Ethics in Poverty?

By Anna M. Holloway

Is buying a shirt a moral decision?

For most of us, it would be obvious.  The shirt looked good on me, it was a Calvin Klein, for cryin’ out loud, and it was under $7 dollars.  (Yes, that was seven.)  Why wouldn’t I buy it?

The tag said it was made in Hong Kong, where workers are underpaid by U.S. standards, but which is better than Indonesia or Honduras, I suppose.  Since it was originally supposed to cost $45 in a “better department store,” the corporate giants who exploited the cheap labor in Asia and took the jobs out of the U.S. were making practically nothing on this particular shirt.  And because it had been through at least two U.S. stores (supposedly) and had definitely been marked down twice at the discount place I was standing in, it had contributed to several U.S. jobs and, through their spending, the U.S. economy at large.  However, the shirt came into existence in a Hong Kong sweatshop at the behest of a corporation that, as all responsible corporations do, seeks to make the largest possible profit for its stockholders.

With all these factors in play, would buying this shirt be a moral act or not?

Some years ago I chose to do what feeds my soul and let money be a secondary concern.   I now live in what I call technical poverty: in terms of the number of dollars in my income, I am poor.  I actually live very well; certainly if I can afford to agonize over whether it’s moral to pay $7 for a nice shirt, I am not in any way desperate.

The companion term is functional poverty.  Many Americans with what most of us would call adequate middle class incomes live as if they are poor, and in functional terms, they are.  For many it’s debt — school loans, credit cards, medical debt — that keeps them poor.  The level of debt in middle income America is staggering, and the current roller coaster of interest rates makes managing debt increasingly complex and hence more difficult.

Those of us who are technically (but not functionally) poor and those who are living in functional (pragmatically real) poverty are buying less.  We are also buying more often from discount and less expensive sources.  The moral issues arise from what makes things less expensive.

The human cost is usually high, so one way for manufacturers to make money on a poverty economy is to find ways to pay workers less.  This is the primary reason that jobs have migrated away from the U.S.; the cost to the manufacturer is much lower in places where not only the pay rate is lower, but also where regulation of how workers are treated is lax or non-existent.

We want to maintain our standard of living (which may be a foolish goal), and we find ways to do it as cheaply as possible.  Often this includes buying clothing and other items made by child labor in Asia, or buying chocolate and coffee farmed by slave labor in Africa.

How do we make ethical choices when we are economically up against it?  If you want to have coffee every day, can you afford to buy Fair Trade coffee?  What do you do if the answer is no?  Some of us choose to drink less coffee, some choose to spend a little more on the coffee and cut somewhere else, some of us buy the coffee we can afford and either ignore or never know what the human cost of our coffee might be.

For me, the ability to make moral choices in purchasing is one way that I know, despite an income that qualifies me for public assistance, that I am not living in poverty.  I don’t always make the “moral” choice.  I have bought coffee and chocolate that has no Fair Trade certification.  I did buy the Calvin Klein shirt.

What would Jesus do?  That may be one way of deciding.  What would you do?  What choices do you face?

Anna M. Holloway is a graduate student in the University of Oklahoma professional writing program and a pulpit supply minister for small Unitarian Universalist churches in Oklahoma.