products made in China under awful working conditions

You’ll be glad to know that this is just propaganda.

Vegetarian and ‘anti-establishment’ for 25+yrs

Work is hard. I’ve worked for souless corporations, it’s hard not to. Sometimes you just have to be servant class and have no other option. Just be sure that you are taking money from them without giving them any excess effort. You can always work towards other opportunities. If you want to do something else, learn to do it. You can learn so many things for free. I just recently accepted a new position with a local company that shares my values. Most of the skills that got me there were things I learned on my own over the last decade. I didn’t go to school for this, nor do I have any directly comparable job experience. Before my last corporate hustle I had a long term job with a local non-profit for many years. I also did not start that position by having the necessary experience. Don’t lose hope, there are always better opportunities in the future.

I control how I spend my money. If I don’t like a company or product I don’t give them any money. Sometimes that means I spend more elsewhere. Sometimes I just have to give up something. I do allow for guilty pleasures occasionally (chocolate).

My grocery bill is minimal because I don’t eat meat, I don’t eat a lot of processed food and I don’t over-eat. I also grow a lot of food (this time of year half or more of my meal ingredients come out of the garden).

The most important thing about HOW I LIVE LIKE THIS?

I don’t judge other people who can’t.

It requires some sacrifice and not everyone can handle that. But I do encourage everyone to try, even a little. If every single person put in effort to be 10% “better” the world would be much better.

Step one: get a better definition of evil

You can’t, or at least, you can’t not support evil in some way and exist in anything approaching normal society.

Everyone has their own tolerance for ethical things, which changes with their daily circumstances. Some people literally can’t afford to pay the extra that some such choices cost, or don’t have the time to search them out, or just don’t have the desire or will. And there’s several levels of this too - at least their core inner belief, and what they tell the world they do.

Remember, it’s all or something, not all or nothing.

For me, I look at each major category of things in my life a few times a year and ask myself how I can improve the ethics of my participation.

So for food, I have been vegetarian for years now, which is good, but lately I have been trying to cut out most processed foods. I also have started shopping more and more local, getting as much of my food as I can from local co-ops, individual sellers, and small local grocery chains.

For software, I’m FOSS everything as much as I can be. 100% Linux on my computers and servers, and I have replaced almost all my programs with FOSS alternatives. Even my phone doesn’t run stock Android.

For work, try to find places to work that roughly align with good principles. For instance, try to get a job at a credit union vs a traditional bank, or try to find an employee-owned establishment vs a traditional top-down corporation.

If you have to work for a corpo, try to pick one that has a good reputation with unions and workers, like Costco, vs Starbucks or Walmart.

Capitalism is a machine that grinds us all down, so don’t feel guilty about not being perfect. But do the best you can to reject it, little steps at a time. Always be improving, bit by bit.

China’s working conditions are steadily improving, so that’s not really a big problem, plus a huge amount of commodities are either produced in the global south by imperialist companies from the global north outsourcing labor, or from imperialist countries using resources carved out of the global south. You can boycott the worst companies, but you are forced to interact with most under capitalism. Better to be made in a socialist country like China than directly support imperialism.

The best you can do is to boycott what you can, and join an org, so you can hopefully be a part of the solution. PSL is a good option if you live in the US, but do research on what orgs have local chapters for you.

Nowadays I mostly, unexpectedly, draw the line at whether the product is good. I haven’t really trained my mental ethics muscle because frankly most of the unethical stuff just isn’t high quality.

Often I use ethics not as a “line” but as a proxy for the quality of something. In a world where we’re bombarded with too many choices boycotting is more of an advantage than disadvantage.

In the rare instance when something is good and unethical, like meat, it becomes a case-by-case thing. In the case of meat I stay away from pork (because that’s the most inhumane) and obviously I don’t touch any American meat.

EDIT: The topic here was work. Which is a tough one because we’re basically not given a choice on jobs. I would never do a job that actively makes the world a worse place, but I would work for a for-profit corporation … except my quality argument still carries over here. For-profit corporations are horrible places to work.

I think its less about precisely where you draw the line, because that would assume you will be able to perfectly practice your ethics.

More important is that you are imperfectly practising your ethics, rather than not at all. Do you consider nestle evil enough to boycott but you haven’t found a suitable replacement for 1 product? That’s fine, boycott the rest of the products you would have got from them.

The harder you try to define the line, the harder it gets to actually implement in practice, which is the most important part.

Where I draw my line is a gut feeling more than anything. I won’t support meta or amazon or any of Musk’s ventures, I try to avoid nestle but they own half the food industry so if a product isn’t from nestle or one of the subsidiaries that I’ve memorised, I’ll consider it fair game most of the time. I’d probably look for a job elsewhere if my company started being evil but I wouldn’t leave until I had a job lined up.

Depends of course. But when I moved states to get closer to my in-laws I looked for programming jobs in the nearest city. There were exactly two available. One was for an address broker. I only applied to the other one.

It’s pretty impossible not to be tangentially connected with someone bad somewhere. Unless I have reasonable grounds to think the production of something was directly unethical I can’t and don’t worry about it.

For example, if you buy a thing from a poor country, there’s a chance a slave made it, but a greater chance it was part of somebody’s ticket out of rural poverty, and there’s no way to tell. On the other hand, meat is always meat (unless it’s lab-grown I guess, but that technology doesn’t work very well to date).

I work for a state agency and that’s going well because the state’s values and my own overlap enough for me to be ok being part of the machine. This is in California. I would never have a state job in Texas. But I would never find myself living in Texas to being with.

I look to see if the product in on the BDS list. The No Thanks app makes it as easy as a search or barcode scan

For me there are a few no gos:

• working for a weapons manufacturer
• working for a company that does business with saudi arabia, north korea, russia, and similar authoritarian states/dictatorships
• working for any FANG company (and obviously any company owned by elmo)
• working for car manufacturers
• I try to avoid buying products produced in the US, China, and Israel as much as possible
• I also try to avoid any company that hosts its stuff on AWS, but that’s quite challenging, if you even know in the first place

Anything that’s:

• pro-fascism
• anti-(queer) human rights

So in practice this means I don’t buy at all from companies where the CEO earns way more than their workers, where the companies are not unionised, and American, where the companies are from authoritarian countries.

I don’t drive a car either, and so don’t finance the petrol states’ main buffer.

Easiest way to do this, buy local, buy from stores focusing on green stuff. Don’t buy anything from large stores.

There really should be an app for this, where you can scan a product for whether it satisfies the checkmarks. Or through which you can order products like that. It won’t list products that break worker’s and human rights, and so on.

think big part is looking at alternatives, we dont NEED nestle bc we have other alternatives that can do what nestle does but there isnt really a alternative to super cheap items from aliexpress or a giid alternative to facebook and twitter (bsky for twitter but its got a lobg ways to go)