When we go shopping, we hope the people we buy from are nice people. 

But not only nice to us, but also to their employees. 

And their niceness should extend throughout their entire ‘supply chain’. 

What is a supply chain? 

While your local grocer may have an employee that keeps milk on the shelves, 

the supply chain for milk includes the truck drivers that haul the milk to the store. 

The supply chain also includes the employees in the processing plants that bottle the milk, and the people at the dairy farm that milk the cows, and the plumbers that work on the wells that keep the cattle watered. 

And the complete supply chain even includes the people that makes medicine to keep the cows healthy,

and the miners that recover the ores used to make the stainless steel equipment used in dairies. 

That was a quick view of how far a supply chain can reach. We want the people in the our supply chains to be nice, 

so their employees can be happy, not be economic slaves. 

People who just want something for nothing and don't care how employees are treated. 

That's not nice or admirable.

The picture above is of a mere child, who should be in school, but is forced to mine minerals from the ground, in Africa, 

that make cell phone batteries for Americans. 

Here  is a truth about money-hungry people.

When people try to get rich, they are often willing to abuse other people to do it. 

When workers have terrible conditions or are lied to about what they will be paid, they become unhappy. 

When we hear of people being treated poorly while making things for us, we should do what we can to make things better. 

A lot of people buy from the internet, but there even US internet businesses, that treat their workers poorly. 

For example, rest rooms can be so far apart from their work stations that it takes their entire 15 minute break to get to the rest room and back. There are a lot of tricks that greedy people use to try to squeeze more out of their employees than they should. 

Part of good consumerism is selecting suppliers that are fair with their employees. 

While there are some people who will never be happy if they have to work, a lot of people know what a good job is, 

and are happy to work for good employers. 

 This doesn’t mean that we have to thoroughly investigate the supply chain of every product we buy, before we buy their product; but when we hear something bad, we need to investigate it. 

Eric J. Rose

middlegrademysteries.com

photo: miningafrica.net