The 210 Footwear Foundation is all about "shoepeople helping shoepeople". We're down with that! Nice letter from 210 President Peggy Meill.
Tags >> Workers
Jul 20, 2010
A letter from the Two Ten Footwear Foundation
The Fair Labor Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending sweatshop conditions. We fully support this cause and organization. Being a supporter is one thing, truly understanding he benchmarks they have outlined that constitute good working conditions is slightly more complex. The FLA has assembled a 28 page document that outlines the benchmarks used to determine if a factory is providing good working conditions for their employees. Here’s a link to that .pdf
These benchmarks cover all the basic elements such as wages, child labor restrictions, sanitary conditions, etc. What they do not cover are environmental practices in operations. We have discussed our efforts in that area in previous blog posts and will have even more on that topic in the future as it is a concern we also strongly believe in.
Dec 03, 2009
Sustainable footwear – Part 2
We’re working hard on designing and manufacturing our footwear to be as sustainable as possible. What is sustainable in footwear though?? Sustainable footwear considers: raw materials, product design, manufacturing processes, end-of-useful-life policy, and a whole slew of other components. So many in fact that the only way a company can truly produce a pair of sustainably made footwear is to tackle one element of the process of achieving total sustainability at a time. We at Common Soles are currently focusing our efforts on materials and manufacturing processes right now. That is not to say we aren’t doing all we can elsewhere in the sustainability value chain – this is just our area of focus at the moment.
I wrote a bit about materials on October 22nd of this year. This post is on process. The big one we can influence as a band in the US making footwear overseas is how our factory sources materials. Sourcing is a blend of art and science and is a constant battle of quality versus cost. Being who we are (a social venture) we lean toward quality whenever we have a choice. The difficulty we run into often times is that we are quite small in the world of footwear manufacturing and thus often have little say. Not an excuse though…
Apr 30, 2009
The Reality of the footwear worker
It's no surprise that the individuals who actually make most of the world's footwear don't benefit much from the profits earned on said footwear. In fact, when you consider the pay of a footwear factory worker in China at $120 per month, thank you Washington Post, you don't need to do complex math to realize the workers aren't making off so well...
So where do all the profits go? Answer: Shipping, Duties, Taxes, Warehousing, Depreciation, Design, Brand Mark-up, Retailer Mark-up, etc. Not everyone who touches a pair of footwear in the supply chain gets rich, but most do better than $120 a month! (The sad part, after doing a bit more research, it turns out that the $120 a month is on the higher end for footwear worker pay, see this article citing Nike footwear factory pay - a little over $2 per day.)