migrant workers. In August 2020, Ben & Jerry’s issued a series of tweets calling on the British government to show more humanity towards migrants. Its UK-based social-media division argued that ‘the real crisis is our lack of humanity for people fleeing war, climate change and torture’. Yet the Ben & Jerry’s Vermont headquarters has previously been the target of protests because of the treatment of migrant labourers in its supply chain.24 Workers have alleged that they sustained injuries when milk bottles exploded, and that they suffered with sleep deprivation due to midnight milking and long stretches of work without a day off.

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