Category: Development EN

You may wear the most expensive, best and cleanest clothes but are your hands clean? Your hands might be tainted with corruption, exploitation and dehumanisation? The working class does all the dirty and most dangerous and menial jobs for us. They are poor and exploited and suffer horrible living conditions. And wearing torn and dirty clothes. They are the marginalized of society. And they built...

  What we regard as “normal” is the acceptance of many dysfunctional systems of food production, agriculture, economics, industrialization and science that have lead to our ill-health, inequalities, injustices, domination and the destruction of the planet earth. We accept it because it is the norm and the only world we know. It is like a biologist who has only seen cancerous tissue and...

"...Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It's the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining...

  Almost every aspect of modern life is there, both for good and for ill — our sense of speed, drama, and aggression, the worlds of advertising and consumer goods, engineering and mass-manufacture, and the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signaled landscape.” — J. G. Ballard (in 1971), novelist

This week, Consumers International turn 60. We are delighted to join them in celebrating the extraordinary achievements of the consumer movement over the past 6 decades and their crucial work to build safer, fairer and more sustainable marketplaces.