Is this a comment about the capitalist economy, especially the billions of nameless workers in 3rd world countries who work day after day after day, often in menial conditions and with wages that are not enough to support their families, while the multinational corporations get bigger and bigger and their execs enjoy bonuses of millions because supposedly their already insane monthly wages are not enough to "motivate" them to do their work properly? Maybe.
Truth be told, I didn't notice the number on the doll's head until I was going through the photos, but it did remind me of the tattooed numbers of prisoners.
I've often been thinking it's really difficult to make moral choices completely free of problems when it comes to buying things.
Take the tomato, for instance. Here, you can choose between Spanish, Dutch, Finnish and Finnish organic (and just occasionally, I think, Dutch organic). The Spanish tomatoes are the cheapest - but they come from large farms tended by immigrant workers whose working conditions are really horrible. At the other end, surely it's beneficial to support Finnish employment and production by buying Finnish tomatoes? But then again, they are grown here in winter too, in green houses of course, so isn't it horrible waste of energy and natural resources to make them grow in a place and time they don't normally grow in, more so than shipping them from Spain? If you buy Finnish organic, you both support Finnish employment AND avoid all the pesticides and whatever they put in the tomatoes in industrial farming. But producing organic in Finland has an even greater what they call coal foot print.
Then there's the fact, with clothes, electronics and such that a consumer can't easily find out whether or not the product has been produced ethically, because the chain of production is so complicated. With clothes, the material, the fabric and the finished product are regularly made in different places, different countries. For instance, some time ago there was news that some - not all - of the pillows sold in Ikea had feathers that had come from farms (in Poland? not sure) where they are plucked from living geese. But which ones? Going to an Ikea, how can I make sure? And even if you COULD make sure that all the things you purchase are absolutely ethical, what's the right course of action? I might be viewed as hypocritical because I have an iPhone, and apparently some of the parts have been produced in unethical working conditions in 3rd world countries. But many organisations say that boycott is not something they recommend, because it won't make the corporations actively supervise the sweat shops to make sure the workers' rights are not violated. It only makes the sweat shops kick out the already under-paid workers, so the workers go from just barely hanging on to starving.
