Beneath Us is a cautionary tale of what can happen when migrants looking for a better life are vilified and forced to live in an “underground” economy. People need to feel what it’s like working in a factory, lost in a life of debt and poverty, making the things we touch and wear everyday. This is the disconnect I’ve been trying to bridge with my films, first by being the second generation immigrant bringing viewers to back to my mother’s home country as I did in My Cultural Divide (2006), and now bringing the factory literally into our backyard. Do we choose to treat factory workers differently because they live a world away? Or is it that we don’t care where things come from at all, as long as they are cheap and plentiful?

I want to bring this dystopian but all too real world to screen, and fill it with believable characters with relatable human dreams and faults. Sometimes a fiction film is capable of allowing an audience to experience the reality of something better than a documentary, and this is what I hope to do with Beneath Us. The factory in the short may not exist within the borders of the United States or Canada, but the result is the same – workers are exploited and then ignored by the people who gladly buy the things they make.

OAC is only supplying some of the funding so our team will be reaching out to the community to try to finance the rest of the budget. Contact us through this website, and we’ll definitely keep you up to date when we start our crowdfunding campaign.

Recently a “This American Life” broadcast highlighted the injustices at Apple Foxconn factories and sparked an outrage. There has been a great deal of discussion about outsourcing and improving working conditions because of it, which I think is an amazingly positive thing. Any time activists and ordinary concerned citizens get together to put the word out on a problem there is the possibility of real change happening. It represents a chance for the workers, who are all too often forgotten cogs in the machinery of mass production, to get a fair share of the pie.

The problem with this damning report is that it was almost entirely fabricated. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/03/npr-retracts-foxconn-episode/

Inside a shoe workshop in Bangladesh

I made my sweatshop labour / cultural exploration documentary “My Cultural Divide” quite a while ago. It focused on a different product, clothes. But the principals are the same in terms of corporate responsibility, and protecting corporate image. When I made the movie I didn’t want to focus on one company or brand because abuses happen across the spectrum of manufacturing. To do so puts an unfair spotlight on them, when the problem is more universal. This is what I think happened in the situation with Apple, and unfortunately now that this report has been revealed as “theatre”, it will cause the opposite effect: complete apathy and confusion in the part of the consumer.

Consumers are already apathetic and confused enough. Conflicting reports about who is good and who is bad make it impossible to keep up with who we can “ethically” buy from, especially if those companies change from year to year. Does someone now say, “Okay, so it’s good to buy from Apple again? Here’s my credit card!”  I fear this is exactly what will happen, the same as when they buy their new hairdryer, their new sound system, or their new blender. (I must point out this entire episode didn’t exactly hurt Apple financially as it seems the iPad 3, released today, is a huge hit, and their stock price is as high as ever).

This is exactly why the only thing that will possibly work is exerting public pressure to get all companies to become members of  independent labour rights organizations, or for governments to ensure outsourcing companies comply to some set of standards. I admit that there are major problems to this solution as well, but it would be better than the completely unregulated, anti-union (or forced government union as it is in China) situation that exists today.

Giant companies like Apple or Walmart exert pressure on subcontracted manufacturers to get better prices for their components or clothes as the case may be. This is a reality, and it’s hard to fault them for it. The problem occurs when that push to the bottom eats away at the individual’s salary (or their workplace safety) and not the profit margin for the subcontracting company. Having a set of standards from an independent labour rights organization forces these subcontracting companies not to take away from the workers who are already making so little. Like I mentioned, enforcing those standards is the big issue – but a problem I think a solution can be found for.

In all fairness, Apple is probably one of the best when it comes to ensuring employee (even those subcontracted) safety and livelihood in the electronics industry. This whole debacle was an unfair attack at the big and easy target. It didn’t help things that Apple is also notoriously secretive about their products, which probably makes it difficult for reporters to get access to manufacturing plants. It is this level of secrecy which breeds suspicion, and as much as I do understand Apple’s mandate to have NSA level security on the specs to their latest gadget, this was probably the reason why the public was so willing to buy into the story of horrible abuse and slave like wages.

For Apple’s part, they have let down the curtain a bit, and have now asked the Fair Labour Association to access some of their factories. This happened as a result to that damning, albeit factually false, report. I don’t know what to think of this – on one hand Apple is doing something I think they (and everyone else) should have done a long time ago. On the other, it was an action sparked by a lie (or a theatre piece that was misrepresented, if you take Mike Daisey to his word).

I am left with this thought, which is similar to the ones I had eight years ago while crouching in a sweatshop, chatting with a child making sandals. We should do something about this, it’s not a problem that will just go away. The next time you buy something, anything, write the company that made it a note. Say you read that Apple recently had the Fair Labour Association investigate their factories, and you think that company X should do that too, because you care about the people who make the products you use. It will make a difference. And considering you are wearing clothes that were made at pennies an hour, and browsing on a computer that may have poisoned the small hands making it, it is the very least you can do.

Everyone’s seen this video by now, but I thought I should comment on it regardless.  My first impression is that it’s brilliant.  I have a very soft spot, like about a billion others, for The Simpsons even though I haven’t really seen about 12 of the last seasons.  Anyhow, before going on take a look if you haven’t seen it already.

After seeing it a few times my opinion stays pat: brilliant.  It’s true that I could say that this dumbs the issue of sweatshops down to a homer simpson level, and making black humour over the very serious issues of child labour is not productive.  But I don’t believe that.  I think anything, especially in mass media, that makes people think critically on even a subconscious level about sweatshops and their own personal consumption, is good.  I also think that the whole discussion about sweatshops can be unapproachably dark, and sometimes a joke can start the conversation going, breaking the ice.  How many discussions, serious discussions about sweatshops do you think got started by this viral video?  It’s got 2.5 million hits thus far, so even if 1% of people started talking, that’s a huge impact.

A unique magical taste.

My Cultural Divide tried to do this to a point, but only with a micro fraction of the viewership.  I am proud of my film, and I am glad that people still have the chance to see it online via this website.  But I could never have the viewership a a major tv show on a major network has. Hopefully, people who have begun to think about working conditions for adults and children (and unicorns) because of Banksy and The Simpsons, will seek out more information and more in depth discussions. Maybe some of you found yourselves here because of it.  If that’s the case, you’re welcome to watch my film, start up a discussion, or follow some of the many links on sweatshops connected to this one.

My Cultural Divide Official Site

I didn’t actually make this title, mine was “Bangladeshi Garment Workers”, just to set the record straight. In any case, this was a short film I made for Current TV while visiting Dhaka while showing My Cultural Divide at a film festival there. It was important for me to reconnect with the issues and people while visiting again, and I was really glad to have met a lot of new activists and workers that are trying to make changes to the way things are done. Please take a look and tell me what you think:

Lots of people are watching My Cultural Divide online, and it makes me very happy. I think putting the film online with a CC license was one of the best things I have ever done – it gives me great satisfaction that this issue is in the minds of many people, and the film creates discussion and hopefully creates some good. I am about to shoot another documentary, albeit one not as focused on politics as my first, so it is exciting that this doc lives on in this space.

The holiday season is upon us and it’s time to start collecting those presents for friends and family! In celebration of this festive time I’ve decided to put my entire feature documentary “My Cultural Divide” on the internet for anyone to watch free of charge. In fact – you can download it, pass it along, and screen it for groups if you’d like. My Cultural Divide played in many film festivals around the world, including the Montreal World Film Festival, the Visions du Réel (Switzerland), and even now in film classes at the University of Zurich.

Here’s the link: http://vimeo.com/6393377

And the film’s website: http://www.lutchmedial.ca/myculturaldivide/

There’s a reason I am doing this now, and it’s because of the documentary’s focus on sweatshop labour in Bangladesh and the rest of the world. It shows garment workers inside the factories and their plight, as well as the difficult choices conscientious consumers face when standing at the checkout. And although the film is about clothing manufacturing, the same applies to virtually every product we buy including electronics, toys, and even a lot of our food. That said, I am not telling you to stop buying entirely – just when you do go out shopping this year, take a little time to think about where the things you put in your basket came from, and at what cost. Often there are alternatives out there, and even when there are not, a quick email or letter demanding sweatshop free products to a big corporation actually does make a difference. Better yet, email you Member of Parliament or Congressperson and tell them this issue means a lot to you!

I am not going to say much more because the film speaks for me – but here are a few places you can get information about the subject of sweatshop labour:

National Labor Committee: http://www.nlcnet.org/

Unitied Students Against Sweatshops: http://usas.org/

The Maquila Solidarity Network: http://en.maquilasolidarity.org/

You can always contact me about the film as well at info@lutchmedial.ca and if you are interested in buying a DVD copy of My Cultural Divide (better quality and you can play it easily on a TV) they are now available for $15 + Shipping and Handling.

Happy Holidays, and enjoy the film!