All About "Hope"

The above scene brings together lot of the ideas present in the readings for this week. Mrs. Glass feels that she is helping Estela to make a better life for herself by giving her an opportunity. But she “went out on a limb” to subject her to the same relentless deadlines and low pay that keep Estela consistently behind in her payments and deliveries. She can never get ahead and is forced into perpetually working in sweatshop conditions, on the brink of losing it all at any minute. For every Mrs. Glass (success story, representing hope for the workers) there are hundreds of Estelas and her employees getting stepped on under the guise of “helping them,” so that Mrs. Glass can maintain her tenuous position of power. It would all crumble down if Estela ever did get the means to open her own shop and sell her $600 dresses for $600 instead of $18.

A constant theme throughout the movie is the pride Estela has in her work. Her motivation is to make finer quality gray dresses than anyone else. Pride accessed for motivation despite horrendous working conditions is something Nielsen cites about the motivations of Costumers in Hollywood; “Costumers prided themselves on creating fabulous costumes seen on ‘the most beautiful women in the world’ on giant screens. The studios could then count on the loyalty of these workers because of the degree of personal satisfaction they found in their jobs which became the “intrinsic reward” for thirty-five years of low pay, low status and backbreaking work.” I also found this notion of pride surfacing in “No Sweat.” Many of the first person accounts of garment workers in “No Sweat” came from a sense of pride in even having a job and the thought that you were working, earning something, and could possibly provide something for your family. But of course, this only works if there are the Mrs. Glasses out there who have succeeded within the system. Pride can only happen if you have hope, like Estela designing her own line, that someday you too could escape the oppression.

Psychologically, it sounds a lot like the rhetoric of 8 years of Bush’s “trickle down economics.” Those with the money have the power and make the rules to keep themselves at the top, widening economic gap at the expense of the extremely poor. Clearly the recent economic crash has proved the flaws in this faulty system of deregulation. So how do we escape this? Many of the articles in “No Sweat” and even in the Nielsen were bent on making change by empowering the oppressed through organization, unionization and grass roots campaigns aimed at consumers. Although it is often touted that the power is in the consumers, a study in one of the articles said only 50% of consumers even think about the working conditions in the factories where their clothes are made. Honestly I think that is idealistic. I mean American Apparel, a company actively trying to eliminate sweatshops in LA by charging a ridiculous high price for a T-shirt can only charge this crazy price, not because people believe in their cause and are willing to pay more, but because their trendy advertising with waifishly oppressed models has clearly situated them within the Hollywood fashion elite. People are paying for the American Apparel brand, not their fair wage politics. And at what price? Clearly they are not supporting healthy body image amongst women with those ads. If we go back all the way to the beginning of the semester, I’m sure that American Apparel ads would be featured selections in the next incarnation of Killing Us Softly.

So really, it is all up to Obama to find a way out of this self-perpetuating cycle of oppression, that has traditionally been fueled by the idea of “Hope.” Fingers crossed and here is hoping :)