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Nike, leading the footwear industry, essentially rode the
Christian Louboutin shoes authenticwave of cheap labor from Japan, but as their economy bubbled, much of the manufacturing moved to Korea, Taiwan and eventually Southern China. While manufacturing costs went down, Nike’s logo was busy ingraining itself in the Globalization of culture. Nike’s otherwise ingenious marketing and efficient production praised by the business press throughout the 1980s saw the tables turn. Their manufacturing in Southeast Asia was tied to what was dubbed the “Crony Capitalism” of Indonesian President Suharto’s regime. The dictatorship had attracted capital due to a “virtually union-free environment…” that “meant low wages and big profits for foreign companies” reveals professor and author Dan La Botz.
This is where the AFL-CIO’s Jeff Ballinger discovered Indonesian workers making Nike shoes at poverty wages and put momentum behind activist movements from Nongovernmental organizations. Groups like Press for Change, Global Exchange, The National Labor Committee and United Students Against Sweatshops waged a war that Nike retaliated against no less. Its a two-sided coChristian Louboutin discountin for Indonesian workers though, as the country’s minimum wage increased more than 300% from under $1 a day to over $2 a day, “in large part due to large Multinational Enterprises such as Nike.” This wage increase occurred gradually between 1988 and 1996 and may in part be why Nike failed to see any fault in their Southeast Asian operations until 1998. A earlier boycott of Nike in 1996 and subsequent establishment of the Vietnam Labor Watch, was prompted by national media exposure. "Nike landed at the center of the sweatshop debate after the CBS news program 48 Hours... detailed the abuse of Nike workers in Vietnam," according to Amy Domini, author of Socially Responsible Investing.
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The footwear and apparel industry could no longer dodge the issue of sweatshops as the anti-globalization movement gained media attention. Several corporate coalitions with private auditing firms were formed to address Sweatshop labor, including Nike’s, among other corporate backing of the Global Alliance NGO a
Nike apologists have managed to justify multi-billion dollar sponsorships of larger than life celebrities like Michael Jordan when their factory workers in Vietnam were paid $1 a day. Phil Knight, Nike Founder and Chairman, put this economic chasm in perspective when he said that Athletes earn so much, “because the markets have dictated that they get that money.” Knight continued that, “…the fact that they endorse our products allows us to sell more products and create more jobs.” Though Nike is not a direct owner of the thousands of factories it contracts with, it’s hard to imagine many of these operations without Nike’s business. Knight inherited the pressure that Sweatshojerseys wholesalep activists were creating when in 1998 he accepted social responsibility for the conditions at these factories.
When Labor and Human Rights activists shifted their game in the 1990s, a full court press on Globalization made Nike one of the first targets. As Berkley Professor and labor advocate Dara O’Rourke wrote, “Nike has been on the hot seat…longer than any other multinational corporation, and its painstaking initiatives result in large measure from this pressure.” So what put Nike Inc., a company from Beaverton, Oregon, into cahoots with manufactures in places like Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam? For one, Phil Knight’s founding principle for Nike’s forbearer, Blue Ribbon Sports, was to market low cost shoes from Japan competitively with high-end wear from Germany. Cutting manufacturing costs to profit on brand marketing was Knight’s plan for victory from the get go in 1962, and thirty years later he was “just doing it” with Michalouis vuitton handbags cheapel Jordan and Bo Jackson.
in the right direction, but hardly the independent monitoring of factories that critics were demanding of the industry. Nike hired pricey auditing from firms like Ernst & Young and Price Waterhouse who took necessary action, but critics largely deflated it as patchwork PR (See CorpWatch). In all fairness, on any given day, Nike employs 550,000 people at over 22,000 factories in 52 countries, so if the company is genuine about enforcing manufacturing codes they shouldh of oppressive sweatshop operators. Phil Knight once offered a defensive anecdote of 300 Vietnamese workers waiting outside a Nike factory, hoping people would quit so they could replace them. Similarly Globalisation scholar Johan Norberg wrote that, “the most persistent demand Nike hears from the workers is for an expansion of the factories so that their relatives can be offered a job.” So it seems that there are hundreds of thousands quite grateful, some hopeful, for manufacturing jobs with Nike, but as a resjerseys cheapult responsibility of basic human rights comes with this role. In 1998 Nike addressed this by raising the bar in their original Code of Conduct from 1991, requiring stricter child labor limits of it’s contracted manufacturers. Yet, again and again critics have alleged that these codes are nothing but empty promises that just hang on the factory walls. Part of the issue in reaching viable implementation of codes is that
