Branded by Eric Walters

Author:Eric Walters
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Childrens, JUV000000
ISBN: 9781554692682
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

“Are you going to turn in soon?” my mother asked as she peeked in the door of my room.

“Soon. And you?”

“Possibly not so soon. I have a big day tomorrow, pre-trial hearing.”

“I’ve been looking at situations where people need a good lawyer,” I said.

“Really?” she said. She came into the room and looked over my shoulder at the screen. It was a picture of five kids— a couple of them looked nine or ten years old—standing in front of a factory.

“Those kids look like they need a school more than they need a lawyer.”

“The only way they’ll ever get to school is if they had a good lawyer. They’re all factory workers.”

“I’ve heard about things like that,” she said.

“I’d heard things too, but nothing like what I’ve read. Kids, as young as five and six, basically used as slave labor. They get paid next to nothing, if they even get paid at all. They’re locked in factories, separated from their families, beaten and abused if they don’t make quotas, or even if they do.”

“Have you looked at the laws to protect them?” she asked.

“In some countries there are no laws, or if there are laws, they’re so different from ours. It’s legal for little kids to work twelve hours a day. It’s legal to pay them next to nothing. And even the laws that are in place are ignored or broken. There are almost no health or safety codes either. Some of the conditions are hazardous, dangerous and deadly.”

“Some people say that at least they get some pay and enough food to survive. It’s unfortunate and sad, but better than the alternative,” she said.

“Maybe the alternative is to pay their parents enough so their kids wouldn’t have to work.”

“That sounds like a good alternative.”

“All the companies have to do is earn less than fifteen billion dollars profit or pay the celebrities less than thirty million dollars to endorse the products.”

“Or if people were prepared to pay more for the product,” she said.

“That would work if people weren’t so cheap.”

“That is working. Have you heard about fair-trade products?” she asked.

“No.” I typed the words fair trade into the search engine.

“It’s products, often coffee or chocolate and clothes, which are guaranteed to be produced in conditions that are—”

“‘Fair to the people who make them,’” I said, reading off the screen.

“Exactly.”

“They pay them living wages, it says.”

“And the factories or fields are more humane. Of course that means the product costs more.”

“How much more?” I asked.

“We buy fair-trade coffee,” she said, “and it’s about an extra dollar per package.”

“That’s not too much.”

“It’s fair to both the producer and the consumer. Those that make it and those of us who buy it.”

“So how do you know if something is fair trade?” I asked.

“Usually they advertise it. The real question is, how do we know that it really is fair trade?”

“That’s the problem I’m having. I’m trying to figure out, for sure, what the truth is,” I said.

“They used to say ‘Believe only half of what you read’ and that ‘Seeing is believing.

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