The American Dream Has Been Outsourced
Ikea’s latest marketing campaign is gaining approval for focusing on the quality of living for people who buy their furniture, and not just the furniture itself. Their full-page print ad asks, “Where did the American Dream Go?” and lists affordability and sustainability among their goals for every household in the U.S. The ad also declares that “all homes are created equal.”
The same slogan is used in a separate ad; while an interracial gay couple lounges together on the couch, a bright blue flag in the background declares that their love, and their Ikea-furnished home, is just as valued as any other.
This is not okay, and here’s why.
The contemporary queer rights movement is seen as being fought on three fronts, or the three “M”s : marriage, the military, and the market. Gay marriage is legal in the U.S. thanks to the Supreme Court’s June 2015 decision, and the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on queer troops was overturned in 2010 (although it is important to note that the U.S. military’s discrimination policy wasn’t updated to include sexual orientation until last year). That just leaves the market, and queer folks and allies have been using their dollars to make it clear that they’ll be as relentless on fighting this final front as they were fighting the other two.
But the issue with fighting for economic equality is that it is impossible to achieve. Capitalism is based on competition and profit, and the owners – not the workers – control the bottom line. This system assigns a dollar value to human bodies and has little regard for their welfare. People who can’t generate profit are ignored or told that their lack of success is due to their own moral failings. In a system like this, I don’t want Ikea being the one to champion queer rights.
Even if a company has a non-discriminatory or queer-friendly workplace, we shouldn’t be relying on businesses for social change. The goal of a company is to entice workers to buy their product. Equality shouldn’t be a marketing gimmick, no matter how well-intentioned or sincere the bigwigs at Ikea are. If queer folks want economic equality, we should be fighting a system that hurts workers, not buying into it.
Ikea asked us where the American Dream went. It was outsourced to third-world countries when American businesses realized they could save money by using slave labor overseas instead of paying fair wages in the U.S. The American Dream is being smothered under the more than $1 trillion in student loan debt. The American Dream has turned into a system where it’s easier to hire models to play a gay couple than it is to protect queer folks from getting fired in almost half of the country.
The Ikea couch may not care which couple uses it, but in the U.S queer households are still far from equal.
