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People often complain about how reality TV dumbs us down, but BBC3's recent Blood, Sweat and Luxuries and its two predecessors use the medium to great effect.
Aside from allowing us to exercise collective moral outrage towards the infuriatingly self-assured young Oscar in the last series, the programmes have helped millions of viewers to connect at a very basic, human level with some of the people who are usually just another poverty statistic.
Most of us are aware that more than one billion people in the world meet the World Bank's dollar-a-day poverty threshold. But, like trying to visualise the size of the UK budget deficit, such eye-popping figures are often just overwhelming rather than empowering.
And that's just as true for corporate bigwigs sitting in their glass offices as it is for us.
But who could not be affected by watching a young Ethiopian shoe maker talk about how she barely manages to survive on her £14 a month wages, or seeing barefoot children scavenging for copper on a toxic electronic dump in Ghana?
Likewise, I've realised in my own work that any amount of academic reports, news articles or campaign exposés amount to little compared to hearing workers themselves tell it how it is.
In my recent visit to Tanzania I met Agnes, a flower farm worker, who told me how she wished she could save enough money to buy a metal roof for her house - her straw one lets the rain in. And I will always remember my visit two years ago to a very poor and remote area of India, where Praveen, a homeworker, described how she'd organised a self-help group of women homeworkers in her village after being educated about her rights as a worker.
Many ethical trade staff in our member companies understand this. They realise that to win the senior management buy-in they so urgently need for their ethical trade programmes to succeed, they must get to their hearts as well as their heads - and that means taking them to where the workers are.
Some have taken senior commercial bods - even CEOs - to visit supplier factories in the poorest of their sourcing countries, to see for themselves what conditions are like, and to actually talk to the people who make their products.
In practical terms, the result of these visits has been increased support for ethical trade from the very top. Critically, this has led to bigger budgets and substantially revamped ethical trading programmes, impacting many more workers.
So if you're an ethical trade manager battling to get your senior managers to take your job seriously, sit them down in front of an episode of Blood Sweat and Luxuries on iplayer. Better still, next time you go an audit trip, take the boss with you.