Julia Dzurenko Blog Post #5: Week Ending June 13th, 2024 | 2024 Lehigh-in-Milan with Professor Gupta

Professor Gupta’s CSR Class

This week in Professor Gupta’s class, we talked a lot about ethics, and ethically sourced products. We watched a documentary called “The Corporation” on Wednesday during class; I thought I was going to be drifting off during the movie, but it really caught my attention because of the realness and authenticity of the documentary. The main speaker in the first half of the documentary went to a factory in Asia and saw and caught the factory owners paying their employees extremely low wages, with terrible and unethical working environments. Before this documentary, Professor Gupta asked us what does it mean for a product to be ethically sourced, and it was a hard question to answer, especially without using the word ‘ethical’. But this documentary really showed the unethical working environments of the employees that make high end or even low end products. In the documentary, it says that the employees will make less than 10 cents per shirt they are making, which will usually cost around 75 USD. This was unbelievable and looking around at my peers, I could tell everyone was shocked and disgusted by the actions of these corporations. This documentary also talked a lot about externalities, whether they are positive or negative. The documentary touched upon how these big corporations will go to these low income countries and let the citizens in desperate need to work for cheap, and then when their average income is higher, they move to another low income country to then boost their income. The film also went into great detail about slavery and the 14th amendment, as well as corporations and the 14th amendment. I remember from the documentary, they said that the 14th amendment was made for slaves to attest to their full natural human right, while corporations took control over that amendment to attest to their ‘conscious’ human rights. Out of around 700 cases back in the day, ~686 were from corporations using the 14th amendment, and ~14 were from black people, trying to gain their full human rights. This was genuinely so disgusting and unbelievable that corporations even have that much power to make the court believe that this amendment applies to them as well, even though the 14th amendment was made for the natural person. I think this topic is so important in today’s society as marketing and advertising online through people and brands is increasing, since the marketing is a wall between you and finding out how the products are made and if they’re made ethically.

Internship Seminar

During this week’s class, we learned a lot about Italy’s history and its application to the economy, culture, and the working environment. We deeply compared Italy’s main cultural standings, like soccer, food, etc., and compared it to our cultural standings like college rivalries, or our great divide in politics currently, and more recently. I learned that Italy has many political parties and coalitions that just work completely different from our politics. I learned that Italy does not have a lot of trust or faith in their government, and there are so many different political parties for different standings, so if you want environmental differences, you would vote for the Green Party, which advocates for a Greenier Italy. But for the US, the differences are wide because our political parties are now separated into basically two radically opposing parties. The difficulty with this is that if you have a more neutral stance, or you have economically conservative views, but a socially liberal stance, who do you vote for? And at this time, 2024 election, the country knows that it is not about political parties, and it is more about the candidates. I find this comparison to Italy to be concerning, but also understandable with pros and cons of each type of government.

Internship in Milan

The weeks during my internships are going by super fast, and I think that it’s easy to say that I am learning much more, and I am understanding my tasks, as well as getting used to the frequent and heavy Italian. I went to a different office yesterday, and I thoroughly enjoyed it because it’s closer, but also because it was louder, busier, and livelier. This was an interesting spark to me because I think I have realized that I like a busier office or space because I don’t feel like I am alone or socially deprived. Yesterday was a big breath of fresh air because I completed my market research to be done by today (Thursday), and we ate food from Puglia for lunch. I think I am integrating well into my internship, so it is a fun adventure and learning experience to go into work everyday.

Travels and Italian Culture

This weekend we traveled to Florence, as I mentioned in the previous blog. But before we went to Florence, the group of us Lehigh students went to a wine tasting at a nearby restaurant. This was a very cool experience because I just thought they were going to give us a couple different types of wine and to taste it. But it wasn’t that at all, when the waiter spent a good 2 hours with us to explain the history of wine and how it should be handled and tasted. It was an interesting cultural perspective because wine in America is so expensive, but good wine here in Italy is only 30 euros. To add on to this, the cultural aspect that interested me the most was the multiple steps to do before and during the tasting of your wine. The first step was to smell the cork, and this was good to know because if you smell the cork, and it smells moldy or like mildew, then you know it is not good and to send it back. The Second step would be to swirl the wine and see how fast/slow the ring drips down,and you can tell if the wine is older or younger. The third step is to bring the glass slowly from your chest and up to your chin to smell the wine, but to make sure to not put it too close to your nose. The last step is to taste the wine. To taste the particular hints of flavors and scents, that will help you enjoy and understand the wine better. This was a very interesting activity to understand the importance of wine in Italy, since it is a agricultural boost fro their economy as well as a multifaceted topic to learn.