Craig Foster has been critical of organised sports endorsements of fossil fuels and big oil sponsorships. He claimed, “Sport should be raising the alarm, not legitimising the culprits” he told Yahoo News.
He’s wrong. Some facets of society should remain pure and free from the tentacles of overzealous activism.
We are starting to fall victim to the mass hysteria of climate activism.
Activism has a place in society. The issue is where that should occur. Activists like Craig Foster seem to think that it is appropriate to use any public platform to voice an array of discontents about human actions.
Foster is against fossil fuels; he told Yahoo News, “It is time that all fans let their favourite teams and sports know that the wellbeing of our kids, and theirs is more important than the tainted funds on offer from fossil fuel companies.”
Hold on Craig, maybe it is time to stop perpetuating a double standard. While figures like Foster focus on the climate apocalypse of the future, sports teams, fans and Western society has not addressed a much more pressing issue: how our clothes are manafactured by third world slave labour.
If we are going to entertain the necessity of sport to act as a moral authority for teaching kids, then why not discuss how sporting attire is manufactured in countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and China?
If the purpose of sport is to draw attention to global iniquities, then the harsh working conditions in the Third World should be at the top of the list. And surely, the privations of children working in ‘sweatshops’ are a more morally pressing issue than the ‘dangers’ of fossil fuels to the environment.
Countries like Australia benefit from cheap ‘slave labour’. China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam are the biggest importers of clothing to Australia.
Yet I don’t hear activists like Craig Foster pressing for sporting codes to condemn the manufacturing of clothing in the third world, where factory workers work in appalling conditions.
Some of the biggest brands in the world are notorious for using sweatshops in third-world countries to then import to the West.
According to the World counts website, ‘250 million children between 5 and 14 work in sweatshops for up to 16 hours per day.’
In 2013, the infamous Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh collapsed, leaving over 1,000 people dead. What degree of responsibility do we, as Westeners, have here?
I am not arguing that I have a solution to these issues, but peacocking the virtuous climate-saving routine is ironic when the same social justice mafia tends to ignore the human tragedy of how our clothes are made in the West.
You can’t have it both ways. Either sport is designed to fulfil a desire to see competition and fulfil business interests, or it is a social justice platform designed to raise social awareness for generations.
Thinking that sport is the latter is fine as long as you are morally consistent.
Before Craig Foster and others want to preach the message of correcting the business of sport, we ought to examine the double standard no one seems to care about.
For every argument against the human contribution to environmental destruction, there’s one to be made for the human contribution to human destruction. How can we only focus on saving the environment while millions of children are undergoing slave labour that we as westerners, contribute to?
Every time we purchase clothing that was made in the Third World, we contribute to the economy of this process. So before we get on our high horses, we should think twice about moralizing, unless, of course, we now believe that the environment is more important than us?
Retired Australian soccer player turned refugee advocate in the “freedom cage” to highlight the plight of refugees in detention, Photographs by Matt Hrkac ,licensed under CC BY 2.0
