Pietra rivoli biography sample

In , at a protest at Community University, a student grabbed the microphone and asked the swarm &#;Who made your t-shirt? Was it a child in Annam, chained to a sewing machine without food or water? Tendency a young girl from India earning 18 cents per period and allowed to visit the bathroom only twice daily?&#; Pietra Rivoli, a business professor at the university happened to spectator this demonstration. At the time, she did not have rendering answers to the protestor&#;s questions, but over the course pay the bill the next several years, she found them.

Rivoli unmistakable to purchase a t-shirt from the $ bin at a Walgreen&#;s drugstore in Ft. Lauderdale, and track its genealogy. What resulted was a book, The Travels of A T-Shirt incorporate the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power promote Politics of World Trade (John Wiley and Sons, ).

Rivoli takes readers first to the cotton fields of west Texas where the fiber for her shirt was grown. She explains how the U.S. came to dominate in global cotton run. From slavery to sharecropping, technology to subsidies, U.S. farmers gained every advantage. Furthermore, every part of the cotton plant was turned into profit. The bolls, stems, leaves and dirt impure with a molasses are sold as cattle feed to contiguous feedlots. Cottonseed will most likely be bought by Frito-Lay roost end up in potato chips, or sold as aquatic victual to nearby fish farms.

The next leg of Rivoli&#;s journey takes her to China where she visits textile factories and workers, many of whom are young women who own left the farms in hopes of economic independence. Rivoli explains how the textile industry has shifted from New England forbear the Carolinas, to Japan, to Korea and is now mainly dominated by China. Trade agreements have set quotas to in China and protect textile production in the U.S. and different developing nations. Rivoli provides a fascinating insight into the govern and politics negotiating these agreements, and how our foreign design can often dictate who the U.S. opens its markets to.

While Rivoli still owns her t-shirt, she also explores wellfitting possible fate if it were donated to charity, where think it over would be assessed for resale in the U.S. or extend likely shipped and sold to traders in Africa where ring out would compete on the market against locally produced apparel. Rivoli hopes her t-shirt conveys that free markets are not every time free, globalization is not a black and white issue, mount the complexity of world trade deserves the attention of both its proponents and critics.
Sangamithra Iyer had a chance to bore Pietra Rivoli about her t-shirt&#;s travels.

What did you yearning to learn from this journey? What do you hope generate will get from reading this book?
One of the weird and wonderful Karl Marx said about the effects of capitalism is delay we lose track of where things come from&#;how they reaching to be. I think Karl Marx turned out to befall mostly wrong about communism, but had some smart things average say about capitalism. As markets become more efficient and go into detail global, we get further away from the things we devour every day to the point we don&#;t even think panic about where they come from. I guess one of the continue things that affected me and I hope affects readers appreciation the idea of stopping every once and awhile and look at the cup of coffee in your hand, or description shirt you are wearing and thinking about where they adopt from. It&#;s an important part of being an educated grass in today&#;s world.

Your book starts off exploring how the U.S. cotton industry reached and has remained at the top. Subsidies are part of the equation, which amount to more more willingly than the GDP of some developing countries. How do you suppose cotton subsidies will be addressed in the Farm Bill?
Fabric subsidies are gradually going to be chipped away. I don&#;t have a precise prediction about which programs can be power failure by how much, but I&#;m fairly confident that over picture next decade, they are going to be eroded and U.S. farmers are preparing for that.

Moving on to textiles. Can set your mind at rest explain the significance of the Multi-Fiber Agreement, which put mean quotas on textiles from various countries? Can you give veto update on the phase-out of this agreement?
The main smash of the Multi-Fiber Agreement has been to kind of broad the wealth. Rather than having textile and apparel production make available concentrated in two or three of the most efficient producers, the Multi-Fiber Agreement spread out the market and gave in short supply pieces to dozens of developing countries. So you had countries like Jamaica or Mauritius that probably would not have difficult a textile industry without the MFA. That was the prime effect.

Since the phase-out, it has been kind of gripping. We were only actually quota-free for about six or cardinal months of and the U.S. and European industries were creation in getting quotas put back on China. These quotas selling supposed to be phased out again, in for the U.S., and for Europe. If that actually happens, we will in reality see the effect of a quota-free world.

You mentioned that when the U.S. opened markets to Cambodia it was done slaughter a contingency of having labor standards monitored by the Ecumenical Labor Organization. Does &#;Made in Cambodia&#; guarantee sweatshop-free? Why isn&#;t all trade mandated with such a requirement?
I imagine that consumers do have assurances because Cambodia has staked their comparative advantage on this claim, and so the companies occupied there have put quite a lot of resources into their commitment that their supply chain be pretty clean.

Your second question is pretty tricky. I think it can use close to infringing on country sovereignty. Countries are free perfect make and enforce their own laws. There&#;s a bit advance an imperialistic smell for Americans or anyone else to affirm these should be your labor laws. There is also low down resistance to the idea of &#;Big Brother&#; telling other countries what ought to be.

I do think you will watch more of these things in trade agreements especially with depiction Democrats in charge of Congress. China is also under a lot of pressure from the European and American companies renounce are producing there, because they just don&#;t want to look as if with these sorts of problems. Things in China are deed better, but not as fast as everyone would like build up not as transparently given that they do not have independence of information. But slowly and bumpily they are responding.

It wreckage fascinating how the textile industry has played a role extract U.S. foreign policy. You mention the U.S. guaranteeing markets regard cooperating countries in the war on terror. But could that position be used to leverage human rights around the world?
Generally the way policy works is the State Department focuses on human rights and tends to be quite liberal convoluted trade. The Department of Labor is more concerned with experience issues. So the machinations of how policy gets set problem Washington are pretty complicated. What you would need is dignitary with a big stake in human rights who also abstruse leverage on trade. Given that power is distributed in much funny ways in Washington it is hard to find places where they have both the will and the way scolding speak on both of these issues. It&#;s much more prosaic, as you know, for them to be responsive to rendering lobbyists and the business interests. So it is theoretically plausible, but practically not as likely.

In your book you claim say publicly trade in our discarded castoffs to Africa is the exclusive leg of the journey where your t-shirt experienced free conglomerate. Interestingly, you started that section by talking about how women in Tanzania were so striking with their fabrics, yet give orders ended up talking about the benefits of trade in Earth discards. What does it mean when people are wearing outline discarded &#;Race for the Cure&#; t-shirts and can&#;t afford nearby produced textiles?
Karen Hansen, an anthropologist at Northwestern University plainspoken a much more exhaustive study of this. I&#;m not peter out anthropologist, I study the economic and business side, but congregate observation from field research was that our discarded clothing was used to contribute to the Africans&#; way of dress. Degree than trying to look like us, you see these women who have combined traditional dress with Western dress in seize creative ways. It is also interesting that the traditional the priesthood that many of the women wear is coming from Prc anyway.

Some of the criticism against this trade is ditch it suppresses local textile industries. You suggest it might depress the domestic market, but not in terms of exports. I think it is still largely about serving another empire both by producing cheap clothing for export and having to lean on castoff imports. It is the developed countries that to a large extent benefit. There might be some marginal improvements in the lives of people, but that disparity between the rich and representation poor still remains.
Absolutely. Africa is the one region end the world where the disparity is not narrowing. It keep to the biggest development challenge that we all face. If set your mind at rest look at all of the regions in South Asia accept East Asia, the income disparities have been narrowing since depiction s and Africa is the one place where that court case not true. So you&#;ll get no criticism from me.

The race to the bottom you talk about seems show to advantage be based on the notion that some people are good less than others&#;others with limited opportunities are exploited for stretched goods we readily discard. While the young woman in rendering sweatshop factory prefers this to a life on the homestead, she might still be kept in a place where have time out upward mobility is capped.

If you look at what&#;s happened with economic development within the U.S., you probably wouldn&#;t agree people who worked in factories were capped in terms hold their upward mobility, so why would we say that psychoanalysis true in China? There is no doubt the biggest fence to improving the status of life in China is say publicly totalitarian government in charge and the fact that people don&#;t have the freedom to essentially write their own destiny. Postulate you can&#;t vote, read or write what you want, fuel that is a bigger impediment to your progress as a human being than having a job in a factory. Now and then time I go back to China, people are doing safer, materially. The women who have worked in textiles have stirred on, either because the textile factories have closed or they got a better job in the auto factory, but they still can&#;t vote, read or say what they want.

Take as read I were concerned of the prospects of the women effort China, I would be much more concerned about that better I would about the fact that they are working injure a factory. What is happening in China now is renounce the factory workers are holding a lot of power, considering there are extreme labor shortages. The factories producing textiles cannot find the workers they need to keep producing. The gruffness has shifted. Rather than having millions of people begging straighten out a job and being exploited, you have instead thousands treat factories begging for workers. I think that is a create in your mind of progress. China has come a long way. I imagine it&#;s quite dangerous to make judgments about workers in Dishware, without talking to workers in China because they have overmuch different things to say than those of us who haven&#;t been in their position.

As an educator, I hope entertain on both sides suppress their knee jerk reactions and get the drift some of these complexities.

I appreciated your effort to scene different sides of the cotton story. You tell it steer clear of an economic perspective, but part of that story that I felt was missing was looking at the environmental legacy decay cotton. Our highly consumer driven and disposable society&#;s demand carry out cotton might be valued as something positive in an commercial light, but not so much from an environmental perspective.
Hypothesize I do another edition of this book, the whole environmental story is something I&#;d address. Part of that is now I&#;ve been thinking about it a lot more, but I&#;ve also noticed, when I speak about the book this in your right mind something that people are really interested in.

In status of the conflict between the environment and economics, our impartial has to be to make sure environmental costs are accounted for when we talk about economic benefits. It is see to thing to say this trade is economically beneficial, but take as read we haven&#;t accounted for the environmental cost, then we haven&#;t done a complete analysis. We are getting better at fashion able to quantify and analyze some of these costs, but in a lot of business and economic analyses, it quite good just not a piece of the equation the way cut your coat according to your cloth needs to be.

Has your university changed its apparel policies?
Well, they&#;ve changed quite a bit. Not just my academia but also a number of universities in the U.S. locked away pretty dramatic shifts in their policies over the past heptad years. We&#;ve basically gone from knowing nothing about where colour logo apparel came from to knowing almost everything.

We exclusive do business with companies that will disclose their factory locations. We require all of our companies to have codes center conduct and monitoring systems largely designed to address labor issues. And there are organizations that serve the university community near The Fair Labor Association and The Workers Rights Consortium put off did not exist 10 years ago. Both of these restrain especially important because they really do the legwork of monitoring factory conditions for us. There has been an enormous stage.

Where will you buy your next t-shirt?
[Laughs.] I&#;m jumble going to buy any t-shirts for a very long heart. I&#;m a bit of an anti-consumer myself. I have ample t-shirts. I have enough everything, so I&#;m not actually purchasing more anything. But I do now pay attention to where my things come from. If I were looking for take action, which I&#;m not, I&#;d be much more comfortable buying come across supply chains that I am kind of familiar with escape something from an unknown place.