Thanks so much to Rachel Karpf for this special May Day guest post.  Rachel is the blogger for the NoSweat Shop, an initiative that seeks to help ease the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by supplying unionized jobs and living wages to Palestinians living in the Bethlehem in the West Bank. They’re a pioneer in fair trade fashion and believe that a global economy means a global labor movement.  Check them out here.

On the banner of the Jew and the Carrot reads a quote by Paul Cezanne, “There will come a day when a carrot, freshly observed, will spark a revolution.” What if the day has already come when a T-shirt, union-made, has sparked a revolution?

No Sweat, the brand name of Bienstar International is a radical new approach to making clothing.  All No Sweat Apparel is made by Union members who are paid living wages.  Most notable however is their factory located on Virgin Mary Street in Bethlehem, West Bank.  This factory, which is affiliated with Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU), not only pays its workers living wages which allows them to support their families and thus have an alternative to terrorism, but also makes 100% organic cotton T-shirts.

According to Helen Exim Corporation,  ”conventional cotton crops occupy 3 % of the world cultivated areas. Nevertheless, it represents 25 % of pesticides and 10 % of insecticides bought in the world. This problem is eliminated by the use of 100% organic cotton, not to mention that many of our products  also contain no animal ingredients and have never been tested on animals.

Yet this revolution is not being led solely by a Union-made T-shirt.  As many of our readers may already be aware of, today is May Day or International Workers Day.  It commemorates  the Hay Market Massacre in Chicago in 1886, where police fired into a crowd of demonstrators after a stick of dynamite had been thrown at them.  This led to approximately 16 deaths and up to forty were wounded.

The riots and strikes that had led up to this tragedy had been caused by a publisher’s demand for an eight-hour workday printed just before May 1.  Due to the bravery and determination of laborers across the country over the years, many reforms have been made, and we often forget how much we owe to the Unions.  A five-day work week, an eight-hour day, health care, and safe working conditions are all rights that we now take for granted, yet had to be fought for just a few generations ago.

Nonetheless the struggle is far from over.  Migrant and seasonal farmworkers, who are responsible for picking much of the produce that we so carefully prepare and set on our table, are often taken advantage of and abused.  The Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs which seeks to end this injustice notes that ” most of the more than 3 million people that work in agriculture in the United States earn minimum wage or less and have annual incomes below $10,000 per year.”  Being a environmental-conscious consumer means being concerned about not only how a product is produced, but the conditions of the worker making it.