Saturday 9 March 2002                                 VAYAKHEL-PIKUDEI

Many years ago I went with my daughter to the local United Colours of Benetton to get her a new duffle bag, the one currently 'cool' at the time. I remarked that the price seemed high for what was basically a shmutter which would have been worth a ¼ the price without the logo. Ilana began to wish she hadn’t asked me to go shopping with her; the sales assistant looked annoyed. “Well,” she said, “you’re wearing a Burberry scarf” “I am indeed,” I replied, “but you didn't need a logo on it to tell you it was a Burberry!”

Ever since the rise of the corporate logo on clothing I’ve always felt that Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas, Ralph Lauren and the like should be paying me for advertising their products.

But that is precisely the idea why the consumer is happy to wear something with a logo - those GAP chinos, Nike trainers or Calvin Klein tee shirt are making a statement about who and what you are. In buying these logo-ed clothes, we are buying a lifestyle - and all the advertising for them transmits that message. Sometimes you have to search hard to even find the brand name being advertised. In the good old days, adverts emphasised the company name and made extravagant promises about better quality. But consumers are wiser these days – we know there’s little difference between this or that branded trainer, shirt or pair of trousers.

For so many of the products are made in similar places and ways, anyway. And that is a further part of the problem. Dyson, the vacuum cleaner manufacturer recently announced that it is moving a large part of its production to Malaysia - with the loss of many jobs in this country. I presume it can produce its products at a fraction of a price that a highly-unionised and decently-paid workforce here would do. That increases Dyson’s profits exponentially, but leaves unemployment in its wake and creates another Asian sweatshop.

But who can avoid this? I wrote this sermon on my Hewlett Packard PC. I wouldn’t be surprised if most or all of it was assembled in a Third World country by people working long hours for minimal wages.

I recently finished reading a book called No Logo by Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist. The title, she explains, is not a literal slogan (“let’s get rid of logos”) but an examination of an anticorporate attitude emerging, especially among young activists. “As more people discover the brand name secrets of the global logo,” she suggests, “their outrage will fuel the next big political movement.” We saw something of it, beyond the wanton violence, at the G7 Summits in Seattle, Genoa and so on.

We are indeed in a global village. I used to enjoy shmoozing through shops when I went abroad, looking for things I couldn’t find in England. For the past 20 years or so, you see primarily the same fast-food outlets, the same corporate logos in the shops. Increasingly these companies have divested themselves - like Dyson - of direct manufacturing. They now subcontract out to Third World Countries with little labour and union law, vast incentives from the governments of those countries, where the workers are often teenagers working long hours for minimal wages. Companies have moved from manufacturing into branding, creating life-style - hence the rise of the logo. Hence also the vast increase in advertising expenditure - in the USA between 1977 and 1998 it rose from $50billion pa to over $200 billion.

Aimed so much at the young and the teenage market, there is the immorality of kids from really poor families feeling pressurised by style and advertising to acquire vastly-overpriced trainers because they have the Nike slash, Reebok or Adidas written on them. Small wonder that mugging of kids by older kids for their trainers has become a standard form of street and school crime.

Starbucks is a classic example of how a lifestyle is being marketed even more than the product itself. After all, they are only selling a cup of coffee. Clever Starbucks, certainly in the States, to have teamed up with bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble. TV soaps like Friends and films like You've got Mail reinforce that lifestyle message about the cup of coffee..

How much, finally, of what we acquire is really essential for human well being? Whatever the benefits of a strong economy might be, we are afflicted by what has been called ‘the escalation of desire.’ What was a luxury yesterday becomes an apparent necessity today, something we can’t live without, or that we feel we are entitled to have. This consumer escalator has a devastating effect on both individuals and society.

And so we end up defining ourselves and others by what we wear, drive, live in, where we go on holiday and so and so on. Few can resist the enormous pressure.

Diderot, the 18^th century French philosopher, wrote an essay called ‘Regrets on parting with my old dressing gown.’ He was given a beautiful new dressing gown to replace a tattered, but beloved one, he had. But then he noticed that the other things in his house started looking shabby in comparison with the new dressing gown. He wound up replacing everything to conform.

This fortnight is Fairtrade Fortnight, inviting us to think about issues of Fair Trade, business ethics, ethical consumerism, ethical kashrut and our consumption patterns.

It asks questions like: how can we bring Jewish values into everyday life, even into mundane tasks like doing the weekly supermarket shop? Are there some things that Jews shouldn’t buy? Are there some things that while they might not be halachically treif, we still shouldn’t eat. As a synagogue what tea, coffee and other provisions should we be buying? How do our consumption patterns affect the livelihood of people producing the things we buy?

We could argue that the interests of the consumer are best served by making things available as cheaply, easily and profusely as possible. Our economic interests are, indeed, best served in that way. But are our spiritual interests best met when we buy goods whose production may have involved the exploitation of adults and children, where people are not paid fair wages or work in decent conditions? What if the food we eat involves the excessive use of pesticides or the degradation and pollution of the land?

We know that the world’s wealth is distributed in a very unequal manner and that many of the products we consume are much too cheap to ensure a decent living to producers in the developing world. How much can a banana farmer, say, have got for his bananas if, after all the middlemen and the supermarket have taken their cut, they still sell at such a ridiculously low price? We may have to not only look at the price but also ask begin to ask about the conditions in which what we buy is produced.

Some argue that it is all relative. Children might be paid a low wage by Western standards, but still more than the standard of the country they live in and they do get some schooling, less than a child here but something nevertheless. Even the little they earn might be the sole source of income for them and their families. This is the so-called Trickle Down Effect - yes, there might be larger benefits for the western companies and consumers, but there is a trickle down of benefit all the way. But trickle down only works if there is a leak, if the multinationals actually allow something to trickle down - for they control the whole process of course.

Fairtrade isn’t opposed to the idea of Free Trade. It recognises that there are lots of grey areas and situations vary from one place to another. But if there weren’t grey areas, there wouldn’t, of course, be an ethical issue. But Fairtrade is saying that we can make people’s lives better by the sorts of consumption choices we make. It is not against capitalism but is arguing for a responsible capitalism.

Logos serve as a potent symbol of rampant capitalism, capitalism at its most exploitative and uncaring. They stand in contrast, for example, to an old Biblical teaching – rhfa ,kugp ihk, tk - about not withholding the wages of a day labourer until the morning. It speaks to us – and this is central to this whole matter – of an imbalance of power in the relationship between the West and the Third World. When there are such imbalances, exploitation of the weaker by the stronger is all too often the outcome.

We could look to the 12^th century teaching of Maimonides. He formulated a ladder of charitable acts, each rung better than the one below. The highest one for him was where our action helps somebody become independent, to stand on their own two feet.

These teachings do no more than state the obvious – but sometimes the obvious needs restating and restating.

Building the tabernacle in the desert was to create a sacred space for the Israelites. It was a very physical space. Rabbi Tony Bayfield suggests that there may also be other forms of ‘sacred space.’ By doing what we can – maybe limited and restricted ways – but doing what we can nevertheless, we can begin to create another sort of sacred space. Not in our synagogues, this time, but in the everyday, mundane world we inhabit: in our homes, in our supermarkets, in our consumption patterns.

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