Happy 4th of July! All of us at Fair Trade Atlanta wish you a fun and safe holiday. If you need ideas of what to bring to the barbecue, check out these great fair trade recipes!

Now onto this post… 

When people site their reasoning for choosing to purchase fair trade products, you will most often hear them saying how it ensures fair wages, empowers women, and helps alleviate poverty in other countries, which is all true. However, I very rarely hear people site another benefit of fair trade practices: more jobs for American workers.

Since we’re in an election year, we’ve all heard it: jobs are being shipped overseas where workers can be paid less. This causes the manufacturing industry in America to shrink. However, if more fair trade practices are employed, it will not necessarily be cost effective for companies to move, keeping more jobs open for American laborers. This is an argument hardly never brought up, but we thought it was a patriotic way to say that fair trade is not only good for people in other nations, but good for all of us.

However, this can only happen when companies start seeing the demand for unethical labor-made products shrink. This will only happen when WE increase demand for fair trade products. So, this Fourth of July, and every day, let’s improve the lives of American workers and workers around the globe by choosing to buy fair trade.