Uncomfortable Truth: Website Determines Your “Slavery Footprint”
Most of us try to be pretty conscious about how we affect the state of the environment and slowly, but surely, we are making progress. In fact, 2013 was the best year for air quality since New York City starting keeping track of that information. Helping the environment is a relatively easy task, but what about helping the people who work in terrible conditions to create the material things we value? Well, a new website aims to do just that by making users more aware of their “slavery footprint.”
The Slavery Footprint project is a collaboration between anti-slavery organization, Call + Response, and the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking In Persons.
The interactive app/website uses 11 questions like What items are in your medicine cabinet? and How much fine jewelry do you own? to determine how much slave labor goes into producing your favorite products. The results: even the most conscious among us probably have a few slaves working for them.
Obviously, you’d be hard pressed to completely avoid using cheaply-produced items, but the point of the site seems to be that the massive companies who are consciously/unconsciously using slave labor need to lead the charge and only we, the consumers, can impress that on them.
And the Slavery Footprint is here to do just that. Once you determine your footprint, you can send a note to the companies whose slave-produced products you use. Nearly 15,000 notes have already been sent to Apple and Microsoft comes in a very close second with more than 10,000 notes of dissatisfaction.
Hopefully, this will re-ignite the conversation about and action against modern day slavery. To find out more, visit the Call + Response website.
Follow Nikita Richardson on Twitter @nikitarbk