Pietra Rivoli, author of The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy and Georgetown University professor, visited DU to speak to students about her book and business ethics Saturday.
The event at the Cable Center was part of the Daniels School of Business’ “Voices of Experience” series.
Rivoli spoke about her interest in the global economy and how she wanted to study it through something as simple as a T-shirt.
“It’s the life story of a $5.99 T-shirt,” said Rivoli. To explore the relationship between the T-shirt and the global economy she decided to use the structure of a biography where “you have to not just relate the facts about the person’s life, but ideally to illuminate the world in which the life took place.”
Rivoli showed the audience a T-shirt with a parrot design and related its history from production to consumption.This traced the T-shirt through various locations and demonstrated the globalization of modern economy.
The T-shirt’s life began in Lubbok, Texas, where the cotton fiber was grown.
The fiber was shipped to a textile factory in Shanghai, China, where the T-shirt was made. The garment was then returned to the United States, in this case, Washington D.C., where a consumer bought it. After wearing it for a while, the consumer donated the T-shirt to charity, which, in turn, sold it to a private American firm that sells used T-shirts to people in Tanzania, Africa.
“Even this simple product actually makes its way through a number of very different global industries, everything from agriculture to textiles to apparel to used clothing and then again, of course, through the political intrigue that is the Word Trade Organization and that is Washington trade policy,” said Rivoli.
Rivoli told the audience how she wanted to meet the various people involved in this process in order to see the human faces behind the facts.She visited the cotton farmers in Texas, the textile workers in China, the T-shirt salesman and the trade policy makers.
Rivoli spoke about the tendency to forget about the people involved in the process whose concerns are never addressed by those who make the rules.
She told the audience it is easy to forget about the people in the lower ranks and that it is important for students to remember this in their careers.
One example she gave was how this country’s $5 billion cotton subsidy raised world prices for cotton.
This, in turn, lessened the profits made by poorer countries that have less diverse economies.
“We all have the responsibility to look around our businesses and try to identify those cases where the rules are not written by an impartial observer and where the rules have unintentional negative consequences for people who were not at the table,” said Rivoli.
