Hello! I have just finished this week's assignments, and I have so many feelings and things to say. I can't wait to discuss these topics with you all!

I want to start by saying I'm feeling kind of overwhelmed with the all the information this week. Not in a bad way really, I'm just shocked by a lot of things I found in my research. I always knew fast fashion was a thing, but I never looked into it very deeply. I enjoyed the film we watched this week, Clothes to Die For, it put a lot of things into perspective for me. One thing that I connected from the film, chapter 8, and the lectures was the workers in Bangladesh are very alienated from their labor and each other. Expanding on what we discussed in our last thread, these people only had the choices of either selling their labor for a wage or not surviving. Some of them had no other choice but to sell their labor for wages as children to help support their family. Continuing on that topic, during my research I found that Nike has violated local minimum wage laws at their factories all over the globe. Specifically, the ones in Vietnam. "In Vietnam people are illegally forced to work 65 hours per week for 15-20 cents per hour..." (Lormand 2017) *. When I read this it really concerned me. While reading chapter 2 in our textbooks, I became familiarized with the terms economic liberalization and free trade agreements. I believe that free trade agreements have a lot to do with the labor conditions we are seeing across the world. “… opponents, including labor unions, workers, farmers, citizen watch groups, environmentalists assert that NAFTA has caused massive job loss, economic instability, and displacement as well as increased involuntary migration and environmental degradation” (Sorrells pg. 38). I can only feel like the people that are creating and signing the free trade agreements only have themselves in mind. I believe they only want cheap labor, and they know developing nations won’t retaliate because they don’t have a choice of working. At the end of my unit assignment, I brought everything together by watching the lecture for the week. It really tied the information in my research together so that I could really think about my current position and framing in capitalism. I felt that the thoughts I have written about above were really validated when Anna was lecturing about the Labor Theory of Value. It just shows that the capitalists are only looking for the most bang for their buck, and will make poor ethical decisions to feed their pocket when most of the men and women manufacturing their clothes can not even feed themselves.