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Nike: Just Don't Do It
Daruka Krishna Das writes "Jonah Peretti turned Nike's corporate creativity against itself in a stand against third-world exploitation labor. Peretti's protest made use of the swoosh brand's Nike iD Web site, which allows customers to "build your own" sneaker, complete with a word of your choice, or "iD," printed on the side. For his iD, Peretti selected "sweatshop," which generated the e-mail exchange archived on Jockbeat's Web site here."
That he planned on using his Nikes so much that he could have been a sweat manufacturer, making enough to sell off. Hence, a "sweat shop".
Might have fooled the suits long enough to allow the order.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
how is walmart bad to its employees? My understanding was that they made an effort to stock products made in American factories.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Rich Americans and other first worlders, whose idea of privation is finding that Starbucks is out of frappaccino mix,...
Dude, you rock.
You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!
Our government doesn't touch Nike's corporate decisions. That's a private sector thing there bud not a government problem.
I would like to know. You sit and you speak of how horrible things are because of what BIG CORPorations are doing (Nike as example). However, what are you even doing to help the people who are being taken advantage of in countries outside the US. I would really like to know. Is it because your lax, a procrastinator, all words no action, or do you just like something to argue about? Stop wasting precious energy and do something meaningful.
And on that note...I am leaving to go do some good for my fellow man.
Thank you!
Truth like surgery, may hurt, but it cures. - Han Suyin, Chinese Physician and Writer
what's served by criticizing them for providing jobs for poor people?
Well, I might ask what's served by defending them for it. I'm very glad factories were "criticized" heavily here in the US by the likes of Upton Sinclair, among others, so that I now can have a childhood, an education, a nice job, and good pay, and not have such sooty skies to boot. And the children wouldn't be on the verge of starvation if their parents got a wage you could actually raise a family on. I find them more than distasteful - I find them completely unethical. Your point about the extra costs of operating overseas is a very good one, tho, and helps me to understand why it is not so easy for Nike and others to take the high road.
ooky
One day. I am going to grow wings. A chemical reaction. - Radiohead
Yes, I find sweatshop working conditions deplorable. Yes, I'd love to do something to rectify the situation. But you know what? The money that I'd be using to do this with is already involuntarily pilfered from my paychecks at the rate of $30,000 to $40,000 per year by the same jackasses who say I need to contribute to their causes!
Until they stop with their stupid police-action politics and money grubbing, my money stays where it belongs: in my wallet.
Get rid of the stupid, illegal taxes and allow us to put that portion of my income to the causes we hold near and dear to our hearts, and I promise you we'll be more effective that some bloated, red-tape ridden government entity ever could be.
/tma
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Not only that, but picking "sweat" on one shoe and "shop" on the other results in the following error, as does "child"/"labor" but not "child"/"labour" (for those of us who spell correctly) or "cheap"/"labor":
So what if I'm an althetic teenaged girl wanting to convey my two favorite hobbies on my shoes? An expecting mother, perhaps? Bah!
ian.
ian
Personally, I'm glad those kids work in a 3D world. Just imagine 2D working conditions - human bonsaikittens! :-)
"just say NO to Marxist propaganda"
Err... explain this one a bit better for me. Disagreeing with child labour is Marxist propaganda? Nope, you missed me there.
don't do it. Seriously. Force yourself to hold it until your 10 hour day is up. No way, no how are you to get up from your desk. You must sit there for hours, doing the same repetitive motions over and over.
Want a drink of water? Yeah right.
You are also not allowed to talk to your co-workers. No chatting on the phone, even if it is a call from your mom saying your dad just died.
You are expected to be at work at all times. You are not allowed any time off for any reason. Miss one day and you are fired.
Think I am making this up? This is just a small sample of what it is like to work in a sweatshop.
*Now* please call me a liberal and tell me I am full of shit.
Other Slashdot readers have suggested retrying the act using obfuscated letters or arrangements, like "sweat" and "shop", "5w34t5h0p", or a mix-and-match between orders. How about obfuscating the entire act by trying it in another language? The odds are pretty low that Nike can interpret all those languages, so it would be interesting to see if they tried. Also, try splitting up individual non-English words or phrases, and submit them across multiple orders made by multiple individuals. Then mix and match, so they can't track it!
:)
I applaud this person's activities, and I really like the term "culture jamming". I thought that he had a masterful use of language and social appropriateness in his responses up to the point where he requested the photo. I think that was way too blunt and bordering on the disrespectful.
In any case, Nike's attempts to block this have failed. Especially in the information age, the number one way to make an idea popular is to try to censor it. That's why printing an anti-sweatshop message on Nike shoes, or printing an anti-leather message on a leather jacket, are totally appropriate. People always silently ignore or boycott ideas in protest, but they tend not to let anyone else know about it!
This is great though. Thanks.
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If you don't like the shoes Nike will make for you, or allow you to make, buy from another company.
Unless, of course, your real reason to "culture-jam" Nike is to get your name in print...
sulli
RTFJ.
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I have an honest question about your arguement, who is it exactly that is bullying and threatening these women and children into working at these jobs. if Nike itself is threatening physical harm to those who refuse to work then by all mean show evendence of this and i'll become an avid Nike hater. however if other people are doing the threatening then we need to approach the problem a different way. it is those who are forcing people to work that are to blame, and those are the people who deserve our hatred/actions. I would be suprised if this is nike, but i'll listen to whatever evidence you may have.
They are not there to help reduce suffering
They are not there to promote social justiceThey are there cause the lower the wages the higher the profits
it's fine to sympathize with how bad conditions are in the third world. But don't blame Nike for those conditions. They are providing jobs that --while we may not think they're good-- are better than most other jobs in the country. It hardly makes sense to demonize Nike for providing jobs for poor people just because they didn't improve conditions enough. Those people would be worse off without Nike, not better.
They'd be unemployed, which is worse. I guess they could subsitence farm, or handcraft cardboard shanties. Are they being coerced into working there? Are they in a collectivist state that doesn't give them the liberty to work as they choose? If so, _that's_ the problem, because you can bet those people are simply slaves of the state, and sweatshop conditions are of no account. Or would you say Southern slaves who had masters who took good care of their property were better off than being dirt-poor-but-free?
I seriously doubt these folks are working there because the state is forcing them to. They are there because it's their best opportunity to advance economically. The rest of the opportunities for them are worse. Any you can bet they know the risks of working there, and they are factored into their decisions to work there.
We in the USA have the luxury to worry about lots of things poorer countries can't. Such as a pristine environment. Sweatshops in other countries. Seals. Miniscule risks of every kind. Most people around the world are doing what they can and need to to survive. We spend our time roaming the countryside on vacations in our SUVs, camping, hiking, fishing, sporting. Are we really happy here? We seem paralyzed by risks of all sorts, and loaded down with guilt because of our prosperity.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
How else are they going to pay Mr. Jordan???
- "yes but can you hit someone over the head with a rolled up internet?" -Foxtrot
A company thata relative of mine works at operates several factories in China. They pay a multiple of the prevailing local wage -- in fact, the Chinese government actually prevents them from paying more. I wonder how often that happens?
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
A company that a relative of mine works at operates several factories in China. They pay a multiple of the prevailing local wage -- in fact, the Chinese government actually prevents them from paying more. I wonder how often that happens?
- - - - -
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Holding a "candle to the dark" would consist of employing adults who are past school age to work at wages which would allow them to send their children to school. That isn't happening.
And absent multinational labor, local economies exist for local markets.
Stop to think for a minute. Why are these children working for Nike? Surely their parents would rather have them playing in the yard or going to school. There is quite a simple answer these childeren work for nike because their parents cannot provide for them and they would otherwise starve.
Why can't their parents earn enough to feed them (working at Nike or otherwise)? Their countries are overpopulated, have no infrustructure, and the population is completely unskilled and uneducated; hence the amazingly low price of labor. Just by being there, Nike is improving conditions for the simple fact that they need an infrustructure to move shoes from the factories to the ports. The Nike factories are pumping american money into the local economy through payroll, supplies, and factory costs. Hell, globalization as a form of third-world aid seems to be the only kind that does any good!
People either chose to work for Nike of their own free will or are forced to work by their governments. If by their own free will then they obviously thought that working for Nike, no matter how seemingly horrible, provides them a lifestyle that is better than it was beforehand; therefore Nike is improving their life while it provides you shoes. If their government is forcing them to work at Nike then doesn't it seem more prudent to focus efforts on changing the governments to a more free society rather than attacking Nike who if they closed shop would just be replaced by someone else?
I personally challenge those people who believe that the third world is exploited by american corporations to fly to one of these third world countries and see how much worse off the people who don't work for Nike are. You cannot comment on the living conditions of these workers without seeing the living conditions of their neighbors who aren't working at Nike. I spent 3 months in Haiti, and let me tell you these people would give anything for the chance to work 18 hours a day and put food on the table.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Flame? We all know that Nike, Kathy Lee Gifford, GAP, et all only have these factories in these third world countries because the labor is so cheap. Nike isn't doing these people a service by locating thier factories there. All the comments I see on /. about how the RIAA, MPAA, Microsft are evil because they are only conserned with money, but Nike is ok for following the same greedy religion. The third world is in the state it is because of exploitation by the western developed countries (not just the good ol' US of A). If Nike were forced to adhere to US labor laws in other countries, maybe those poor street orphans could actually get off the street and raise the wellfare of their entire community. Of course that would raise the cost of the shoes (or lower Nike's profit margins) and we all know $100 dollar shoes is more important than freedom and justice.
Well, I might ask what's served by defending them for it.
Because they're improving the lives of the poor? What's not to defend? Yes, they don't provide American-quality wages, but they are providing jobs that are better than what was there before. No matter how greedy and evil the companies themselves are, this is a Good Thing. Bad jobs is better than no jobs.
The improvement of working conditions in the US had nothing to do with Upton Sinclair and little to do with labor unions or labor laws. The biggest driver of increasing wages was competition for labor-- there were more jobs than workers, and so wages rose.
The fundamental cause of this is accumulation of capital-- nations with large capital stocks and good infrastructure will tend to pay higher wages because their workers can produce more. Labor unions and labor laws at best provide short-term improvement, and do nothing to change the underlying economics. Had a $5/hour minimum wage been instituted in 1900, it would have destroyed the US economy. Wages are driven up by market forces, not government intervention.
So while overseas conditions seem repugnant to us, bellyaching about it isn't going to improve things. What those people need is jobs-- even bad jobs are a good start compared with no jobs at all. As as more factories are opened, competition for labor will begin to drive up wages, as happened in Taiwan and South Korea.
Are corporations greedy and profit-seeking? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that they are necessarily harmful.
Please keep firmly in mind that you are looking at the world from the perspective of the richest nation on Earth. We are privileged to be at the pinnacle of the world economy, getting nice fat paychecks for highly technical work, short hours, and extremely generous benefits. Obviously the conditions of poor workers is appalling from our perspective.
But what you have to keep firmly in mind is: what's good for those workers? The fact that their wages seem pitifully low to us doesn't necessarily mean that those workers are being treated unfairly. It might be that if forced to raise wages, corporations would be unable to turn a profit and would leave those countries.
Don't let your moral revulsion cloud your judgement. Pursuing policies that eliminate sweatshops may just kick third world workers into even deeper poverty. Focusing on the evilness of the corporations deflects attention from what really matters-- the interests of the poor. If sweatshops are so terrible, what do you propose to do about it? And how do you prevent your policy from simply causing those corporations from closing up shop and making the poor even poorer?
I bought from NikeID, and my ID is of course, Linux. Lots of pictures and a review are here
Linux: Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste.
James Brents
How about FUCKNIKE?
Lib.BENCH the only site you'll ever need!
It must suck for these people working in these sweatshops to be making the highest real wages in their country.
Dancin Santa
It is funny you mentioning Calcutta, concidering that the government of India did step in in helping their people by supplying better cheaper education systems. As a result, they are a growing number of technologically adapt people. Not everyone is benefitting from this boom, btu it proves there is something a government can do to help their people besides watching their people "raped" by corperations.
Nobody has talked about the bruital health conditions that these places do/did have.
If you want an eye openner, maybe somewhat dated, go to http://www.saigon.com/~nike/
Bye!
Maybe the workers know they have a choice, work for what the western world would call nothing or not work at all. If the workers demand too much, the factory is closed and moved elsewhere. Currently the swetshops are moving to places like China and back to Indonesia. For thouse that are too young to remember, Indonesia was the second "asian cheap labor location" after Japan. A bunch of factories were built there, the people wanted more and got themselves a leader that would increase their wages. The result was compaines closed the factorys and moved to Taiwan. There are currenlty about 50 good locations if you wanted to build a sweatshop and there are still about a billion people that live by subsistence means. Many of them would be much better off by having any sort of job and in time they will be expolited.
Nike made a tactical error by refusing this guy's request. When they said no, he gets a juicy e-mail exchange where he gets to needle them over this issue, and everyone's reading it.
Now, if Nike had made the shoes, he'd have some shoes that said "sweatshop". Big Fucking Deal. He could show them to his friends. Ooh. Or he could put pictures on a webpage, which would leave us saying "photoshop". Instead, they played right into his hands.
By Just Doing It (tm), Nike would win on several fronts. They'd deprive this guy of ammo. They'd appear hip and postmodern. Their personalization scheme would feel more "free". All while selling sweatshop-produced shoes for $100+/pair.
I just hope their marketing idiots don't figure this out.
Everybody knows that corporations, Nike or otherwise, are not around to promote social justice.
However, we forget that what governments are *supposed* to do, what we pay taxes for and give up numerous personal freedoms for, is to promote social justice. The goverment's one and only true job is to create and enforce a legal system that promotes social justice and reduces suffering. That is rarely what they do, and it seems most people (including our elected representatives in the US) forget that this is what they are there for, but it is.
I don't object to Nike paying people a wage that is penuts on the US wealth scale. What I object to is Nike being allowed (by either the US or foriegn contries) to pay people less than a living wage for the area they live in, or to allow a manifestly unsafe work environment. That is Just Plain Wrong.
It is pure fallacy to think that if Nike couldn't pay people $.50/day to make shoes (or whatever) that all the people working for those wages would be jobless. Nike would just have to pay more -- and the cost of tennis shoes might go up.
A free market isn't about "let people do whatever they want". It is about letting the market forces drive supply and demand, rather than government price and production fixing. But we can and should manipulate those market forces (via taxes, tarrifs, tax credits, etc) to encourage socially responsible behavior. In a perfectly efficient market, this would result in all goods and services having its "true cost" -- defined as "how much does it cost the rest of the world for me to have this." which must take into account things like pollution, deforestation, poverty, crime, etc.
All your answers lie here.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
What I think is funny, is that this article will probably affect Google's search engine, so that a search for sweatshop will probably end up leading straight to NikeId's website. Unless it already does, I haven't checked! It's much like that Google search result for `dumb motherfucker' that we all love so much...
Not really a plug, but if you want a custom operating system without giving your money to Microsoft so they can shortchange some programmers overseas, try these guys.
Linux
Granted, they may be doing the same thing for all I know, but at least there are other options.
No surge protector will protect my surge. - Commodore64
OK, fine, asshole, what do you propose? That we just let people starve because we don't want to feel bad that someone might be making less money than us? I'm not saying that Nike should get a medal for a great deed of humanitarianism, but your blind emotionalism doesn't change the fact that people in sweatshops *is* an improvement over people starving on the streets.
There are *still* millions of people who are so poor that they can't even afford the basic necessities. If a sweatshop opened in one of those countries and provided some of them with work, would you denounce them for "enslaving" them? Is it better to let people starve than to give them crappy jobs?
The problem is that Nike now has a vested interest in making sure that things don't get better.
Sure they do. But in most cases they can't. In most cases where they "shop around" for lower wages, it's because competition has driven up wages and working conditions in the previous country.
If they can get the governments in those countries to hold down wages by force, that's absolutely a bad thing, but I see no reason to believe that's the norm. And if that's the case, it's government corruption-- not sweatshops per se-- that we should be criticizing.
You mentioned child labor laws-- this is a good example of letting the perfect being the enemy of the good. In wealthy Western countries, it's perfectly reasonable to demand children not work. But if you're talking about a country where children have to work to stay alive, it's far from clear that banning it is a good thing. Would I like a world in which no child had to work? Absolutely. But I'm not going to condemn children to even deeper poverty so wealthy Americans can soothe their consciences.
Your claim is essentially that it is better to be a good slaveholder than to oppose slavery.
No, my claim is that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. Sweatshop owners might be motivated by greed, but as a side effect they are improving conditions in the third world. I'd love it if conditions improved, but the fact that conditions are poor doesn't justify taking the jobs away.
The question isn't whether sweatshops meet American labor standards. If that were the requirement, we would condemn third-world workers to poverty in perpetuity. The question is whether sweatshops on net help or harm the poor. I don't see how you can claim that they hurt them. Again, poverty existed long before the greedy corporations arrived on the scene. It's absurd to blame them for it. Bad jobs at lousy wages is better than no job at all, yet sweatshop activists seem to believe that until coroporations are willing to pay a "living wage" the third-world poor shouldn't be allowed to have any jobs at all. I think that's a cruel and destructive policy.
They also blocked SWETSHOP, SW3TSH0P, NIKESUX (but not other companies - I tried IBMSUX and it went through). Apparently criticizing about their use of child labor hits a little too close to home, they're turning down a sale just so all 3 people who might read the back of your shoe don't see nike and sweatshop together.
So download the page and edit the HTML to expand the field limit back to 12 characters. Fix the <FORM> tag to point to the fully qualified URL at Nike. Then load the locally edited page into your browser, fill it out, and click submit. If their server admins fell into the "trusted client" trap, it'll work.
Heck, you could theoretically expand the input limit to whatever size you want; certainly large enough to send them the DeCSS code :-).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Wow, if the deal is that good in these third world countries why don't you send your children to work in a sweatshop for food?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
also "Sun" is a no go.
:-)
"Win98" is ok, but don't get your hopes too high of getting your name on the shoe if your first name given at birth was "Dick".
You "Compaq" lovers will have to call your shoe "Dell" instead.
You can't wear "Prince" shoes, but "Princess" is fine.
There is no "Napster" shoes for you my friend, but you can go jogging in your "Gnutella" shoes.
The only question remains, what am I going to do with those Princess shoes,,,,
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Won't market forces deal with this evenutally? The problem seems to be that the 'sweatshop' jobs are coveted for their comparatively high income levels and low availability. As more companies do this, the dependance on any one 'sweatshop' will decrease, meaning people will have the option of changing jobs, which means the really bad employers won't be able to hire people as readily and will have to improve their conditions?
Of course, some guy at Nike's probably poring over the logs every day looking for the new, clever things people invent, then banning them.
"SWETSHOP" # Ok, we need lowercase to
"CHILDLBR" # unfuck the lameness filter
"KATHYLEE" # to let this post get through.
"KIDWORK" # I find it worth posting, and
"$.05/hr" # the caps are to make sure
"LBRUNION" # the the "ell" character shows.
--
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I've had my Customatix shoes for some time and I love them. They have stood up to the abuse I put on them (dropping cases on them; walking through dusty network closets; mud, rain, and silicon paste) and I can say they have faired much better than any "brand" shoe I've ever had.
No surge protector will protect my surge. - Commodore64
If I have to choose between a sweatshop and starvation, that really isn't much of a choice, now, is it?
Sure beats the choice between starvation and starvation.
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
So because Nike did not cause the problems they are allowed to further abuse such a rotten system, man you're a moron!
There is NOTHING except greed preventing Nike to pay decent wages and to only employ adults.
The main reason kids have to work in those countries are the low wages for the parents DUE TO COMPETITION FROM THE SAME KIDS!
It is despicable to buy anything of those western companies abusing the lack of worker protection in less developed countries.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
In a large number of cases, the country's conditions got to the way they were because of offshore corporations arriving to begin with. For example, a mining corporation getting the land rights to a mountain so they can dig it up for ore. The subsistence farmers are displaced, so they move to the cities to find work. The mining operations pollute the river, which kills the fish which sustain another part of the population living at the mouth of the river. Cattle can no longer graze at the river, destroying another group of people's way of life. The people may *now* wish to work in a factory for 18 hours a day, but they were sure better off before they were shoved off of their original lands...
I adblock all animated gifs.
Blessed be the prime numbered slashdotters
SOMEONE
SET UP
US THE
BOMB
!!!
You crazy man? You piss off supahfly!
It would take a fairly long discussion to explain the economics of comparative advantage. Here's the basic argument.
Every dollar worth of shoes that gets shipped out of the local economy means one dollar that comes into the local economy. That dollar will be spent by *someone* in exchange for American goods and services.
So, the question is, does the value of the labor that went into the shoes outweigh the value of the goods and services that got purchased with those wages? More specifically, let's suppose that from the perspective of the poor country the labor was *more* valuable than the American goods and services.
If this were the case, then the market price for goods produced with local labor would be lower than equivalently-valued goods from abroad. And so the locals would use their dollars to bid up the price of the local products, and the price of overseas goods and services would drop until they were equally valued.
Trade benefits both countries in a transaction. In order to convince third-world workers to work for them, they must offer more value to them than is available in local jobs. And that extra value represents a net inflow of resources to the country, counterbalancing the loss of labor. So the economy as a whole benefits from the trade.
This is a basic premise of economics, which even extremely liberal economists would agree with. Free trade doesn't benefit one country at the expense of the other. By specialization and comparative advantage, both economies benefit.
I don't believe that we are not exploiting anyone in the third world, but having been to India in the past month I now think those shops are a necessity. With the number of people that make up these countries, given nothing to do they would all starve. Someone has to hold open the door for you to get that 10 rupie tip because they would otherwise be standing on the sidewalk watching you open the door for yourself, wishing they could eat. It is only right that we as a wealthy nation contribute something to these countries, but damn if we can't get something like a pair of shoes in return. Nike's quotas are another matter, though! Because of that people density, the amount of money put into hiring them is greatly diluted for each one. Giving a million people a $0.01 an hour raise is not a tiny figure. In fact, even the corruption that infects those countries is necessary for the same reason.
The $100 that you put into those shoes gets further reduced by half each time some distributed handles them. God knows that fuel used to power the ships that bring clothes to cover your asses is free these days. Take $100 a month and send it to someone in a third world country to them live a better life, and then realise that 1 out of a billion people is NOTHING. There aren't even enough Americans to send someone in India $100 a month to make a difference, even if you could imagine that Americans could afford such a thing.
You want to save the world? Stop asking for raises. Stop putting $1 bills into soda and candy bar machines. You're driving down the price of the dollar and helping to send the world into an inflation ridden lamaise. If not you'll see what a great thing Nike was when millions of people all over the world lose their jobs as American companies pull out, leaving all those people with...nothing to do in order to eat. We can't save the world, folks. Stop believing everything that you breathe.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Offtopic:
I don't like WalMart, because they're a huge, impersonal company that really doesn't give a flip about the locals. (I have Chestertonian Distributist leanings.)
To bring it back on topic, Nike I suppose is the same way: a typical global multinational, which will work hand-in-hand with government; that's why the Democrat/Republican coalition is so dangerous: big business + big government means you end up a slave. We should be scared when they cooperate. And if you are not in the US, you may be the next country we bomb, if you look at us funny.
You can't blame the locals for working there (Nike), it's a good opportunity economically for them. But they do give up something in the end. They support the global multinationals, but not everyone is cut out to be a hero for the cause, eh?
OTOH, I like WalMart, because I can go there when I want to feel thin.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
It's amazing how many times on Slashdot I will read a post which completely misreads the definition of a corporation as an individual. Cluestick: It's not.
The lawmakers are not completely stupid. It's not corporations that are criminaly liable but their officers - as it should be. You can't punish a corporation by putting it in prison and you're not really punishing the people really responsible for the crime if you "kill" it. If Nike has committed any criminal offence - including any that deserves the death penalty, it's the people who are responsible for making those decisions who should face the jail time/death penalty. You don't want them to get away scot-free do you? If the United States laws recognize what Nike has done in terms of child labor abuse, I want our government to go after the executives who knew of this and put them in prison besides fining the company.
"Executing" the company means the people who are actually responsible for the crimes get away scot-free (relatively). Corporate charters only absolve the owners of FINANCIAL LIABILITY. Hiding behind the identity of a corporation DOES NOT allow them to get away from CRIMINAL LIABILITY.
Repeat after me: Corporations are treated as individuals only as far as non-criminal rights and responsibilities are concerned.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Of course they are. So is every business in America. That's not the issue.
The questions is: do sweatshops hurt or harm third-world workers? Are they worse off than they were before the sweatshop opened?
Again, corporations didn't create poverty. It was already there long before they came on the scene. They are improving conditions, not because they care about the poor, but simply as a side effect of their greedy, ruthless, pursuit of profits. But they are improving conditions nonetheless. And to condemn improvement in the lives of the poor simply because corporations make money off is absurd. I am not willing to condemn the third world poor to perpetual poverty simply to soothe the consceinces of wealthy Americans. Sweatshops might look cruel and inhumane to us, but for millions of starving peasants it's a ticket out of poverty. What right do you have to tell that peasant he can't have that job because you don't think his wages are high enough?
What I object to is Nike being allowed (by either the US or foriegn contries) to pay people less than a living wage for the area they live in, or to allow a manifestly unsafe work environment.
Even if this leads to those people losing their jobs? The greater the profits of sweatshops, the more that will be built, and the sooner wages will be driven up by competition. It's fine to say that you want wages to be at a certain level. But are you willing to take the risk that companies will simply refuse to operate in that country at all, leaving those people destitute?
You describe lots of problems third world workers face, but what you don't mention is that Nike didn't cause those problems. Those countries were poor long before Nike arrived on the scene, and would even poorer if Nike were to close it's "sweatshops" and produce shoes elsewhere. Hmmmm...what about the simple solution of leaving the factories there, NOT hiring children, NOT beating or intimidating people, paying them a fair wage for their efforts, and letting them work a NORMAL workday instead of 14-16 hr shifts. Your argument of "when in rome" is frankly disgusting to me. NO, nike didn't cause the labor problems of the third world, they just perpetuate them, all in the name of profit margin. And Nike's not hurting, so don't tell me they'll go under or somthing if they actually adhere to ethical business practices. Nike has it in their power to actually help the ocuntry/society/people they get all their profits from, and the fact that they refuse to do so just shows how really evil they are. Imagine your child dies in some shoe press after a backbreaking 10 hr shift - would you really understand some chubby well paid American saying, "It hardly makes sense to demonize Nike for providing jobs for poor people just because they didn't improve conditions enough. Those people would be worse off without Nike, not better."
...So Die Young, Stay Pretty - Blondie
ooky
So you sit down in your rocking chair
Transistor pressed against an ear
Are you waiting for the reaper to arrive
Or just to die by the hands of Love?
They can charge it because people are willing to pay it. There *are* shoes available for $10. People choose to buy Nikes at the higher price because for whatever reason they feel it's worth it. I'm not sure I see what's immoral about it.
For a lot of very good information on this issue I'd recommend reading "No Logo" by Naomi Klein. It might correct some of the innaccurate assumptions you're making.
Sweatshop owners might be motivated by greed, but as a side effect they are improving conditions in the third world.
Granted, if these countries were seeing any taxes or revenue from the factories that Nike (and many other multinationals) set up in Asia and South America. Unfortunately, a large percentage of these factories are set up in what are called Export Processing Zones. Factories in these zones often pay no taxes whatsoever, and the host country sees no money from the companies that own them. There is typically some sort of deal that after ten years companies will start paying taxes (thus it's intended to act as an incentive for companies to invest), but most just pick up and move to a different EPZ before the time limit is up.The EPZ's often also act outside of the jurisdiction of the laws and courts of their host country. So not only are factories inside not necessarily following the work standards of countries like the US, they often are not even living up to the standards of their host country
But if you're talking about a country where children have to work to stay alive...But why should children have to work to stay alive? Because sweatshop owners won't pay their employees enough to support themselves, let alone their children. Don't argue that the companies can't afford to. These are the same companies that were previously paying American workers $15/hour. The same companies that are making literally billions of dollars per year. Now they can't afford to pay an asian woman $2/day to support her family?
Bad jobs at lousy wages is better than no job at all, yet sweatshop activists seem to believe that until coroporations are willing to pay a "living wage" the third-world poor shouldn't be allowed to have any jobs at all. I think that's a cruel and destructive policy.
I don't recall hearing any activists demanding that jobs should be taken away from the poor if they're not being paid a living wage. The demand is simply that these people should be payed a living wage. Period.
You seem to claim that the current situation is a necessary step on the way to prosperity for third world countries. If these countries were making any progress towards proseperity, I might be inclined to agree with you. Instead, they are largely being taken advantage of by large multinational corporations who refuse to pay their workers enough money to even feed and clothe themselves. I would suggest you do a little more research into the actual economic impact of this sort of investing before you argue in support of sweatshops. Again, I would recommend Naomi Klein's book.
-rt
======
Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
So you're one of these conservative and neo-liberal morons which believe that PR bullshit of NIKE.
(yeah, just like Open Source is unamerican, isn't it!!!)
go and check out: http://www.nikewages.org
and get a reality check
ALL YOUR
BASE ARE
BELONG
TO US
!!!
Imagine a basketball team with those shoes!!!
I must say that i'm very impressed, personally, I had to force myself to not visit nike.com as soon as i read the "build your own sneaker" part. I know how awful their workers' conditions are, but their designs are SO MUCH BETTER than other sneaker companies, and i'm ALL ABOUT having cool shoes.
So far, i've held out and stuck to Reeboks (which also use less-than-ideal conditions, but are much better than Nike) I'm glad to see articles like this, they remind me of why I haven't bought Nikes yet, and hopefully seeing this in the news every so often will help it stick with me next time i'm shopping!
Kudos to all those with the conviction to not buy from the company, and even more support goes out to those who really try and do something about it!
unless he's arab/israeli/indian
A century and a half ago, before the advent of child labor laws in most western countries, there was little indication that companies were ever going to think of their workers as less than cheap capital. The workers themselves were more or less prohibited from mounting any kind of opposition because, to do so, they'd neccessarily have to remove themselves from the system which means no wages, and eventual starvation and death. Only when government stepped in and regulated the ability of business to treat their labor like dirt did things even start to improve.
Sweatshops are opportunistic exploitation in the worst sense. Wealthy and successful corporations push their ways into markets and are able to entice labor by virtue of lack of competition. On the other hand, their presence also stifles the rise of any alternatives and, while potentially preventing widescale starvation, has no incentive to do anything beyond that. Indeed, one might argue that keeping a population below the poverty line is beneficial to a sweatshop employer.
It's a perfect example of unchecked capitalism run amok.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Come on! You guys are stupid and irrisponsible!
Why should it be neccessary for these kids to work in sweatshops when their parents are unemployed and/or underpaid! We have to accept there are countries with a lack of government power/will to enact decent labour conditions but that should NEVER be a reason for greedy western companies to come in and abuse the weakest of that country.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Umm.... Charities like that rely on a number of peoplem offering $10 a month. You can't feed an entire village on that little, but, with some luck, multiple increments of $10 will do the trick. $1 a day is still an insufficient amount of money, particularly considering the health and wellbeing risks inherent in working at a sweatshop.
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Short picture: if goods can be relocated and labor cannot, then capital will move the goods to where they can get optimal returns, yet move production to where costs are minimal. Differences in mobility and the cost of mobility throw out the benefits subsumed under the comparative advantage model.
What I PROPOSE is a living wage for people working their assess off so you/he/she can have all the newest/latest/most expensive brandnames plastered all over your bodies. Am I suggesting an immediate pay hike to $20/hr. US? No. What I am suggesting is safe and humane working conditions, and a LIVING WAGE. What about the people that are working 16 hours a day and STILL cannot afford a nutritious meal for themselves, let alone their family?
Maybe you ought first do some research into the REAL conditions these people are working under, and how much money they receive for this work - and how that money translates in their economy.
If you cannot see why these practices are unethical and undesirable you must be wearing blinders. Or you're a Republican.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world. - Gandhi
On a tangent: Did you know that whores in ancient Pompei had "follow me" on the soles of their shoes? In Latin, I assume, and I doubt if they were running.
Still, makes you wonder what's new in the world.
Wait 'til someone tries to patent this. That would be a nice bit of "previous art" to bring forward.
me too!!!! Lovers_Arrival_The@americanwicca.com Hello everyone! My name is Margot, and I work as a Web Designer in Bangor, Maine. I am from Scotland, but moved to Maine some 18 months ago for the money. I like it, but I do find the locals to be quite stand-offish. My favourite pastimes include dancing (especially a good Ceilidh with a strapping Six Footer - tee hee! ;), Graphics Design (I have worked as a Graphics Designer for a Web Company in the past) and writing. Anyhoo, if you would like to chat or talk, feel free to e-mail me. I really like talking to technical types, even though I am a bit of a dunce, rather than the boring chaps you get round these parts. It helps to stop me from feeling *too* homesick :o)
Lover's Arrival, The has posted 32 comments (this only counts the last few weeks)
All these models, of course, assume Pac-Man like producer/laborers who do not have to do with local inflation, resource competition, and the increased unattractiveness of local markets in this sort of environment. Nobel economics prize winner Amartya Sen's work "Rational Fools" is the most thorough debunking of these omissions.
They even reject my request for "SWT SHOP" even after explaining that I work at a condy store in Denver called "The Sweet Shop". Go figure...
nikesuck
nikesux
kcusekin
Doh!
Sorry about the looser / loser thing. I am taking Japanese class and stuck in the mindset, well, in their words are 'spelled' in their sylabic character _exactly_ how they sound. Odd how lose's long o sounds longer than the 'oo' in loose.
Well, that was too far off topic. I thought I had to explain my brain fart.
I read lots of people talking about the evils of sweatshops and how these people should be payed more, for many ethical and economical reasons. What I don't hear is anyone talking about doing anything about it. Me, I sponser a kid named Nuttapong Kilawong in Thailand. His family is very poor, but because I send $28 a month, he can go to school instead of work everyday. Granted, one kid at a time is only a little bit, but it's something. So, what are you gonna do about the problem of sweatshops?
I want one that says "Tiger's Bitch".
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I need to get some new shoes. :-)
And while we're at it, how about German, Spanish, any of the Roman(ish) alphabets so we can pretty much avoid them weird accented characters?
--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I want one that says "Tiger's Bitch".
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
Nike is doing good? C'mon... They are doing nothing more than any out-sourced US corp who is maximizing shareholder & company profit by moving production to an economically-deprived labor pool.
You want to volunteer on frontline production? I dare you.
No it's not, which means it's a good thing that the sweatshop is there. If you were in fact in that situation, and the sweatshop was removed by well-meaning liberals, then your only choice would be starvation.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
that's still plenty enough characters for "GOATSEX".
unfortunately, not nearly enough for "All your base are belong to us "
windows makes me 'loosen' my mind.
ha, ha. please don't moderate this as funny.
-Legion
However, just considering the practical aspects, child labor doesn't really help poor people. The children make very small wages, in part because they really aren't very productive. They are young and weak and unskilled. Studies have shown that the money lost by sending a child to school is regained in full and then some by the increased skill they will have later in life. Simply being literate and capable of doing math is a tremendous benefit to even an unskilled laborer.
Of course, future wages don't matter if you don't have enough foot now, and if your children's growth is being stunted now, and if one of them will die of a curable disease because you are poor now.
So I can't blame a parent that sends their child to work. But I think child labor is still bad, it's just the unfortunate -- no, the unjust situation that all alternatives are bad. That child labor is sometimes the best alternative doesn't mean that we, as a society, as a species are any less morally implicated.
It's about time somebody here has some sense!
BinaryBits - Right On!
Everybody else - Get a fucking clue. Take an economics course. Learn about rational behavior. Learn why what you are saying simply is propaganda. And for christ sake - quit using watered down terms like "Slave Labor" and "Exploiting" The word exploit is so watered down thanks to you people.
It's sorta like wearing a leather jacket with stitched on letters that say "a cow was killed so I could wear this". ;-)
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
order it with "" written on it.....
(you need a chinese text translator, also know how to read chinese would help, if you can't read chinese, try babelfish.altavista.com
Not really a plug, but if you want custom shoes without giving your money to Nike so they can shortchange some kids overseas, try these guys.
Customatix
Granted, they may be doing the same thing for all I know, but at least there are other options.
Raptor
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
I grew up in a third-world country so I believe I'm qualified to comment on this. I'm not aware of the actual labor practices Nike practices so I'm not commenting on Nike in particular but about child labor in general.
Don't get me wrong. I believe that all children should be in school, sheltered and with the opportunity to learn so that they can grow up to be contributors to society at large.
However, the reality of the situation is that in several third-world countries there is rampant poverty. The governments in those countries are not able to provide free education and many times, even if they do, many people can't afford to send their children there because they still need to pay for food and clothing and shelter and the parents can just not afford to do so. This is not an exaggeration. People actually do live like this and I have seen this myself.
From the perspective of the children being employed, this is many times the best thing that could have happened to them. The children who work there don't greet the closing of the factories with jubiliation - to them it doesn't mean being able to go to school - to them it means that their family will go hungry.
None of this defends child labor practices where the children are unfairly exploited - that is not what I'm defending here. Outside of those situations, child labor is not bad, per se because it is often times better than the alternatives.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Don't buy anything with the Nike Schwooshtika on it, they are almost as bad as walmart.
------------------------------ SirPhreak - "It's Thinking..."
Try SW34T SH0P ... works for me
You're going up against some lame middle manager who could care less about anything other than his or her political standing. The "Nike reserves the right.." (to decide what they'd like to print on their own products) bit pretty much says it. It's their product, their intellectual property, their marketing, and thus their decision whether or not to allow such a request.
And yes, there's a whole department probably dedicated to this very atomic task. Thanks to the sweatshops, Nike can afford the likely $500k annual budget of this said department.
HTH HAND
-R
Let's hear it for the new colors, people! I hope Fox News covers this important new development in foot-related fashion.
That last request, though, was a bit sarcastic, and I cannot blame Nike for not following up his request for the picture of a downtrodden underage sweatshop worker.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
Sweatshoppe
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
This provides some solid information.
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
$ finger #timmy
$ finger #timmy
invalid use of finger
By that argument, anybody who works at Boeing building 747s doesn't economically benefit from their job, because only a few individuals -- elsewhere -- can afford to buy jumbo jets.
There is no reason to think the workers in any particular industry should want to be able to buy the product of their labor. Just as the people who cut, guard or ship diamonds and build 747s benefit from their jobs, the people who build Nike shoes benefit from their jobs too. They work for Nike because that's the best option available to them. If Nike had to pay them much more, Nike would probably go out of business but at a minimum would have to close all those factories putting everybody out of work. Really. Their business model is based on cheap low-productivity labor. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Nikes are a luxury good; you don't NEED them. China is full of shoestores selling cheap knockoff shoes for $5 a pair.
[I spent a few weeks in 1999 working in a chinese factory where young women on the line were making about 20 cents an hour plus food and board assembling electronics for companies like Sharp, and it seemed like a great job for them. It was transitional employment, like working at Burger King is here. They'd do this for a couple of years, then move on to a company that paid more for more experience. The workers seemed to be happy and healthy and safe, much more so than they would be at the surrounding businesses or in their villages back home. Many actually used their job to send money home to their families.]
I play Nerd-Folk!
I wonder if the WAPI would come after me if I ordered a pair that said "Sucks"...
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
I hear there's an 8 letter limit now.
So you'd want:
5w8+5h0p
Or something like that.
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Jonah should have ordered bliss shoes..
In Nike's world 'Sweatshop' *IS* an innapropriate slang term.. They prefer '3rd world employment opportunity'.. try fitting *THAT* on the side of your shoe..
air and light and time and space
Hmmmm...what about the simple solution of leaving the factories there, NOT hiring children, NOT beating or intimidating people, paying them a fair wage for their efforts, and letting them work a NORMAL workday instead of 14-16 hr shifts.
The question isn't what's wrong with it. The question is: how are you going to get Nike to do it? I don't think you can.
If you were to mandate a minimum wage, maximum hours, no child labor, etc, the reaction would be very simple-- they'd close up their third-world factories and move back to the US. What's the point of enduring poor infrastructure, unstable government, poorly skilled workforce, long shipping costs, etc when there's no cost advantage?
I'm not claiming that this calculation is a good thing, but that's what would happen. Putting a factory in the third world isn't cheap. Corporations won't do it unless they stand to make a profit from it. If you take away the few advantages the third world has (primarily low wages) you take away any possibility of those workers competing and condemn them to perpetual joblessness.
Are corporations greedy and ruthless? Perhaps, but so what? No law or boycott is going to change that. The question is: what's good for workers? If we make life miserable for corporations that run sweatshops, are they going to improve their factories, or are they simply going to pack up and go elsewhere where the infrastructure and education is better?
Imagine your child dies in some shoe press after a backbreaking 10 hr shift - would you really understand some chubby well paid American saying,
For every child who dies in this manner, there are dozens who die on the streets from malnutrition and lack of medicine. Sweatshops, no matter how distasteful to us, are the first step toward alleviating their suffering. I'll turn the example around on you: if someone's child is on the verge of starvation, are you going to tell him "sorry, you can't work in that sweatshop because they make you work long hours and don't pay enough."
You act like everything was rosy until the evil sweatshop came in and made all those children work. Children were dying from poverty long before Nike came on the scene. Even granting that they could and should drastically improve their facilities, the simple fact is that they *are* better off than they were before. Given that Nike is in it for profit, not the interests of its workers, what's served by criticizing them for providing jobs for poor people?
Jesus... YOU act like just because these people live in a country with terrible living conditions Nike is doing them a favor by making them slave labor. If you don't think it IS slave labor, check into what these people make a day, and how much it costs to buy a substandard meal.
By your logic, I suppose if you come across someone in the desert dying of thirst and rather than offer them a drink of water you piss on them you are doing a good deed. After all...they were thirsty before you got there! They should be thankful you stopped long enough to piss on them.
unfuckingbelievable.
After finishing upon reading Mr. Peretti's emails to Nike, I decided to pursue the same mission. Upon arriving Nike's website, it was easy to navigate to the build your own shoe section. I customized my running shoe and was ready to enter "sweatshop" in the iD box. "Sweatshop" was immediately rejected on the website. It didn't take a series of emails like it did for Mr. Peretti. Since the incident Nike came across with Mr. Peretti, Nike has limited the character limit to 8. Notice, "sweatshop" is 9 characters and would not even fit. I then entered the word "swetshop" and it was declined! I was very surprised. The word was even mispelled. To make sure it wasn't a bug, i entered "swetposh" and it accepted the iD. I find this behavior very peculiar. Nike must be really embarassed over the amount of sweatshops it owns. They will do anything to protect their Evil Empire!
Scenario one:
Megacorp starts a factory in some semicivilized dump of a country where corruption, communism, civil war, superstition, race hatred, or other BS have destroyed most of the value and driven the best and brightest out. Some scraggy kid gets a job at that factory, working eye-wateringly long hours for a pittance. Kid lives, saves, starts her own business, working up from scratch. Her and other kids like her change the political climate such that the crap burdening her nation can be pushed back and the light of free trade let in. Kid retires on share dividends at age 50, and moves to Malibu.
Scenario two:
Whiny well-fed reds back home guilt the megacorp into abandoning the country altogether, and campagn successfully to get child employment outlawed. Starving kid turns to whoring, dies of AIDS at age 14.
Compare and contrast. These are both realistic scenarios.
.
cpeterso
Yeah that is the ticket. Spelling in l33t style so you can look like a bonafide camping H@X04 llama.
Give me a break. Sweatshops are bad. The folks screaming that it is Stalinist to fight child labor forget the Lenin loving Mao fscks in China running so many sweatshops making everything from shirts to shoes. Sure, I see some stories and laugh because it is just blantant corporate bashing like f*ckedcompany.com from the opensource perspective. However, to bash corporations is not necessarily socialist.
You can hate commies, be ultra conservative, protectionist and want to keep the jobs at home. That is the Buchanan line which is very conservative. I am not a big fan but both liberals and conservatives bash corporations as they see fit.
When it serves their purpose.
ACK
I like to read what my opponents have to say. It's a good way to keep an active mind and not doze off. But I had to stop after reading the quote below. To summarize, he says
"Stop bothering me with reality! I don't want to think about it. I want to dream about paradise!!"
I got an e-mail today that included the same question I have heard a thousand times, "If Nike weren't in Indonesia, what else would those people be doing?" I guess the rhetorical response I posted a few days ago to address this question didn't quite satisfy everyone. I wondered why not? I also wondered why people always tend to ask this question with a "worst case scenario" approach. "If they didn't have those jobs they would be starving." Is it possible to consider a scenario that sees the possibilities of a better world and not a worse one? Is it possible to dream? [Is it possible to give a real answer to a real question?] Isn't this what the human spirit is all about?
It dawned on me that perhaps it is necessary to invite people to do this. Perhaps it is as simple as that; asking people to imagine a world where all human beings live together harmoniously. And once they have imagined it, ask them to take it a step further and act on it. We can do it. We can change the world! It is only a matter of asking a different set of questions and then working to find the answers to them. The first thing that must happen is the discarding of the question that does nothing to improve the situation of our brothers and sisters here.
"If Nike weren't there, what else would those people be doing?"
Hear me now... this question will no longer be asked. It limits the possibilities. It limits our ability to dream. It limits our commitment to establishing a world where all persons live freely and are granted the dignity that is their human birthright. How do we begin to change this situation?
But then the only people who will be able to pay are the kids who work at Nike.
-Legion
To paraphrase That 70's Show:
Burn!
cryptochrome---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Any takers?
Executives and sports celebrities are making millions off the slave labor in third world countries. These workers (children and adults) are being denied what is theirs -- a fair part of the profits. I would bet that if these companies who use child labour were to pay workers a fair wage the children would not have to work -- parents could support their families. The executives at Nike are simply taking advantage of the fact that third world countries don't protect their citizens the same way we do -- these countries rarely have minimum wages and are often complacent when corporations break unions.
How can they overcome poverty when the future of the country spends 10-12 hours a day assembling shoes and soccer balls instead of getting an education, let alone REAL workplace skills? Nike and other sweatshop labour using corporations are locking down their future wealth by keeping these countries poor by not paying workers fair wages.
A country with no income can't hire teachers. Workers are the source of a countries income but these corporations are stealing the workers income.
And Dauntless, I would like to know how you can defend the practices of these corporations. Families can't make a living while Nike makes a killing. The families are barely surviving on their wages and have little hope of a better future while they are working at Nike.
when Nike starts paying its manufactures a fair wage i might buy their products.
fear is the mind killer
Ever notice that sweatshop won't fit? because of their character limit it would be "sweatsho"
Smev
Ganked from nikewages.org
8-11-00
"What else would those people be doing?"
"What else would those people be doing?" I have been asked this question so many times. It has almost become the litmus test for whether or not what we are doing here has any meaning. I know that there are a few people who ask the question with genuine concern for the workers. "If they weren't doing this, would they be able to survive? Would they be OK? I'd be worried about them."
Then there are the majority of people that ask the question, "What else would those people be doing?" These are the people who want to feel OK about actively or passively contributing to the horror that is the workers' daily reality. They ask the question meaning, "Hey, those people are desperate, they should be happy they have those jobs. If they weren't doing this they would be starving, so they should feel lucky that they are making the little they are making from Nike." My gut reaction when I hear this is to want grab them by the collar and say "You self-righteous, privileged, #$%@! Is there a heart beating in that chest of yours?" To these people, if the question "What else would those people be doing?" is not answered, it justifies the exploitation in some warped way.
To be very honest, I do not know what the workers would be doing if they weren't working for Nike. How many of us would be able to answer that question for ourselves let alone thousands of people? What would you be doing if you weren't at your current job? There are a lot of factors to figure in aren't there? What would happen to the workers if Nike did not provide these jobs? Again, I do not know. But I do know what would not happen to them.
* They would not be working 10-15 hour days and not making enough to eat.
* They would not be screamed at and humiliated when they weren't meeting their production quota.
* They would not be forced to work overtime.
* They would not be threatened verbally or physically for trying to form unions.
* They would not have healthcare plans that do not meet their basic medical needs.
* They would not work 48-hour shifts when production quotas were high during American holiday seasons.
* They would not have their water supply polluted by factory waste.
* They would not have their once fertile farmland covered by factories.
* They would not be at the mercy of American companies that worked hand and hand with one of the most brutal military dictatorships in history.
* They would not have their economy dominated by foreigners that want to exploit their current situation and keep them oppressed for financial gain.
* They would not be reduced to cogs in the machine that feeds American greed and consumption.
* They would not be making American athletes and coaches rich from their sweat.
* They would not be helping to maximize American shareholder's profits.
* They would not have their hope taken away.
* They would not be dehumanized.
What else would they be doing? Once again, I'm not sure. Do I have to be? Most likely they would be poor and desperate, much like their reality now. They give so much to us in America. They give their hearts, their lives, their sweat, so we can be rich, in-style, comfortable, better athletes... They give us all of these things. But it isn't enough, we want more, we want to exploit them AND not feel guilty about it. So we smugly ask the question "If you weren't working this hard to serve our selfish wants what else would you poor, dirty, uneducated Indonesians be doing?" In asking this question we take from them the one thing they have left, their dignity.
ALLYRBSE
RBLNG2US
All your children are belong to us.
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Stop to think for a minute. Why are these children working for Nike? Surely their parents would rather have them playing in the yard or going to school. There is quite a simple answer these childeren work for nike because their parents cannot provide for them and they would otherwise starve. No, you ignoramus. These children are working for Nike because children's hands are small and therefore children can do the job quicker. I know this, because I've been to carpet factories in India where children were hired to do the weaving for this exact reason.
What you Nike-proponents and capitalism-freaks don't realise is that by hiring children for these tasks, Nike is perpetuating the cycle of poverty: kids who work in these factories can't get educated, and when they grow up they send their kids to these factories, ad infinitum.
The broader question is: just because the local laws don't forbid something, is it OK to do it?
Here is an example. Just because laws in country X don't forbid child pornography, is it OK to go to that country in indulge in such activities with poor kids? Of course not! Even if the money you gave those kids in return was a LOT, it would still be immoral.
Now I'm an asshole because I believe people should be treated fairly?
No, you're an asshole because you use emotionally loaded terms and examples designed more to ridicule me than to make a real point. And "unfuckingbelievable" doesn't seem to me like a respectful response.
What I PROPOSE is a living wage for people working their assess off so you/he/she can have all the newest/latest/most expensive brandnames plastered all over your bodies.
And how do you propose to accomplish that? You're just going to mandate it by government fiat? That's not likely to work. Although since you seem more interested in beltling me than seriously discussing the issue, I don't expect you to understand this.
Maybe you ought first do some research into the REAL conditions these people are working under, and how much money they receive for this work - and how that money translates in their economy.
Did you even read my post? The question isn't whether they make "enough" money. The issue is whether they make more money than they would without the sweatshop.
If you cannot see why these practices are unethical and undesirable you must be wearing blinders.
And if you can't see that the world cannot be made over by government fiat, you should study some economics.
Last, but not least, Mill-Owner Robert Owen (founder of Owen's College, now the University of Manchester, England) proved conclusively that an able, educated, well-nourished, well-treated work-force with adequate breaks and adequate housing will ALWAYS out-produce a crippled, uneducated, malnourished, abused one, with no breaks and poor housing, by MORE than the difference in cost between them.
Really.
I'm having a little trouble believing this, especially since most modern assembly-line production methods proceed at a fixed rate. I'm also having trouble believing that his proof is so extensive that it covers all economic and technology levels, past and future.
You going to give us a source on this, a paper, a book, a link, or should we just assume you're repeating someone's propaganda?
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
EXPLOIT, EXPLO1T, and EXPL01T
LABOR
SWETSHOP
NO UNION
Seems Nike is pretty sensitive these days. But the order system did accept "KID MADE" :)
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun, with Coca-cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun.
they're US-centric. I went to the Nike ID site and tried to create shoes that said "CHILD" on one side and "LABOR" on the other. It was rejected. However, change the back to "LABOUR", and it's accepted. Any Canadians/Brits/Aussies out there want to make a statement about Nike? :-)
You're absolutely correct, Nike is not trying to be humanitarian when it sets up a sweatshop in Bora Bora or whereever. They're trying to make a profit. Labor is so cheap in some of these third world countries that it makes up for all of the shipping costs involved.
But by virtue of setting up business there, Nike does help the countries out. Nike and others employ people in these countries who would otherwise be sitting around starving. Why is labor so cheap over there? Because it's so plentiful. Think about it, if you and 100,000 of your best friends were sitting around starving, and a company came in offering 1,000 jobs, they wouldn't have to pay very much to get you to apply. Maybe if more companies went over there to "exploit" the workers, the available labor pool would shrink enough that companies would be forced to pay more for labor.
And are the wages really all that low? Recall that Sally Struthers says I can feed a village for $10/month. In that economy someone making $1/day is wealthy.
-sk
First, where else would they go? Nike has to make shoes, it is their job. If they don't do that, they go out of business and default on all their sponsorship contracts. If people won't buy shoes made by workers earning a living wage, they are not a viable product and don't deserve to be produced. But I don't think that will happen. Like I said, Nike might have to raise prices, or pay sports figures less for endorsments, but they will still stay in business.
What would be bad for them is not all shoe companies had to operate on an even footing--if they were held to higher standards than other companies--that is why we need laws and governments for this sort of thing, rather than relying on the goodwill of individual companies.
Too many people don't pay attention in economics class, and all they get out is "humans are rational, self interested parties." This is a questionable hypothesis to begin with, largely misunderstood, and ignores the more important thesis "market forces drive a free market economy". By manipulating those market forces, it is possible (within limits) to control a "free market" economy. Depending on the means and the ends, such manipulations can be monopolistic behavior or collusion (bad), other times it is optimization, and good.
Neither are particularly related to Soviet socailims where the market was driven by government quotas, not supply and demand.
It's always highly suspicious when people are fighting for some supposed victims, and you NEVER GET TO HEAR from the "victims" themselves.
The only people raising this issue are rich westerners. The workers themselves are never asked. Think about why that could be.
If you want to customize your shoes, Customatix lets you play with a lot more elements than Nike's three colors and a word. I can't comment on the quality of the delivered shoes because I can't stop fiddling with my design. And while I can't vouch for their labor practices in any way, either, they do at least claim (here) to be trying to improve their workers' situation.
qualifies as a hack - and I'm glad to read that MIT students still believe in social engineering.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I'm fairly sure they have actual people reading over each name, not just a computer. Otherwise simple replacements would potentially get them in trouble.
Heres a good picture of a nice Nike related T-shirt that may interest some of you!
someone provide mirrors for the pic please!
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Neither laws nor unions are the primary driver of increased wages. Rather, wages are increased as a result of competition between employers for workers.
Don't believe me? The local McDonalds pays $7/hour. Explain to me how either the government or organized labor caused that to be higher then the minimum wage. If it happens here in the US, what makes you think it's any different overseas?
Try putting "i love you" on a shoe. It doesn't let you, yet it has no problem with "jesus is gay"
Does anyone believe in capitalism and the free market any more? I go to Purdue and the "Purdue Students Against Sweatshops" have been out in full force with their protestes that Nike is evil because they run sweatshops...etc. They claim that these people that work there are starving to death because they're being treated unfairly by Nike, blah blah blah. Does any one think that if it was that bad, that they would go find a job somewhere else? Even PSAS said that these people were in the middle of an "industrial section of mexico." Doesn't that imply LOTS OF JOBS? The free market is the only way to go. I agree that sweatshops exist and that working conditions are probably pretty crappy there, but hey, it isn't like there aren't other jobs out there. Workers should make themselves more marketable with education or work ethic. If they feel that they have this and aren't being treated fairly, GET A NEW JOB!!! Does anyone else feel this way? Please, I hope the answer is "yes."
Linux is so bad it's free and most people don't use it. But you have the source code, so it's your fault.
Won't market forces deal with this evenutally? The problem seems to be that the 'sweatshop' jobs are coveted for their comparatively high income levels and low availability. As more companies do this, the dependance on any one 'sweatshop' will decrease, meaning people will have the option of changing jobs, which means the really bad employers won't be able to hire people as readily and will have to improve their conditions?
Time to enter reality - the are no market "forces". This is one of those stupid metaphors the right wing uses to make it sound like economics is a hard science. It's not, it never will be, it's a soft science, with models and predictions only slightly more rigorous than the other soft sciences.
Your so-called 'forces' produce the results you expect them to under a limited set of conditions:
-zero market entry cost
-an extremely large number of producers and consumers
-perfect information available to all agents
-no collusion or government intervention for any agent
-all agents act in a perfectly rational manner
Under these conditions the supply and demand curves would predict prices, wages, and other good distribution with perfect accuracy. These conditions never exist, but some economic situations come close. The further you get from the assumptions of the market model, the less likely 'market forces' are to work.
None of the needed assumptions is remotely valid:
-zero market entry cost
It costs an awful lot of money to open an overseas sweathsop. I think there's a pretty serious barrier here.
-Extremely large number of agents
Maybe. But how many sweatshop operators are there in any particular corner of nowhere? At a global level, the number of agents interested in running sweatshops might approximate a true market, but you still have geographic monopolies and oligopolies that have absurd amounts of bargaining leverage.
-Perfect information to all agents.
Definitely not
-No collusion or government intervention.
This is the big problem. It's illegal to strike in these countries. Try starting a union, or demanding better working conditions, and you'll end up dead. If you have a one-sweatshop town and a second sweatshop opens, do you really think both sweatshops will engage in a wage bidding war? They'll make an agreement to keep wages at $.07/day. This deal is better for both of them. In the US, we call this price-fixing, but in developing countries they call it business as usual.
-All agents are perfectly rational
Do you really think a sweatshop boss confronted with demands for higher wages is going to start drawing supply schedules and demand schedules and find the intersection like a good little economist would? He's gonna hire a death squad...
I think 'market forces' and the 'law of supply and demand' are about as applicable here as classical mechanics and Newton's laws are at relativistic speeds. Sure, we can them to try and describe conditions and predict future conditions, but our predictions are just wrong.
If yous stop to think about it, it's amazing you'd expect markets to correct this situation. Some people refuse to believe that markets ever produce grossly suboptimal results. The "Markets are Always Optimal" school of thought isn't a hard science, it isn't a soft science, it a fucking ideology - an article of faith. You apparently accept even when it's completely wrong.
You're correct in saying poverty was not created by multinational corporations. Simply in many cases it is being maintained by them.
I'm not entirely sure where I said that "evil corporations [I] loathe so much will spontaneously raise wages out of the goodness of their hearts." They're not going to. That's exactly why workers in these countries need to fight for improved wages and work conditions and why people who sympathize with them in the first world are supporting their cause.
You seem to be proposing that things are the way they are and we shouldn't be challenging these multinational corporations to change, that we should work to maintain the status quo. Without people fighting for their rights we wouldn't have women voters. We'd still have slavery in North America.
What's my proposal? My proposal is that multinationals start paying their workers a working wage. My proposal is that workers be guarnateed safe working conditions. My proposal is that workers be allowed to form unions without threat to their jobs or their lives.
As you've said, multinationals aren't going to do this on their own. They're going to do what's in their best interests. Thus it's up to morally-concious first-worlders to show these companies that they do not approve of the treatment of third world workers. With enough opposition, sweatshop labour will no longer be in multinationals' best interests, and genuine change can be enacted.
When you think about it, many celebrity "role models" are in reality unsavoury. But they're usually a lot prettier than the people who volunteer at the local food bank, or walk the dogs from the pound, or work as doctors in developing nations for nothing when they could be making six figures doing nose jobs on vain North Americans.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I did some research on my own shoes. They're Converse, blue, you know, the skate type. The label inside the shoe told me "Made in Macau". I've never heard of Macau, let alone know where it is. I went to the Converse website to find out more. Let's have a look at their "studentinfo" (sic)
http://www.converse.com/info/studentinfo/manuf.htm l
- "...Converse Inc. is the largest U.S. manufacturer of athletic footwear due to its Lumberton, N.C.
..."
- "Lumberton employs approximately 890 people and is the largest employer in Robeson County, NC.plant"
- "Converse manufactured over 10 million pairs of the canvas Chuck Taylor All Star in 1992; 50 percent of which were shipped to overseas markets."
Hmm that's strange, they're producing from the U.S ? There's nothing about Macau in there. It seems to be an All American shop.Let's do some more research and read a bit of the financial info on their website. Hmmm this SEC filing looks interesting. It seems to go to the sec.gov site, but no hits on the query they gave us. Try hitting the link for yourself to see what I mean.
Grmbl, let's see what google gives us. Hey another link to the SEC site. And this one does mention Macau !
http://www.secinfo.com/dS997.7433.htm
"We utilize independent producers located in the Far East, particularly China, Taiwan, Macau, Vietnam and the Philippines, to manufacture approximately 64% of our footwear."
Well, 64% eh, that's quite a lot. I wonder how many sweatshops that is.
Converse, Stay True (tm)
No they would not move the factories back here. It would cost them more to build a factory here and pay the workers than to just pay more where they are. If you were to double what they pay the people in these 3rd world countries it wouldn't materially raise the cost of the shoes and would barely impact their profit margin. It might even increase their profit margin because the workers would be better nourished and with less worry about things like food they would probably increase their productivity. Paying a starvation wage to your employees is never in your best interest. I do not, have not, and will not own Nike stock. They are morally bankrupt and I refuse to help the current stockholders gain by my purchase of their stock. Nike has no legitimate reason to use the practices they currently follow. They have an obscenely high profit margin on the shoes they sell and can afford to put more of it back into the economy of the locations that allow them to make that profit. If you need to cut costs somewhere cut it on the promotional side. There is no excuse for a celebrity making more in one year from them than all the workers they have in Vietnam put together. That is wrong my friend, make all the excuses for their behavior you want but it still boils down to being just plain wrong. People keep saying they are a corporation and will only serve their best interests but corporation's decisions are made by human beings and the ones who made these decisions are unethical slimey toads.
"If there is nothing you are willing to die for, then you are not really alive." Myself
Think I am making this up?
Yes.
Especially since you say "[t]his is just a small sample of what it's like to work in a sweatshop" without actually having actually provided any examples. Your "sample" was actually a group of generalities presented in the second person.
I have no doubt that you actually believe that conditions similar to those you've described exist in the third-world, but I'm led to beleive that you base those opinions entirely upon hearsay.
Yes these kids in third world countries aren't making as much as we would be making shoes but what other jobs can they get out there? Although it may seem like chump change for us, it allows them to feed their families.
It may be politically incorrect but its true.
How about choosing between starvation and a decent job ? 0.7% of the sale price of a Nike shoe is sweatshop wages... they could easely double that wage, and reduce the PR budget by 0.7% (won't make a difference, it's already over 20% of the price of the shoe).
But of course paying 2 or 3 already overly rich basketball players is really more important than giving a decent life to thousands of workers abroad...
Well, I take great exception to this patronising viewpoint. The simple fact is that in the third world, there are no cushy benefits systems or fallbacks, other than your family, assuming of course you have one.
A lot of children who work in these places are a lot better off than they would be otherwise. They are working through choice, they are earning money to buy food and very often these jobs can mean the difference between working hard, but eating and being housed, and starvation and death. This is the cruel reality of the third world.
I find it gravely worrying that liberals are trying to remove the ability of people in the third world to make up their own mind on the matter, and also trying to remove a useful safety net in those societies.
I hate the way that they try and apply our values (children shouldn't work, people shouldn't be payed less than X amount, people shouldn't work more than X hours a week) on countries and societies where the situation is completely different.
It is moral and good not to expect your well fed American child not to work, but is it also moral to expect a street orphan on the streets of Calcutta not to work, especially when it is the only way he will make money?
I would say most definately not.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
90% of the cost of a pair of shoes to nike does not go to manufacturing wages. You're paying for materials (and R&D for the same?), but mostly marketing, marketing, marketing.
I suspect a small reduction in advertizing, or (gasp!) a price increase of a few dollars (which really isn't going to hurt any of us overweight americans) would provide enough available funds to pay a living wage to a 3rd world factory worker.
If mom and or dad could get one tenth of the US minimum wage for their blood and sweat, then junior probably wouldn't have to work at all.
However, Nike's management team would rather have nice bonuses, and their Ad firm wants to spend far more than necessary on advertizing.
(DISCLAIMER: All facts presented here are actually assumptions, and statistics are made up)
He should have ordered a pair that said "Sweat" and another that said "Shop". Mix and Match and boom you're done.
"The words of the prophets are written on the Slashdot walls."
By allowing a pair of shoes that said "Sweatshop" on them, Nike would de facto be close to admitting that they are in fact operating sweatshops. Why? Because every company guards its "brand" very carefully. If they allow the word on the shoes (right below the Swoosh), it in effect becomes part of their brand. Your name? Fine - if you want to be part of their brand. "Joe, by Nike." But "Sweatshop"? I don't think so.
Freedom: "I won't!"
In as much as corporations are "natural persons" under Federal law, Nike must be held to the same standards that other individuals are held to: Nike must receive the death penalty for its crimes against humanity.
Nike has engaged in countless acts of child labor abuse. They've not only failed to produce any benefits for the society that gave them corporate status; they've actively harmed that society. And other societies. It makes the US look like one evil corporate behemoth instead of the peaceful land of freedom our forefathers envisioned and drafted in our Constitution.
When individuals kill other individuals, they receive the death penalty. When corporations do the same, they get to keep teh proceeds and profits? Even serial-killers are denied that right under most state laws.
Anti-trust law is good and all, but it doesn't go far enough. Nike must receive the corporate death penalty (having its charter of incorporation burnt and its board members tried for criminal activities) not because they've harmed other corporations (as antitrust law concerns itself with) but because Nike has harmed actual living and breathing human beings.
Corporations like Nike have no place in any modern civil society. They are as good as dead.
Read the rest of this comment...
You are so blindsided by the idea that "providing jobs" is going to be an economic fix, that you are missing the fact that jobs are only as meaningful as 1. the wages the produce and, more importantly 2. the availability of local goods (esp. food) that can be bought with those wages. What is good for those workers is that people are producing food and goods locally at a price they can afford. The proliferation of sweatshops does nothing to make this happen - the economic benefits occur elsewhere.
I'd urge anyone interested/curious to read "No Logo" by Naomi Klein, which addresses the issues of branding / sweatshops etc. It's a fascinating and informative read.
Second, most of Robert Owen's findings apply to assembly lines equally well. In this case, a well-maintained robot arm is going to produce more than a poorly-maintained one, on a per-dollar basis, simply because it is capable of performing close to it's theoretical best. Whereas one that's not been oiled for a decade, and has half of its servos shorted, is not going to do nearly so well. Sure, it's -cheaper-, but so what?
The equation you need to look at is this one: Real Cost = Total Expendeture - Total Productivity, where Total Expendeture = Base Cost of Work + Cost of Obtaining Labour + Cost of Maintaining Labour, and Total Productivity = Work Achieved + Worker Self-Enhancement (ie: learning how to be more effective, on their own).
Last, you ask for URL's. What's stopping you from going to Altavista and punching in +"Robert Owen" +"Manchester"? Now, I've no problem with people critisising what I write, but self-admitted ignorant critisism, with no self-motivation to find out for yourself?
Now, if you'd asked nicely, I'd have put them in as a hyperlink. As it is, you'll need to cut and paste. There's no gain without effort. Making it trivial for you would achieve you nothing. But if it's worth the work, for all that the work is trivial, you might actually profit some.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Being vegetarian does not preclude wearing animal products.
yes, thats why I said "ethical vegetarian" that is (roughly) one who does not eat meat because they think it is wrong to kill an animal for food. WHile this also does not by definition preclude wearing leather, most people find it somewhat inconsistant to refuse to eat meat "because of the cruelty" but buy a leather coat.
Different strokes for different folks, though. I find waste more ethically disturbing than factory farming (which I try not to support) so if they're going to die I'd rather see the skin used than thrown away. Anyway, the orriginal post seemed to be talking about using a leather jacket to send an anti animal slaughter message, so I was going with that.
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
yeah this is an old story but it was on cruel.com no /. just so ya know
While I don't know that this is specifically true for Nike, it is not generally true for US and multinational corporations that have farmed out their production to the "export zones" of countries like Malaysia and the Philippines. Many of these companies routinely flout even the feeble labor laws of the countries where they set up shop. Because of "incentive programs", they generally pay no taxes. Workers are forced to buy company housing at rates that don't leave them much "take-home pay".
Read No Logo by Naomi Klein.
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
Do you really believe that Nike will give up the cost-effectiveness of making shoes in Indonesia just because people 'browbeat' them. I'm not asking them to give their workers western wages, just western conditions. The cost to them would be relatively small and their sales would go up. For example I spend around $200 a month on clothes and suchlike and at the moment, Nike don't see a penny of this. My money may be a drop in the ocean, but then I'm not the only boycotter. A mere 500 people like me would see Nike losing $1million worth of sales a year. So you're right - Nike doesn't care about me in particular but throwing away $1 million of sales doesn't sound like good business sense to me.
It does depress me to hear people say 'what's the point?'. If that had always been the attitude, the US would still be a British colony, African slaves would be still be picking cotton and only rich men would have the vote. Nothing may get changed thanks to my protest, but guaranteed nothing would get done, if I just carried on buying Nike.
All your base are, belong, to us?
__
__
what you say!
So I should say nothing and give Nike my money in the hopes that one day they might do something. Your argument reminds me of the '97 UK election when one of Labour's pledges was to reinstate the minimum wage, which had been abolished by the previous government, leading to local sweatshops. The business community were up in arms; prices would rise and workers would have to be laid off. Three years after the minimum wage was reintroduced, unemployment and inflation are both at thirty year lows. I don't doubt that similar arguments were used against giving our ancestors rights at work.
Finally, Nike do open factories in more developed countries. There are few to no western factories in Southern Africa (with the exception of South Africa) because it has been racked with war for decades. On the other hand, China, Indonesia, Thailand and Mexico have been relatively stable for decades, but the possibility of upheaval should be taken into account when companies prop up tin-pot dictators like Deng Xiao Ping or President Suharto.
Free movement of goods and restricted movement of people is economic slavery.
The global village is social not economic, any theory that claims the status quo is fine because it helps some people fell secure is childish myopia.and, and and...
We minorities have problems because of racist White people, not a racist government. Even though the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and numerous Civil Rights laws have stopped most of the overt racism in the political realm, there seems to be more racism in the social/cultural realm these days (just go to any White power website to see what I mean). Jesus, first you are talking about government then you jump to unions. Do I need to remind you that unions are not the government? Now put down the pipe and try to keep up with me. But earlier you claimed that it was the fact that there were more workers available is what made the economy grow and you totally disregarded the social and cultural aspects that interfere with the "rationality" humans need to have truly "free markets". Contrary to the dogma you learned from the Libertarian propaganda you seemingly have swallowed hook, line and sinker, not everything can be blamed on the government and not all government intervention in the economy is bad. Were you asleep in History class? Do you even know the history of Affirmative Action? To blame the federal government is bogus. It it the White people of the US, not the US government, that is holding back minorities in this country.
Racial progress has been occuring since World War II, not the 1960s like you mistakenly claim. Harry Truman integrated the Armed Forces in the late 1940's after seeing how well Black, Chicano and Asian troops did in battle. Before this brave act by HST, minorities died defending their country were not given any respect.
As a matter of fact, a Chicano soldier from Texas who won the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War II was not allowed to be buried in his home town because the cemetery was "Whites-only". This one act galvanized the Chicano community into seeking our civil rights, which eventually led to the Chicano movement and the Raza Unida party of the 1960's. They are not doing it because it is the moral or ethical thing to do. I don't deny that there are economic forces at work here (if no applicants apply at $5 but lots do at $7, then the effective prevailing local minimum wage is $7), however I do think it is simplistic of you to think that all government intervention in the marketplace is bad, and I think that my examples bear me out... Why is it that White Libertarians and Conservatives think they know what is going on in minority communities better than the people that live there? Why is it that they give more weight to their own misguided economic theories than to the the realities faced by the people living in the ghettos and barrios of AmeriKKKa? By definition, minimium wage jobs do not require much education or training, so this statement is false...Most people get hired on the spot because there happens to be an artifical labor shortage due to short-sighted immigration policies that are supposed to protect American workers, even though the American worker doesn't want that damn minimum wage job...Jesus dude! Do you ever put down your copy of "Libertarianism for Dummies"?
The one who is truly hurt is you because the cost of your burger just went up 50 cents. If you are honest enought to say that outright then I can respect your opinion, because you are complaining because it directly affects you in a negative manner. Just be honest enough to admit that many White people are economic racists, not "rational persons" in the economic sense...
Do you even know any people working for minimum wage? I seriously doubt it because if the difference between survival and starving is a measly two dollars, I say pay the damn two dollars to the employee. If that two dollars enables them to build a decent life (with health insurance) instead of scrabbling along from paycheck to paycheck (with no insurance) then pay the fricking two dollars. In the long run, the extra 50 cents that the burger cost me is trivial to me, however, to a low-paid person a two dollar raise is not trivial at all...
What gets my goat is that Libertarians and Conservatives come from basically the same place -- unbridled self-interest (i.e., selfishness). All the available evidence disproves your assertions yet you all blindly continue preaching the faith. At least the fools that believe in a "God" are intellectually honest to tell you that "No we can't prove that God exists, you just have to have faith".
Ask me to believe in your little religion and tell me to have faith if I don't believe, then I may work my way a little towards your viewpoint. Just don't try to use science, economics, morality or ethics to "prove" to me that you are right in believing that selfishness should be the First Commandment of our economic system, one that justifies child labor in Third World countries...
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
if you've got some $ to burn, just get 2 separate pairs of shoes
one pair with "SWEAT" -- "yeah.. i wear em to work out"
and
one pair with "SHOP" -- "uh.. i wear 'em to the mall.."
wear the left "SWEAT" shoe w/ the right "SHOP" shoe.
ROTFL!!! At one time Jim Crow may have been government sponsored, but now it is a social and cultural thing, not a political thing.
What the hell are you talking about? Jim Crow was abolished in the sixties. Yes, there are still some racist white people, but conditions *have* improved. And most of the things that are holding minorities back are still government-run: public schools, minimum wage, discriminatory "not in my backyard" zoning laws, etc.
Jesus, first you are talking about government then you jump to unions. Do I need to remind you that unions are not the government?
No, my point (which perhaps I didn't make clearly) was that unions are given their priviledged position by law. If the majority of the union votes for a particular policy, they can dictate those terms to the minority, and it's an "unfair labor practice" to hire those who don't like the contract the union negotiated. Without those labor laws minorities would have been able to negotiate seperate contracts with employers and probably would have gotten better deals.
Were you asleep in History class? Do you even know the history of Affirmative Action? To blame the federal government is bogus.
You didn't address my point that prior to the 1960's at least the government was the primary means of perpetuating racism in society. In the South we went straight from Jim Crow to affirmative action and anti-discrimination law-- the free market option was never tried. To blame the market for the conditions of minorities is still ludicrous.
As for affirmative action, if it works so well, why are minorities still worse off than whites?
if no applicants apply at $5 but lots do at $7, then the effective prevailing local minimum wage is $7
That's kind of the point, isn't it? Is that such a hard concept to understand? The "effective minimum wage" rises when there are more jobs than workers. You claimed that only governmetn intervention would make employers pay higher wages. Obviously that's false.
By definition, minimium wage jobs do not require much education or training, so this statement is false.
Simply having a job is a step up the job ladder of sorts. Even a burger-flipping job gives you experience showing up for work on a regular basis, following directions, operating a cash register, etc. More importantly, once you have your first job, you can get references for future jobs. "Unemployed for 5 years" doesn't look good on the resume.
As for your ranting about the minimum wage, do you have an actual *argument* as to why it doesn't lock the least skilled out of the job market, or do you prefer to simply belittle me and accuse me of being part of some vast right-wing conspiracy? If you're not bright enough to understand elementary economics, I'm probably wasting my time explaining it to you.
Your last couple of paragraphs don't deserve a response. You are making a large number of stupid assumptions about my motivations and beliefs. I'm not in the mood to debunk a bunch of mindless ad homs.
Read Naomi Klein's No Logo. You probably won't agree with her political views, which is understandable, but she has a lot of information about Nike (and other large labels) who contract with overseas owners of sweatshops in the Free Trade Zones.
The workers are probably are happy to have jobs -- but does that mean contracters should be allowed to pay workers sub-substinence level wages? Should they be allowed to use police to crack down on complaints about unfair treatment, unsafe working conditions, or (god forbid) attempts to unionize?
Nike doesn't hold the baton, but they pay the people who do. The contracters get money, Nike gets cheap labor, and the workers get screwed. Everybody's happy, right?
Nothing may get changed thanks to my protest, but guaranteed nothing would get done, if I just carried on buying Nike.
This is where I believe you're wrong. The conditions of third world workers will improve because once the excess labor is all hired up, companies will start raising wages to compete for workers. By boycotting companies who use sweatshops, you are discouraging them from opening factories overseas, and so you are delaying (if not outright preventing) this from happening. If anything, we should be encouraging companies to open sweatshops, thus hastening the day when all workers in the third world have jobs, and factories are forced to raise wages.
The problem is that as long as the only reason they pay the higher wages is because you disagree with them, they'll work hard to find ways of getting the cost savings and sell you the shoes-- they'll try to lie to you. And boycotts will only do so much. If you demand too much from them and the boycott is widespread enough, they *will* close up shop and move elsewhere.
Market forces, on the other hand, don't have either of these downsides. They will cause every sweatshop to be improved, and will work even if no American consumer pays any attention to it. And the wage growth made possible is unbounded-- it *is* possible that they'll approach American-styly wages as the infrastructure improves and the workforce gains experience.
The boycott option is a short-term fix, while market forces are a long-term solution. My harm is that the former will slow down the operation of the latter, thus delaying jobs and higher wages for everyone so that a few workers in Nike plants can have higher wages now.
I'm not by any means arguing for apathy. I don't dislike boycotting because I don't there's anything we can or should do. I dislike it because I think it does harm to the prospects of third-world workers, by taking away choices and slowing the inflow of capital into poor regions.
Who wants a pair of their ridiculous looking
products anyway? UGLY!
Grand idea.. let's start a petition for Nike to quadruple the wages they pay in 3rd world countries.
Oh, wait.. that means that in order to maintain their profits they'll need to lay off 3/4ths of the workers. But that's okay because the workers they have will be better fed and better able to work. Ah, but wait, they work too many hours. Better drop that by, oh, 1/3rd average. Which means Nike is now getting 2/12ths of the product they were getting from that sweatshop. Which of course means that their profits drop and they realize that for the balance of what they pay out in terms of upkeep and wages for that sweatshop they could put together a shoe-making-machine that does the same work as those 3rd worlders 24 hours a day, requires no wages, never gets sick, and needs one high-school dropout to make sure the laces don't get caught who'll work for minimum wage.
No, it's not right that people should have to live in the conditions that they do in 3rd world countries. Yes, anything that anyone from a 1st or even 2nd world country says about them can be easily dismissed as insensitive crap from the fat, lazy rich. However, this is the world we live in. In order to make 3rd world counties capable of competing for the same sorts of jobs and wages that people get in a 2nd world country you would have to revolutionize the entire country.. from the government to the industry to the educational system to the philosophies of individual citizens. And unfortunitally it doesn't work. It didn't work in various south american countries, it didn't work in china.
Countries can grapple their way into the global economy as something other than slave labor, but when your government takes the money from bigger nations to essentially make their very, very few rich richer in trade for allowing those nations to plunder their resources, it's not easy.
Sweatshops are bad. They always have been bad and will continue to be bad. However in terms of how well off the people working in them are, it's true that they Do have a better chance than with no job at all. When your options are take any job you can get or die you do what you can and all the 1st world activists shouting that you're mistreated doesn't get you a single grain more rice.
See Sig append. Append Sig, append. Good Sig.
*It must suck for these people working in these
*sweatshops to be making the highest real wages
*in their country.
I would like to respond to those of you that agree with this opinion.
The above quote, which I believe is not true based on personal discussions with Vietnamese immigrants, takes a very myopic view of the situation.
The reason most of these companies are able to set up sweatshops is that they not only exploit the labor situation, but the poverty of the government as well. Sadly, especially in Vietnam, most of the politicians there are more than ready to take a bribe and sell out the populous to Nike or any company bringing American Dollars. This type of corruption is really what prevents change. When it becomes profitable for dictatorships like Vietnam to sell their people out, they will do so and any company that buys into this situation is complicit in perpetuating it.
There was a time in the United States before child labor laws when American children were the ones working in sweat shops. Factories owners were probably using the same arguments then as some of you are using now. "We're giving these children wages. Some of them are supporting their whole family. How dare you liberals try to take that away." In some sense these arguments are true. But in the big picture, what America had was a situation where it became advantageous to a family to send its children into sweatshops and for the government to allow it to continue, and any scenario of short term profitability will perpetuate itself unless it is banned outright.
Let me illustrate with the following extreme example:
Mr. Nguyen wants to sell Mr. Rockefeller his son Troung's kidney for $10,000. This $10,000 will be a great help to his family in Vietnam, much more than the extra kidney will be to the child.
Why don't we allow such an exchange to take place? All of the above is true, and their are probably thousands of third world citizens who would take advantage of such an offer. I have no doubt there are some here who think this type of thing should be allowed. I am, however, absolutely against it for the following reasons:
-
Children do what their parents ask them do to. When
the parents are poor and desperate, they are willing
to put their children though great hardships for the
sake of themselves and the family(A prominent example
of this is young girls and boys sold into prostitution
in Thailand). Maybe you cannot prevent it, but it IS IN
YOUR POWER not to personally promote it by buying from
a company that exploits these types of situations when
you are aware of it.
-
Slippery slope. Usually I try to reject slippery
slope arguments, but the possibility of exploitation
by middlemen in recruiting/threatening organ donors,
bidding down the price of an organ, etc. is very
real( For example, the underground market
for babies). In regards to sweatshops, these middlemen
are in the form of the politicians who not only provide
the permits, they probably also will act on behalf of
the company to keep wages depressed and squash worker's
demands for better conditions.
It is unfortunate that the simple act of buying something as innocuous as tennis shoes has to be viewed in the context of a moral or immoral act. I certainly know that I haven't lived a perfect life. But if you are going to buy from Nike, understand the implications of what you are doing, and don't try to rationalize it to the point that you think you're doing some Vietnamese sweatshop worker a favor. You're not.San Le www.slffea.com
You are assuming he actually EXPECTED his order to be filled. A foolish assumption, IMHO. The article called it a culture jam, and thats just what it was. A way to get Nike to do just what it did and expose their hypocrisy for the (internet) world.
And if one went out and got a leather jacket at a second hand store and did just what you mention, it would be kinda funny and ethically legitamate. (or if someone wasn't an ethical vegitarian and just wanted to make irony points.)
Kahuna Burger
...will work for Chick tracts...
But why should children have to work to stay alive? Because sweatshop owners won't pay their employees enough to support themselves, let alone their children. Don't argue that the companies can't afford to.
OK, so what's your proposal? You claim that companies can afford to and should provide living wage jobs for every third world worker. Fine. What policy do you propose that will accomplish this goal?
You're setting up an entirely unreasonable scenario: that the evil corporations you loathe so much will spontaneously raise wages out of the goodness of their own hearts, or that wages can be raised by government fiat. This is simply false.
Again, poverty is not a new thing. It was not created by multinational corps. So if governments can raise standards of living by fiat, why didn't they do it long ago? Given that they haven't done so in the past, what makes you think more of the same will lead to any better result? It's fine to express your moral outrage, but what do *you* propose we do about it?
What drives wages is no unions or laws but competition for workers. By discouraging sweatshop formation you slow this process down and harm workers rather than helping them.
China has a population somewhere in excess of 1 billion people. The rest of Asia is far from underpopulated. You're trying to say that soon there will be a shortage of workers and companies will have to increase wages or face having their employees move to a different factory that pays better? Is this the "market force" you're talking about? The unemployment rate for many Asian countries (China, South Korea and the Phillipines as three examples) has actually increased between 1970 and the present, despite an increase in employment by sweatshops. This makes a worker shortage seem rather unlikely.
What happens if multinationals just fire their workers and bring production back to the states?
I hardly think that's much of an issue. Currently it's estimated that a "living wage" for most of Asia runs at about a couple dollars per day. Factory workers in North America typically earn between $10 and $20 per hour, so up to $160 per day. Not a whole lot of math involved in figuring out where the work force deals are.
How do you enforce this?
You seem to be reading a call for legislation into what I've said. You talk of enforcing, out-lawing, and of creating fiats. I'm fairly certain I didn't suggest any of these. Nike and similar multinationals sell well entirely because of branding. People want to buy into the lifestyle that these companies advertise as coming with the purchase of their product. If something is hurting the brand (like the swoosh being associated with sweatshops) companies will do what is necessary to protect their image. If that involves bettering worker environments in Asia to make Western consumers happy, that's what these companies will do (and indeed have done).
Actually I believe they will. It just won't be out of the goodness of their hearts or the browbeating of US activists. They'll raise wages because they have to to keep their workforce from going to another employer.You can let me know when they start doing that. In the meantime, Nike (as an example) has already increased wages a number of times because of the "browbeating of US activists". Not much, mind you, but much more than any increases we've seen from "market forces".
Perhaps I'm over generalizing here, but it seems that we differ in viewpoint in this respect: You're suggesting a laissez-faire approach to sweatshops in the third world. Eventually economic factors will improve working conditions and wages, so first-worlders can sit back and enjoy their shoes until that happens. I'm suggesting that by disapproving of sweatshop labour and pressuring multinationals through boycotts and negative publicity we - as consumers - can help to improve working conditions in third world countries much more rapidly. Certainly not overnight, but such campaigns have already had success in influencing the decisions of Nike, McDonalds, and Shell Oil (to name three) with regards to human rights.
You've made the point a number of times that sweatshops are doing more good than harm - that they provide jobs that were previously unavailable, that they increase the standard of living of their employees. I won't try to argue that point with you anymore. Regardless, I think we can agree that sweatshops are not the desired end result. They are merely a means towards economic prosperity for third world countires. Yet you seem to be discouraging attempts to help them move towards this prosperity. I am less content than you seem to be to "wait and see" what happens to these economies when corporations are left to run freely. North American consumers have the ability to help speed these countries' progress through the sweatshop stage and should do so to the best of their ability.
...that maybe the protest is just a cover and the real reason for putting "Sweatshop" on his shoes is because his feet stink?
Their web site lists country of origin, or at least it did a year or so ago. I was able to buy American-made tennis shoes. I thought that was pretty cool (and rare).
--
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Just customize it to the Personal ID of "5w34t5h0p"
;)
I guarantee that everyone here would "get" it, and that nike almost definitely wouldnt have it in their filters.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
I disagree. Your assertions are clearly wrong in several extreme cases. For example, a PhD educated McDonalds worker will not make Big Macs much faster or better than one with a bachelor's degree. Next:
a well-maintained robot arm is going to produce more than a poorly-maintained one, on a per-dollar basis, simply because it is capable of performing close to it's theoretical best.
I'm more comfortable looking at this one since the situation is more clearly defined. Certainly there is an optimal level of maintainance on the arm that will maximize profit. On the one hand, if you just let it deteriorate, it will do nothing. If you pay a team of engineers to sit by its side, oiling it continuously, it will work better than if oiled once per day, but proabably not enough better to justify the cost of the engineers.
But what I really object to is the idea that presumably the shoe companies could make more shoes for lower cost in the US. People did of course make shoes in the US during the 40's and 50's. They were not highly paid but conditions were much much better than in a 3rd world sweatshop. When the manufacturers built plants in the 3rd world, surely they would have noticed any drastic increase in labour costs.
Also, up through the early 90's it was possible to buy garments that were "Made in the USA". In my experience, these always cost more than similar garments made in the Central America, Pacific Rim, etc.
I do however think companies selling products in the US should be required to maintain humane labor standards. But I consider this a purely moral issue. In the long run, it will be better for humanity if people are not kept poor. But the unfortunate truth is that in the short term, these companies do benefit materially from these practices.
(Incidentally, in the 80's there was much more resistance to overseas manufacturing sold in US markets due to the industry unions. This eventually died out as these workers had to get other jobs.)
Nike's obvious defensiveness with regard to the use of the words "sweatshop," "child labor," "Nike sux," et al. lead us to one thing:
Truth hurts, don't it.
I think it has more to do with Nike having the right to decide what does and doesn't go on thier products. If I ran a company, I wouldn't want messages against me on my products. They have every right to decide.
The Good Reverend
In all the years I've been reading Slashdot, I've never been so disgusted by the reactions of posters, most of them posting along the lines of " Nike is not responsible for sweatshops/poverty, they were already there in the first place ".
At one point, someone says "If Nike would be forced to pay decent wages, and not hire children, they would move back the factories to the US".
Well, thanks to multilateral trade agreements, tariffs barriers are falling down, and the result is the free movement of merchandise. Countries no longer have to face protective tariffs and whole industries are sucked offshore.
What would be needed is free trade but with tariffs. Each country could be given an indice, proportional to it's standard of living, and, most importantly, proportional to the level of it's democracy. Tariffs could then be levied according to the differences between the indices of each trading country.
This would, of course, discourage trading between countries with different levels. So, the tariffs levied would then go to the poorer country, but administered by an entity that's outside the jurisdiction of the country, so to ensure that there is no embezzelment by corrupt authorities. Of course, any country that would resist that external administration's efforts would face an instant trade embargo.
--
You could always order more than one pair, one with the iD "child" the the other iD "labor", then mix and match them. Or use "Sweat" and "Shop".
Not as effective, but it would get the idea cross.
I thought the same thing, but I checked my facts first... The # of characters is dependent on which shoe. I looked at one of the cross trainers, saw the limitation. So I re-read the article. The author ordered`"ZOOM XC USA running shoes" If you look at that shoe, you see that # of allowed characters is 12. Makes sense that "SWEATSHOP" is now rejected. They'd have a default list that automatically rejects. If a human rejects an ID, then that rejection is added to the automatic list.
So please tell me why the fsck Nike has the impertinence to ask say 70 bucks for such shoes while they pay their sweating suppliers a measly $2.50 a pair.
I wouldn't say anything if them shoews cost us $10; then at least they passed their profit to us (and we'd have to wrestle with our hearts). But when they make 300% profit just by having them put onto AthleteFoot's shelves, then this is downright immoral. It's as if Microsoft charges you 70 dollars for a Windows upgrade which is not even worth the CD it's burned on...
Use The Source, Luke!
So you go on to argue that the only reason these people work like slaves is because more corporations haven't moved in to compete for their labor. Feel free to call me a communist or socialist, but if capitalism is Good, it must be Good at all scales, especially small. No, these people would not be poorer if the company left. They make just enough money ("they" meaning the all of the families who live under one roof) to pay the factory for rent and enough rice to let them live. They have absolutely no time to do anything except work and sleep. That is, they have no time to teach their children anything else except how to work in the factory. Would they die of starvation if the company left? Hmm... mankind seems to have gotten by in pre-industrial revolution times. Would they be poorer? They wouldn't have Western money in their pockets, but just try and put a price on their culture.
Capitalism, true Capitalism, isn't just about exchanging money for goods and labor - it's about a proper trade in value for what you want with what you want. No, these people aren't engaging in Capitalism by working in these factories. They've been tricked into slavery by corporations and corporate-backed polititians like so many heroin addicts who've been lured by the high (or in this case the dollar) but now have been on the junk so long they've forgotten how to live like human beings. They get just enough junk (er, dollars) to remind them of why they're there, but that cash just goes right back to the factory. Hell, if these factories were honest why don't they just pay their workers in rice and rent? I'll tell you why: Because the people who don't work for them already have a hut and rice. They're not blind or stupid. They can see the conditions that the others live in. But just like soon-to-be junkies they say "it'll never happen to me" and take the work for some cash.
If you want to read an enlightening story, here is a report and analysis of the actual earnings of these workers.
Market forces work very well in highly skilled occupations where there are fewer staff than workers. That isn't the case in the semi- and unskilled area where there are many many more people than jobs. Market forces are unlikely to ever solve this, that's why government legislation was required in the 19th century to end the practice in the west. Look at the result - after a mere hundred years centuries of abject poverty are gone, and we've enjoyed the fastest period of technological growth in history. The arguments against ending worker exploitation have always been that the extra cost would cost so much that factory owners would have to lay off staff. It didn't happen then and it wouldn't happen now. The Chinese government isn't about to improve things, but there's nothing stopping Nike or Gap, except that it isn't economical. What I and others are trying to do is make it more economical to do this by not buying their products.
If market forces had always been allowed to run rampant in the west, slaves would still be picking cotton, children would still be working in dangerous conditions and women would be paid a great deal less than men. The market never takes a long-term view, it only cares about what sells now. But making workers richer means more profits in the future for a small profits hit now.
Americans buy their shoes, so why dont they use american workers to make the shoes? Because they know unions would not let them EXPLOIT the workers.
In a word, wrong. Nike runs sweatshops because it's cheap. It's cheaper because the federal government mandates a minimum wage and requires safety regulations to be followed. If you're a corporation who's single purpose for existing is to make money (which is the only reason corporations exist) you will obviously take the cheapest course to make the most profit.
Make Nike and other corporations pay 1/3rd what t hey make to their employees in 3rd world countries and you'll find they no longer Have employees in 3rd world countries. If you pay cheap labor high wages along with high shipping costs it becomes much more cost effective to pay local labor the same wage.
Nike are able to pay for what is basically slave labor
It's not slave labor. Tell any actual slave in a 3rd world country that they can either remain a slave or go back to their home shanty town and have the Option of working in a sweatshop and being Paid and being able to quit if they want to quit and they'll not hesitate a second.
have listened to an executive at Nike say if the wages go up, they move out of that country
Of course they will. The wages go up, their profits go down. They find a new 3rd world country where wages are lower to open up a new factory. As I already said, corporations exist solely to make money by whatever means they can get away with. When they stop making money one way they'll find a new way.. that's how it works.
Pull your head out of the emotion bag and think.
See Sig append. Append Sig, append. Good Sig.
I don't give a crap if you take me to negative karma land, but how the hell can an intelligent post like this be labelled as flame-bait? I doubt any slashdotter understands the realisty of the third world countires that are concerened as this guy is. If we give 50k to a guy in vietnam he's gonna live the rest of his life with maids taking care of him and a sizeable piece of land. 50 cents in the Us != 50 cents in vietnam.
Not quite right...
The ZOOM XC iD allows 10 characters... it is the second running shoe from the left.
Perhaps (giving Nike the benefit of the doubt) some allow 8 and others 10 as a function of the available space on that part of the shoe...
Support a few technologists in Washington.
> SOMEONE
> SET UP
> US THE
> BOMB
> !!!
Coincidence that backwards that text would read:
!!!
BOMB THE US
UP SET SOMEONE
Not such a bad idea...
generic
Think Micheal Jordan. A black man who forgets what slavery is. American dream.
Buy two lots of shoes. One lot says "sweat". Not inappropriate for some sweat shoes. The other order says "shop". Fairly innocuous. Then put the left with the other right and get sweat shop :-)
Nike is different than Fly-by-Night Chinese Clothing Corp who don't have any investment in your goodwill. Once Nike is convinced that it's cheaper to ensure that their (indirect) employees are reasonably treated by North American/ European standards, it could have a domino effect on the treatment of near-slave workers elsewhere in the third world.
If you don't care about human rights elsewhere in the world, you don't have to do anything about Nike. On the other hand, if you refuse to do anything to support somebody else's human rights, there's going to be that much less human rights karma available to help you when you (or your kids) get arrested for doing something like making their own DVD.
Just remember: The people most likely to be opressed by human right violations are generally at their weakest. If you ever have your rights violated, chances are that you're going to be needing the help of others to get out of the pickle.
That's the main reason why some people care about the human rights of others. We're setting up the principles for the defence of our own rights.
--
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
"Bad jobs are better than no jobs"
WRONG! If all parties were perfectly aware of the situation, you would be right.
However clearly Nike holds the upper hand. Nike knows about the health risks due to the fumes from glue that bonds the sole to the rest of the shoe. The workers don't. Nike knows they can make the employees work for longer hours than promised, with no immediate retribution. Sure, the employee can quit but they won't get their last paycheck, etc. Nike knows they can physically abuse their employees -- not likely to be part of the initial employment agreement, nor is it likely to be legal in the country of employment. Nike knows they can lie to the American public about the conditions, and get away with it for the most part.
All of these cases are instances where the employee doesn't have perfect knowledge -- and thus can't be expected to make a rational decision. Economics classes assume perfect information. This doesn't mean one can see the future, but it does mean that all parties know all current information. I have a BS in Economics, and while it does help me analyze problems, I am careful of the assumptions an economics analysis requires.
Nike isn't the only guilty shoe and apparel manufacturer -- its just the biggest. Want to stop an evil gang? Take out its leader.
PS -- LIVINGWAGE is 10 characters, and it was accepted as a iD for the ZOOM XC iD (a running shoe).
Support a few technologists in Washington.
If you want cool shoes, not made in a sweatshop (actually in the good old US of A) buy Oakley.
yep /. ed..
anyone with a mirror?
Hash Bang Slash Bin Slash Bash
The simple fact is the vast majority of the poor in the 4rd world were better off in the days when they were living in agrarian barter economies than they are now. Just compare the lifestyle of someone living in a Javanese kampung in 1920's Netherlands East Indies, with the lifestyle of a contemporary Javanese sweatshop worker. Or we could compare the lifestyles of the average Ghanian (I think it was Ghana, well it was one of those West African countries) back in the agrarian barter days, before the World Bank conned them into bulldozing all the local Fruit n' Vegetable crops & replace them with cash crops such as coffee. Now the country is in huge debt & everyone else is in debt to, & for what? For lower living standards & life expectancies. Or we could just compare the difference in lifestyles between the average Englshman of the Middle-ages (say the 12th Century) & that of the average working class English man of I ndustrial revolution Britian (right up to the Victorian era). The Englidsman from the Middle Ages had a diet at least 60% bigger in calaries & lived on average 20 years longer but worked heaps less to (on average there was arround one feast day a week, too). The simple fact is that economic development does not mean that people are better off, but it does mean that the environment is worse off.
Haven't you heard of needle & thread.
FORGREAT
JUSTICE!
(lameness filter avoidance text)
LOL!
:)
o wing.mov
Check this one out. It's been dubbed over with real voices
http://members.optushome.com.au/geoffebb/misc/zer
Rader
Order Two pair. One with "Sweat" and the other with "Shop" and put one on each foot.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
FWIW, I just went and tried it and the ID field is size-limited to 8 characters, so the nearest I could do was 'SWEATSHO'. I suppose Nike could've changed it.
-Bill
yeah it really sucks!!!
Your making the best wages in your country
and still have to live by 4 in one room,
don't get enough food to be healthy, have
to work insane amount of overhours, get
verbally and physically abused and terrorised
and when you try to organize you get threatened,
fired, beaten and sometimes killed!!!!
And for the ignorant ones out there,
Jim Keady, a former soccer coach who
got fired because he refused to wear
nike stuff, 'tested' the common
PR line of
"these are good jobs and wages for these people"
by living on a typical wage there for a couple
of month:
His experiences can be found at:
http://www.nikewages.org
you probably don't believe the MS FUD and
PR bullshit, so why are you believing the
Nike one????
I'm not sure this is true. How much did shoes cost in 1985, before Nike introduced the Cross Trainer?
I don't remember them costing $100, even adjusted for inflation. What is that, a full day's pay for the average american?
I think the idea of what a shoe costs has changed before, and it could change again.
Rumor is at the heart of all the anti-Nike allegations, and it's spread by casual activists who like to appear hip by "protesting," even when they don't understand the issues they're protesting in the least. A story about an infamous sweatshop spread around a group of young urban professional hippies quickly - in the manner of an urban legend - evolves from an isolated horror story to the norm at Nike factories around the world. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story!
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
Anyone want to step all over Nike's "freedom-of-expressions-we-approve-of" covered toes?
Register www.SWOO.sh !!
Last I checked, it was available... but the fear of well-paid lawyers stepping on my freedom-loving toes -- well that just smushed my thoughts of stickin' it to 'da man!
I applaud this dude...
Crystalize your tears, dried upon The Cross
Blood drips on your pain, time to ride The Light
Crystalize your tears, dried upon The Cross
Blood drips on your pain, time to ride The Light
1. By this brilliant social engineer's statements, we know that actual human's look at submissions that are not rejected outright. What does this tell us? That 'slipping' a catchy little phrase or bit of leet-speak by a jsp (and actually buying a pair of shoes in the process *hehe*) will only get it rejected within 24 hours.
....
...
2. Words that weren't rejected outright before (like swetshop and fucknike) now are - what does this tell us? Once a word is rejected by review, the 'wizard' starts rejecting it. Given that, what are the chances that the folks at nike are going to chance the size of their text field based on a word (sweatshop) that's probably been added to some sort of kill list? It MUST be a conspiracy to keep down us clever little rabble rousers from buying shoes with dirty words on them!! um, yeah right
It's amazing what bubbles to the top of these threads
Carpet pissers did this? Well Dude, we just don't know.
I find it intriguing, that moments after this story was posted, the html "wizard" that allows consumers to build their own Nikes was suddenly changed ever so slightly, and I mean ever so slightly - suddenly the textbox to enter your "id" was limited in size to 8 charachters. Just one shy of the 9 chars in the word "sweatshop".
And to prove this was deliberate I checked the cache of my second pc which coincidentally had visited just this site a few days ago. The text limit was 12 chars on what was otherwise identical HTML.
Fascinating.
Unfortunately, I can still think of plenty of regrettable things (to Nike) that fit in 8 chars or less (per shoe).
I recommend we all place an order right this moment for a pair of shoes with "goatse" in the left shoe and ".cx" in the right one.
They have a defence. It is legitimate, but the taste it leaves in your mouth is foul.
The defence is this: they exploiting companies don't actually employ the workers being exploited. What they do is look for contracters who can deliver lots of product cheap. These contractors are unscrupulous and treat the worker like crap. Nike (and others) can just say "we hired them, but have nothing to do directly with the workers". This is true, in its own, twisted way.
The moral arguments raised by this are endless. I'm sure you can guess what they are.
If you haven't read No Logo, do so. It is a great read.
Woz
I skimmed your URLs.
I missed the "conclusive proof" that you claim exists. I did note that Owen approves of putting children to work at ten years of age. Is that an element of his proof?
You have nice equations, though. Let's take a look at them:
Algebra time.
RC = BCoW + CoOL + CoML - WA - WSE
We're most interested in Labour Costs:
LC = CoOL + CoML
RC = BCoW + LC - WA - WSE
Solving for LC:
RC - BCoW + WA + WSE = LC
Unabbreviated:
Real Cost + Work Achieved + Worker SI - Base Cost of Work = Labor Costs.
So raising LC can result in a raise in Work Achieved, Worker Self Improvement, or Real Cost. The equation doesn't specify more than this. Raising Labour expenditures might result in more Work Achieved. It might also result in an increase in Real Cost of Operations. We don't know specifically, becuase the equation doesn't say.
Got any more irrelevant generalities? Who do I pay to get my crap posts modded up?
Why am I being blunt? Simple. Your science is crap. You're throwing off unproven generalities, and the burden of proof lies on you, not myself.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
Just because the standard of employment in those countries is poor doesn't give Nike the right to employ young children in dangerous, unhealthy environments for a wage that is a patheticically small percentage of what their labor is worth to the company. How about holding huge multinational corporations to a higher standard instead of comparing them to the average employer in Pakistan.
This is a bowel disruptor, and you are just full of shit. - Spider Jerusalem
Please don't feed the trolls.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Oh my God. I love donuts!
Where are they? I checked the whole floor, but all I could find was half a leftover bagel from this mornings training breakfast.
Worked up a good sweat looking, I did.
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One quick observation: If the kids working at Nike are suddenly making more than the local doctors, you just totally screwed the economy to hell.
What is going to change it is to help the workers in these factories stand up for themselves and get the working conditions and wages they deserve. And that isn't going to happen as long as countries like China and Indonesia, etc. brutally supress any attempt by the workers to act in their own interest.
How is that going to come about? Cause trouble for the corporations that created the situation and now profit from it, and make negative political consequences for the polticians that take their bribes.
Where does Keynes reject "comparitive advantage"? In fact, where does any serious economist reject the idea? Your argument makes no sense Lemmy (or at least is incomplete). So the people can't move. That doesn't explain why they are choosing to work at the Nike factory, if they would be better off working elsewhere? Why do you think they aren't they choosing to work elsewhere? And if the Nike factory closed tomorrow, explain the steps that would happen to make those workers better off.
This viewpoint ignores the complexities of economics in developing countries. All corporate entities have a responsibility to those they hire, it's not as simple as I will pay you x for y work.
In a civil society ethics enters the picture. Ethics being that a companies operations should be benificial to the local population as well. Look into the history of corporations for more info on this.
The problem with sweatshops is that they keep these people from bettering themselves. By paying them little cash, forcing them to work for extremely long hours and openly and forcefully opposing unionization, these companies turn the their workers into citizens who are unable (lack time and money) to better their community.
Employing underage workers (the starving Vietnamese kid) is completely immoral. By providing a dead-end alternative to education, the corporation (as well as the collaborative or complacent local authorities) are condeming a generation to the same conditions as their parents. These people would be better off as farmers who owned their own land and worked for themselves, as it was before European colonialism and the Red Scare of post-colonialism (why do you think so many rational people thought communism was a good idea?).
Americans and most Europeans would be in the same boat had it not been for legislation that dictated basic working conditions and terms. Child Labor Laws, unions and minimum wage/max hours laws are what allowed the middle class in this country to grow in flourish.
Any philisophical discourse or study into sustainable democracy and civil societies show that the most important factor is a large, independent middle class, who can collectively counter-balance the large capitalists, ensuring that no one has to much power. Sort of like the 3 branches of the US gov balance each other. If you look at the history of any developed country, a strong middle class was an essential component.
We don't hate all large corporations simply b/c they are big and scary. We object to unethical and irresponsible behavior that does not benefit the societies they exist in. This goes doubly so for the US governments foriegn poilcies which have encouraged and supported this behavior (send in the Marines on behalf of the United Fruit Company!!). I hope this is somewhat enlightening as to why many of us consider large multinationals to be exploitive and feel the need to at least support protests against them and especially against our own government.
Oh and one more thing, the world might be a safer place for Americans if we acted more responsibly. I don't think as many people would want us dead or call us a Great Satan if their encounters with American people and institutions were not so negative. Then we could cut taxes like nobody's business due to the amount of money we'd save on military spending. (Don't get me started on the fact that we're the world's largest arms exporter).
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
First ... Nike never would have processed the order. It says right on the site that they reserve the right to reject ID's.
Second ... The ID can be no longer than EIGHT letters. Sweatshop is NINE, and would never make it through the system.
On a personal note, I think the Idea of custom building my shoes is AWESOME, especially with my nickname on them. Finally, I'm not stuck with the fuckin' ugly colors most Nike's come in these days (I've been wearing Sketchers for that reason). You know the ones ... the shoes that make you look like you're from the future.
However, Nike makes the best shoes I've ever worn, and now that I can get around the color issue, I'll go back to wearing them.
A sweatshop is factory that uses a dominant position (only work available in the area, or "owns" the local government, or employs illegal aliens) to enforce illegal work conditions.
A good summary of the problem can be found in the article "Human Rights Abuses in the Apparel Industry". Search the document for Nike. Nike is responsible for using illegal tactics to withhold pay, to enforced overtime over the legal maximum, and to pay below minimum wage pay. Nike knows about and allows physical and sexual abuse. Nike is breaking the law in these countries.
But apparently because these things happen far away, because the governments is question have problems enforcing their laws, because these workers are desperate for the work, this is acceptable. After all, it "helps keep Nike running shoes affordable for all of us." Apparently the end justifies the means. All hail Nike for abusing human rights in name of cheap sneakers.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Can I get a pair that says "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!!!"?
This is normally their battle cry when faced with evidence of capitalism being an awful system.
Rich...
Ignore Alien Orders
to all of you who buy the swooshtika propaganda machine and their 'fair wage' please check out the olympic living wage project
http://www.nikewages.org/index2.html
Jim Keady traveled to Indonesia and subsided (barely) on an allowance fixed at the same wages as a Nike factory worker. This is after Nike rejected his application for employment at one of their 'modern' and 'progressive' factories offering fair wages.
Please read this if you still buy the Nike propagated myths offering great jobs to the impoverished masses.
I'm sure that I am running the risk of being called a bleading heart liberal, but who cares. When some jackass spews crap like this somebody has to say something.
While this doesn't sound like that good of a deal to most lazy Americans, who like to sit in their cubicles and eat donuts all day, if you were a starving Vietnamese kid, you'd probably be pretty grateful that someone would offer you a job and allow you to work enough hours to be able to support your family.
So that makes it OK to take advantage of this person's lowely circumstances. That's like the slave owner saying "Slave Jim should be happy that I am his master, because without me he wouldn't have a job, and he would starve." You may say that this is a bogus argument because the sweatshop worker can leave, but the slave can't, but hunger and need can be just as strong a deterent from leaving as any that were used on slaves.
Q:So what does that leave you with?
A:A labor force that can't leave their job for fear of starvation(death). A captive labor force. A slave labor force.
Pretty it up any way you want, but the fact still remains that by purchasing shoes made by a vietnamiese child you are wearing the work of a slave. I hope that makes you sleep well at night.
When I want your opinion I will beat it out of you.
If it's so terrible, quit. Employment is voluntary last I checked.
Have you been to a sweat shop? I saw where Wilson makes baseballs in Haiti, all hand sewn. Try doing that for 10 hours a day 7 days a week for minimal pay. Even if it is the going rate for that country. Can't Wilson/Nike/any company afford to pay their employees? Sure they can, but why, when they "need" a new Beemer to fill the 4th garage?
Why are we Americans so sure that everyone else would be so greatful to be like us, isn't that a bit presumptuous? Why don't we climb down off our high horse and actually do something, instead of make excuses for the way things are.
How greatful would you be if you were begging and recived a "gift"?
Would you be greatful?
Or would you be ashamed to be in the position you were in?
Hmmm, think about that for a bit.
"No one will smell that."
Would they accept "Heaven's Gate"?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
He did not intend to create a scene. That would have been stupid purist crusading.
Making a point involves tact not "leadership".
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
However, these practices were banned in the UK back in the early-to-mid Industrial Revolution, as too many workers were dying or becoming seriously injured. (As in, losing limbs, eyes, etc.)
Many people rightly feel that if WE oppose such practices, on moral, ethical (or even business) grounds, for our own children, how DARE we consider it acceptable for children in some conveniently remote location!
Last, but not least, Mill-Owner Robert Owen (founder of Owen's College, now the University of Manchester, England) proved conclusively that an able, educated, well-nourished, well-treated work-force with adequate breaks and adequate housing will ALWAYS out-produce a crippled, uneducated, malnourished, abused one, with no breaks and poor housing, by MORE than the difference in cost between them.
Nike is foolish. Not for moving to a 3rd-world country, but for making the same errors that post-medieval industrialists did. Serfs make very poor labor pools.
Nike could double their profits, by raising the standards of living & working. This might sound a bit strange, but it's a truth large corporations ignore at their peril. NOBODY works better than their conditions. If you want a workforce that can outproduce a small nation, you give them a reason to WANT to outproduce a small nation, to WANT to be that dedicated.
As Roy Castle once said... "Dedication is what you need."
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
May we all learn such passionate civility in supporting our causes.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
"and helps keep Nike running shoes affordable for all of us"
Do you know what the real cost of making that shoe is, The most expensive shoes from Nike and Reebock cost $10 landed(with Freight) in the US. It retails for at least a $100 more than its cost. The base model cross trainer that retails for $75 costs less than $5 landed.
Nike should do one of two things, take some of that profit and make better working conditions for their workers, or they can reduce their prices at least by half.
They choose not to do either and eat up their enormous profit margins.
Well i agree with some of what you said, the part about avg. income in 3rd world nations (developing countries for the p.c.) being under a grand a year. BUT you have got to be kidding me about the bit about the starving kids who dont mind working. Tell me, have you ever met one of these kids you seem to be talking about with so much confidence ? ?
/. readers and NGO's and activists in this area, think a bit, go and read about the lives these ppl. lead!
Well let me tell you something, I have met some of the kids that work for sweatshops, it was not in Vietnam, and not for Nike. I am talking about teenagers who had spent a good part of their youth working in Carpet making factories in Pakistan.... They were these were the lucky ones that got out due to the intervention of NGO's. They were getting paid, yes BUT it was not even enough to feed themselves with a good meal (rice and onions alone is not what i term good) at the end of the day. And you really think its fair for any kid to not be able to go outside and play ?
And if you are wondering why they are working if they are not forced to? The reason is that the parents of these children dont send them to the schools in most causes...... they can make some money if they start working NOW! Take away the sweatshops and you end up with some kids actually getting an education, hell if nothing the kids get to enjoy themselves a bit. Its very easy to see that this is a very vicious cycle and only helps big Corp's rake in the multi-million dollars profits year in and year out!
SO, before you go off on a rant to blame
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
Sure, kids in these countries have the right to work to help their families. Unfortuately, they also have the right to work long hours for low wages with no benefits and in unhealthy conditions. That would fit my definition of expoitation.
Come on. These kids are not abused or mistreated. They're given jobs at a decent wage for where they live, and they are not forced to work beyond their will. Cut Nike some slack ... they are actually doing GOOD.
Oh please. Alright then, what if you were an "unskilled" American laborer, not a "lazy" cube-sitter, who wanted an assembly-line job with this stable, reputable American company?
Oh, sorry, you can't, because there aren't any Nike factories in the US. Because the workers there would demand a decent wage, medical benefits, the whole nine yards. They might even -gasp! - organize into unions to demand these concessions. So, thanks Nike for taking these jobs out of the US. Great corporate citizen.
And if you're going to come back with "well, Americans should work as cheap as the East Asians," then tell me: why? When the executives of the company are making millions per year, why should ANYONE be satisfied with a few hundred (or less!) per week? These are the laborers who are physically MAKING the fortune that Nike executives live on. The fact that they receive such a miserably small portion of the compensation is unforgivable, no matter what side of the Pacific they're on. The difference is that here, they'd make some noise about it.
(Incidentally, Nike was targetted by a sketch on "TV Nation" a couple of years ago; Michael Moore went to Phil Knight's office and asked why there are NO Nike factories in the US, and he had the gaul to say that "People in America don't want to make shoes"! Seriously! So this "make your own shoe" promotion is really ironic on that level, too)
Rich Americans and other first worlders, whose idea of privation is finding that Starbucks is out of frappaccino mix, have the idea that if kids in the third world didn't work at a factory, they'd be going to school and learning. If this were really the case, I'd be against 3d world child labor too. But the sad fact is that in much of the world, kids have a choice between working and starving. If they're not working in a factory, they will be begging, scavenging, or falling prey to pimps. It's not pretty, but it's the way it is. The option of factory work is pretty attractive compared to the other options faced by many poor children.
It looks like Nike altered the site after the fact to only allow eight letters. It used to be 12, apaprently?
Young employees == children. How did you spend your childhood?
if you were a starving Vietnamese kid, you'd probably be pretty grateful that someone would offer you a job and allow you to work enough hours to be able to support your family.
Thats the whole point - corporations move production to economicly stagnant locals so that they can offer diminished wages to an eager populace. But don't believe that the corps are doing this out of their collective goodness. The bottom line of any corporation is profit. Nike doesn't sell shoes, Nike makes money selling shoes.
Not only that, but the inexpensive labor cuts down on the cost to the consumer and helps keep Nike running shoes affordable for all of us.
You expect me to believe that the material & labor cost of any Nike shoe is close to their market value?
Nike is making a killing on every pair of shoes they sell - and an even bigger killing since they moved production to the third-world.
You're defending a corporation that thinks of you as a data point, if they think of you at all. Is democracy stronger when corporations do whatever they want, or are you the type to think that government should be kept out of the hands of the "stupid masses"? Should the capitalist elite and their companies of managers owe nothing to the world they seek to control? Can they not even muster up the candour and honesty it takes to admit their purpose, without layers of obfuscation?
Who's being exploited? Well it's either the people who made the sneakers for a dollar, or the people who buy the sneakers for a hundred... you figure it out. (Use big words like "marginal utility" if you like, but it won't make it right.)
This attack on Nike by exposing their hypocrisy was a strong statement and an excellent example of culture jamming: effective and ironic. In comparison, your "defence" of Nike is pretty weak. What's next? "The misunderstood American lawyer"? "The plight of the dot.com shareholder"?
So how can we tell if a company is running a sweatshop or raising the standard of living? Presence of accusations is no proof, because there are motives opposed to foreign labor. Is there a site where objective inspectors post observations and score companies? I like the use of our relatively high wealth raising the standard of living elsewhere via market forces. I abhor the abuse of people. I don't have the time to personally inspect the factories.
Truth hurts, don't it.
Although if it went through you'd have pretty 133t f33t
come for the naked robots, stay for the zombies
I question the accuracy of this e-mail exchange. Nike's site says that ID's are limited to eight letters. Last time I check, 'sweatshop' was nine. Perhaps this story isn't entirely true?
Of course, if he tried to obtain 'sweat' and 'shop', then that's entirely possible.
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
-rt
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Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS
Yes, it may be a dead-end job, but at the moment it's better then the alternatives for most of these people. I'd rather have to work at McDonalds for the rest of my life then starve to death over the course of a month or so.
So -- what we need to focus on is having a definite foreign policy from a business standpoint, which is enforced by federal law, which states that overseas workers are to be paid no less then is required for a minimal standard of living. Somewhat like a foreign version of minimum wage.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
The rest of the Michael Moore/Nike experience was that Michael asked Phil if he would build a plant in the US if Michael could find 500 workers who would want to make Nike shoes. Phil said he'd consider it, so Michael when back to Flint and videotaped hundreds of folks who would LOVE to have a job making shoes.
When presented with this video footage, Phil said "People will say anything to get a job".
The whole story, plus a lot more interesting reading, can be found in Moore's book "Downsize This!".
As for the 'sweatshop' issue, would they reject a request to put the URL to the story mentioned in this article? What if I spelled 'sweatshop' in another language?
'weatshopsay'
Btw, did Cowboy Neal give Nike permission to use his name on the shoes?
Wow... the possibilities for pissing people off are practically endless! I've got to order my pair of /. (or Cowboy Neal) sneakers today!