The Washington Monthly

April 28, 2008

PLEDGE WEEK....It's fundraising time again! As you all know, since I mentioned this during our last fundraising drive, the Washington Monthly is a nonprofit organization. Ad revenue only covers a small part of our expenses, which means that we depend on contributions from readers to stay up and humming. So if you like the blog and you like the Washington Monthly, we're asking for your help again. Ten bucks, twenty bucks, fifty bucks, whatever you can afford.

You can donate via check, PayPal, or credit card. Just click here to help out.

And what kind of reporting does your contribution keep alive? This month's cover story is by Washington Monthly editor T.A. Frank, who used to work for a Los Angeles firm that specialized in the field of "compliance consulting," or "corporate social responsibility monitoring." In other words, they inspected sweatshops, both in the U.S. and overseas, to make sure they followed some minimal set of labor standards. In "Confessions of a Sweatshop Inspector," he tells us which clients were good and which ones were bad:

You may get the sense that I'm not Wal-Mart's biggest fan. You'd be right. I betray no confidence here, since Wal-Mart wasn't a client of ours while I was at my company. Nevertheless, I still got to visit plenty of its supplier factories. That's because any given factory usually has more than one customer, and during an audit we would always ask the bosses to name their other customers. Wal-Mart was often one of them. And its suppliers were among the worst I saw — dangerous, nasty, and poorly paid even by local (usually Chinese) measures. I noticed that Wal-Mart claimed to require factories to maintain decent labor standards — but why did it seem to think it could find them among the lowest bidders?

Read the whole thing to get the inside story on how compliance firms work — or don't.

—Kevin Drum 12:13 AM Permalink | Trackbacks | Comments (11)

Comments

What? The McCain add aint gettin no clicks? Go figure =)

Posted by: Jet on April 28, 2008 at 1:40 AM | PERMALINK

First! And I avoided the rush and got the donation out of the way, too.

Posted by: Blue Girl, Red State on April 28, 2008 at 1:42 AM | PERMALINK

I've been a subscriber for 25 years or so. I get to skip these posts guiltlessly.

Posted by: bad Jim on April 28, 2008 at 4:00 AM | PERMALINK

I work for a Very Large Corporation that makes us take a training session every year reminding us that we're only allowed to buy company-branded items from vendors whose entire chain of supply has been vetted.

Of course, they do this because they once got caught in an embarrassing sweatshop scandal, but at least they seem to be enforcing things on the domestic end, which gives me some hope that they're doing it on the international end, too.

It's hard to be a liberal and work for a giant evil corporation, but the employee benefits are really good and a minor goddess has gotta eat and pay rent like anyone else.

Posted by: Mnemosyne on April 28, 2008 at 11:13 AM | PERMALINK

If you DON'T pledge, you get an Amy Sullivan post and Megan McArdle link here every day.

Seriously, I'd give some money if I had a guarantee from Glastris that Amy Sullivan wouldn't be posting here anymore and that Kevin would stop trying to be Mickey Kaus at times.s

Posted by: SocraticGadfly on April 28, 2008 at 11:18 AM | PERMALINK

So, if I donate to Blue Girl and she donates to you, I don't have to, right?

Posted by: the ugly duckling on April 28, 2008 at 11:34 AM | PERMALINK

Yeah, I know...

Posted by: the ugly duckling on April 28, 2008 at 11:37 AM | PERMALINK

I guess what I don't understand is why a magazine needs to have fundraising drives. Is it losing money? Is it for a special project that can't be funded out of normal revenues? Is it because of the cost of all of us leechers reading Kevin Drum for free? Maybe if WM is going to have fundraisers, it should do a better job of actually explaining why it needs the money. Then I might donate. But just holding out your hands and asking for cash isn't going to get you very far.

Posted by: Pocket Rocket on April 28, 2008 at 11:39 AM | PERMALINK

If Kevin was trying to be Mickey Kaus, he'd shave his head, look like someone was holding rotten eggs under his nose at all times and spew paranoid anti-immigrant, anti-minority bile. Kevin may play "reasonable Democrat" some times, but he's not a bitter, talentless hack.

Posted by: Kaus Blows Goats on April 28, 2008 at 11:39 AM | PERMALINK

Your fundraising would probably go better if Inkblot were on the cover of the magazine.

Actually what I want to know is why my Washington Monthly arrives so much later after the issue has been posted on the web - like 3 to 4 weeks. The mail is not that slow.

Posted by: optical weenie on April 28, 2008 at 12:13 PM | PERMALINK

Kaus Blows:

I got the comparison idea from a post at Roger Ailes. I "defended" Kevin by saying he was more a squish rather than Kaus Lite.

Kevin may not be Kausian on most social issues, but he is indeed one on economics.

Don't argue or I'll send Amy Sullivan to your house.

Posted by: SocraticGadfly on April 28, 2008 at 3:17 PM | PERMALINK