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Planet Money Makes A T Shirt Summary

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Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt was an interesting story published by NPR about how globalization is an integral part of making everyday items such as a t-shirt. This story contained five chapters (Cotton, Machines, People, Boxes, and You) that follow the hands that an item will pass through before being bought by a consumer, otherwise known as a commodity chain. Each chapter follows a t-shirt or the material used to make it and discusses issues with economics and ethics that revolve around the product as each chapter discusses how globalization has strong ties with a t-shirt.
Technology plays an important role in the global economy. Even in farms where people wouldn’t expect too much technology to be housed. Bowen Flowers, a cotton farmer in …show more content…

In the chapter People, we meet Jasmine and are able to follow what her life is like working in the clothing factory. Jasmine lives in poverty, however, the poverty she’s living in now is not as bad as what she experienced in the small village where she grew up. Her family went into debt trying to pay for her older sister’s dowery, so in order to help offset the costs, Jasmine decided to travel to a larger city to work in the garment industry. This is an example of internal migration, a concept that exists in many countries where people move within the borders of their own country. In the factory where Jasmine works, she is underpaid and has to live with multiple people in a house where there is no running water. Unfortunately, Jasmine is not the only one who is in this position. Millions of people in Bangladesh are in the garment industry and choose to take low paying jobs and work long hours rather than exist in a worse situation where they had originally been raised in. In another article, Two Sisters, A Small Room And The World Behind A T-Shirt, the story of two sisters, who also work in a clothing factory, named Shumi and Minu is told. These girls lived in a small village where they struggled to survive. They even had three younger sisters who died very young because the family had trouble feeding themselves. They have a similar story to Jasmine as they both live with …show more content…

Doing so allows more product to be transferred around the globe and if problems occur, it’s usually at a Customs and Border Patrol officer. In the article, The Giant Book That Creates And Destroys Entire Industries, It talks more about how location can affect entire industries. A few years ago, the United States signed a free-trade agreement in which Columbia would not have to pay any tariffs. If Columbia did have to pay tariffs, the CEO of the company who made the shirts had said that they would be unable to ship their products to America (Goldstein, 2013). As a result, of the free trade agreement, the factories remain in the countries where they are, however, some people are worried about their jobs being outsourced to a different country. As the economy gets better in Columbia, the more likely it will be that a company may pull out of the factory as it becomes increasingly expensive to have simple products made in a country where wages are higher. This frightens people as they will lose their jobs if these companies pull out of the country. As mentioned before, the worst thing that can happen to the employees that both activists and CEO’s agree on, is if a company pulls out of the country to find cheaper costs of production elsewhere (“Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt,”

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