May 19th, 2010
Team Sweat:
Please read the article below from The Financial Times. This is an excellent rebuttal to the market fundamentalists out there who believe that our anti-sweatshop work is going to hurt the workers for whom we are advocating. It is clear from this piece that the facts do not support that position. In fact, the reality is that our campaigning is working and improving workers’ lives.
Let’s keep the momentum going!
Peace, Jim Keady
By Tim Harford
Published: May 8 2010 01:25
Financial Times Weekend Magazine (UK)
When my book The Undercover Economist was published five years ago, I would occasionally be asked whether I was in favour of sweatshops in developing countries. Not at all, I would reply. But I could see where the question was coming from, because I was certainly worried as to whether campaigning against them would do any good.
My argument had a logic that will be familiar to economists. Unless sweatshop workers are literally slaves, they are presumably working long hours in horrible conditions for low pay only because the alternative ways of making a living are worse.
When a well-meaning group of activists launches a campaign against sweatshop labour among, say, Nike suppliers in Indonesia, the obvious risk is that the sweatshops are closed, workers are tossed out on to the street, and the work is shifted to computerised sewing machines in Osaka. This is surely not the aim. The only alternative is economic growth: while it may be frustratingly slow, it finishes off sweatshops by producing far more attractive jobs.
But while the logic is straightforward enough, it is not watertight. A successful multinational may be profitable enough to be able to afford wage increases, and may prefer to take wage increases on the chin rather than move its business around. Economic growth itself can increase the demand for child labour as well as reducing the supply.
So I was intrigued to discover two new pieces of research addressing these questions. One is an article in March’s American Economic Review, written by Ann Harrison of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jason Scorse of the Monterey Institute. Harrison and Scorse study data from Indonesia. In the 1990s, Indonesia was the focus of anti-sweatshop campaigns that persuaded the US government to put pressure on its Indonesian counterpart, and encouraged US consumers to boycott companies such as Nike. (An influential study in 1989 had found that Nike’s suppliers paid lower wages than other companies in the export sector.) Harrison and Scorse look at the footwear, textile and clothing sectors and compare regions with lots of brand-name suppliers to regions with lower-profile businesses.
If my argument is correct, Harrison and Scorse would have found a slump in employment in export factories in the brand-name regions. There is little sign of this. Profits do fall, and so does investment. Some small plants closed. But few, if any, jobs seem to have been lost.
The minimum wage in Indonesia more than doubled between 1989 and 1996, after inflation, and this did depress employment. But there seemed to be no additional effect in the districts with lots of brand-name suppliers, despite the fact that wages in those regions outpaced wage increases elsewhere by almost a third.
The second paper was presented in draft form at the Royal Economic Society meeting in Guildford at the end of March. This research, by Nigar Hashimzade and Uma Kambhampati of the University of Reading, shows that economic growth – at least in the short-term – is not enough to reduce child labour. Complementary policies to strengthen schools and the incentive to attend them seem to be necessary.
Neither piece of research is the last word, and neither discounts the long-term effectiveness of economic growth in improving working conditions. But I am having to think again about anti-sweatshop campaigns. At least I am in good company. John Maynard Keynes is reported to have quipped, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Tim Harford’s latest book is ‘Dear Undercover Economist’ (Little, Brown)
May 18th, 2010
By Ellie Faulkner
Staff Writer
Published: Thursday, May 6, 2010
The Vista, University of San Diego
In a search for the truth about Nike’s labor practices, Jim Keady spent time in Indonesia to see what working as one of Nike’s factory workers was really like. He lived on $1.25 a day and resided in what he described as a “9 feet by 9 feet cement block” worker’s slum. Huge rats were frequent houseguests and the open sewage system flowed right next to the sidewalk outside. Over the course of a month there, he lost 25 pounds. His reasoning for embarking on the crusade in Nike’s sweatshops stems from his studies as well as his interests.
Back in 1997, Keady was a soccer coach at St. John’s University while simultaneously working towards his masters in theology. A class assignment led him to research how Nike’s labor practices violate human rights. Concurrently, St. John’s was negotiating a $3.5 million endorsement deal with Nike, meaning that he, as a coach, would be required to wear and endorse Nike. Keady realized that it would be hypocritical for a Catholic school, supposedly an institution of Catholic social thought, to partner itself with a transnational sports empire that was violating human rights. This realization turned to activism and he lost his coaching job because he refused to drop the issue and wear Nike. Soon after, he embarked on his life-changing trip to Indonesia and formed Team Sweat, an organization committed to changing Nike’s labor practices.
Nike currently employs a million workers in 1,000 factories across 52 different countries. When Keady tried to ask Nike about their labor policies, he was met with subterfuge and lies. He pursued answers through many different divisions of the company, and even tried to set up a meeting with Phil Knight, the former CEO of Nike. Often he was turned away, and when he did receive an answer, the information was often conflicting. Nike would like to have the public believe that they have cleaned up their act, but Keady said he went to Indonesia, saw the reality of Nike sweatshops with his own eyes, and made a short film about his time there. It can be viewed at vimeo.com/6109896.
It should also be noted that Nike is not the only company that uses sweatshops; sweatshops are the reality of most modern apparel production. Nike was simply the company that first caught Keady’s attention and he chose to make an example of it for four reasons, as listed on his website, teamsweat.org.
First, Nike is the leader in the sportswear industry. They control roughly 45 percent of the global market. Second, Nike led the push into low wage countries with poor human rights records. They exploited, and continue to exploit, these countries for their cheap labor. Third, labor abuses in Nike factories have been extensively and reliably documented over a 15-year period. There is no other company for which there is this much objective research. Finally, as the company with the largest profit margins in the industry ($1.5 billion in profits in 2008) Nike can more easily afford to ensure living wages and fair working conditions in their factories.
However, the mission is not to boycott Nike. Although Keady feels it would be effective, the factory workers themselves have not asked for a boycott. The mission is to put continued pressure on Nike to change their labor policies by educating people about the sweatshop situation.
If Keady’s organization, Team Sweat, is able to put enough pressure on Nike to clean up their act, then the same model of change can be replicated to change other companies and eventually the entire industry.
“The thing that I took away from the talk was that Nike is simply a case study and the largest corporation that owns sweatshops,” junior JaRae Birkeland said. “Plenty of other companies do the exact same thing. Adidas, Puma, Abercrombie, etcetera, all have sweatshops in Southeast Asia and other third world countries. Advocating against the Nike company is important but so is putting up a front against other companies as well and leaning towards purchasing fair trade products.”
When Keady presented this breakdown to a manager at an Indonesian factory, the manager said, “Hang on, they [Nike] only pay us $10 to $11 for a pair of shoes?” Even worse, upon further examination and number crunching, Keady found that to double the workers wages, in essence paying them about $5 per day instead of $2.43 per day, it would only cost Nike about seven percent of their advertising budget. There was silence in the room after Keady shared this.
Nike is a $18.6 billion dollar corporation, and if Nike would spare 7 percent of their advertising budget, they could double the wages that their workers receive and hence pay them a fair livable wage.
“One example that really shocked me and stuck with me was about how much Tiger Woods makes in one game of golf just by wearing Nike,” Birkeland said. “Tiger Woods is worth more than 700,000 workers and makes enough in one second of time to buy an Indonesian worker a house.”
It would take a Nike factory worker in Indonesia 9.5 years to make as much as Tiger makes for playing one round of golf clothed in Nike. Students wondered what this says about how North America measures the worth of a person.
Another poignant moment during the presentation was when Keady displayed a picture of Nike’s logo emblazoned alongside our school’s logo on merchandise from the bookstore.
“It was not the most comfortable part of the presentation because it shocked me,” junior Ryann Berens said. “The entire room as well kind of gasped and shifted in their seats. This is when the reality of the situation hit home and made it personal.”
Keady said that Nike is aiming to partner itself with Catholic schools because they want to associate themselves with places of Catholic teaching; it is a strategic public relations move.
So what can USD students do? Keady emphasized that the wrong question to ask is, “Okay where can I buy garments that are sweat free?” or “What brand can our athletics department wear instead?” He said that Team Sweat’s campaign is “not about assuaging your Catholic guilt.”
The campaign is not about helping you feel better about what you buy. What he would instead like people to ask themselves is, “How can I build solidarity with the workers and put pressure on Nike that will eventually eliminate sweatshops?” He encouraged the audience to write the current Nike CEO, Mike Parker, an email telling him about their concern for Nike’s factory workers (at Mike.Parker@nike.com). Tell people you know, hold demonstrations, and donate to Team Sweat so they can get the message out to more people.
Join the facebook group at facebook.com/teamsweat. In this campaign, education is power and the more people that know about Nike’s human rights violations, the more pressure it will put on Nike to change.
Slowly but surely, Keady said he has seen this approach create progress over the last 13 years.
May 18th, 2010
PUBLISHED IN THE CORNELL DAILY SUN
FEBRUARY 24, 2010
BY DAN FREEDMAN
As the afterglow of their success against Russell Athletic fades, University activists now face the prospect of dealing with what they view as a larger workers’ rights crisis with the corporate behemoth Nike.
In February 2009, relentless pressure from United Students Against Sweatshops forced Cornell to join nearly 100 universities across the country in boycotting Russell Athletic, after the apparel manufacturer allegedly closed one of its Honduran factories to prevent unionization. Nine months later, USAS groups celebrated a landmark victory when Russell decided to rehire the 1,200 Honduran workers who had lost their jobs.
Their campaign against Nike is just beginning. According to a press release issued Tuesday afternoon by Cornell’s chapter of Students Against Sweatshops, a new campaign dubbed, “Just Pay It,” has been initiated against the Nike Corporation for allegedly violating University code of conduct regulations at two of its apparel factories in Honduras. Following a meeting with University administrators, CSAS issued a statement condemning Nike and its subsidiary, the Haddad Group, for illegal wage practices following their closure of the Hugger de Honduras and Vision Tex factories in January 2009.
The unionized factories, which predominantly produced goods for Nike, including University apparel, were shut down by Nike subcontractor Haddad for “economic reasons.” According to CSAS though, after Nike stopped sourcing from the Honduran factories, forcing them into liquidation, both Nike and Haddad refused to pay their workers approximately $2.1 of $2.5 million in severance pay legally mandated by the Honduran Government. For CSAS leaders, this refusal represents a breach of university clothing codes of conduct as well as the Designated Suppliers Program regulations that Cornell endorses.
“Nike is trying to skirt its obligations by claiming there are legal loopholes that excuse their behavior,” Casey Sweeney, President of Cornell Organization for Labor Action, stated in the brief issued yesterday. “But both legally and morally, they are required to pay their workers.”
Besides Nike and Haddad’s legal obligations in Honduras, which COLA and CSAS leaders assert are being ignored, student activists are lobbying for Cornell to adhere to DSP, a set of policies that both governs apparel procurement and sets standards for labor practices for licensees of university logos.
While DSP has not been officially approved by the US Department of Justice, according to Alex Bores ‘13, President of CSAS, it is “something that Cornell signed onto in principle in 2006.”
According to Bores, the Workers’ Rights Consortium, which conducts audits to ensure that workers are treated fairly, monitors factories belonging to companies like Nike .
“We used them [the WRC] on our behalf to investigate charges brought against companies and overseas factories,” Mike Powers, vice president for university communications, told The Sun last year. “Cornell is committed to respecting the rights of workers around the world and we expect the companies that are licensed to produce Cornell apparel to share that commitment.”
Bores said that Nike has consequently violated WRC and Cornell’s code of conduct.
“Under Honduran law companies have to pay severance pay, but [the workers] only got money from the liquidation of the factory,” he said.
While student activists see many similarities between Nike and Russell Athletic, they are also quick to point out the differences between the two.
“The biggest difference is that Russell directly owned the factory where their violations occurred, whereas Nike is one-step removed by subcontractors,” CSAS member Bill Peterson ’10 said. “The unfortunate reality of apparel manufacturing is that sweatshops are often subcontracted. Nike denied that they were making Nike products there, yet they had huge Nike banners in the factories.”
This campaign may also prove more difficult than the campaign against Russell because Cornell is much more involved with Nike, which provides uniforms for athletic teams, than it was with Russell, Bores said.
“It’s a lot for the University to deal with, but if that’s what it takes to get justice for these workers then that’s what we’re going to push for,” Bores added.
Student activists hope to work together with Cornell to employ some of the same strategies used to influence Russell Athletics to adopt fairer labor practices.
“I think we’ll be able to get the workers paid,” Peterson said. “It’s going to be a really long campaign but I don’t see why not. With Russell we had to put pressure on them. We need to make [Nike] realize that this is something that’s important and that people will not stand for this. Ultimately, what influences their decisions is money.”
May 18th, 2010
Teagan Dooley sits on his staircase with his 48 pairs of shoes. Many consumers are unaware of the labor that goes in the production of their purchases.
By Patrick Okocha, II
Published in The Clipper, Everett Community College
Nike ads are on television and billboards everywhere: what is not so apparent is the process behind the construction of Nike products.
Nike owns 31 percent of the athletic footwear market worldwide, followed by Adidas with 16 percent, according to anti-sweatshop activist Jim Keady. The company’s yearly revenue is over 19 billion and it generates profits of 1.5 billion, yet factory workers in Indonesia can barely afford noodles.
Keady spent a month in 2000 working in a footwear factory in Tangerang, Indonesia and spoke at EvCC on Feb. 2.
During his speech, Keady described the poor living conditions he endured, including sharing small bathrooms with five to ten other people in a small village. Keady became so ill during the trip that he lost 25 pounds.
“Nike is in Indonesia for one reason, cheap labor,” said Keady. “In Indonesia there are 37 contract factories with 123,000 factory workers. Those workers earn $1.25 per day. Most of the workers must work overtime just to get by.”
There is a major disparity between the athletes Nike uses in their ads and the factory workers who produce their products. “Tiger Woods makes more money in one round of golf than a Nike factory worker makes in 9.5 years,” said Keady.
The issue is not with how Nike merchandise is made, but how the workers must live.
The workers “don’t want [Nike] to pull out the jobs, (they) like to work and we are proud of what (they) do, but don’t want to be exploited,” said Keady’s partner, Leslie Kretzu, in a pre-recorded video presentation.
Teagan Dooley, an EvCC student and member of the men’s basketball team is an avid sneaker collector. He owns over 80 pairs of shoes worth around $10,000.
“You spend most of your life either sleeping or on your feet so if you are on your feet for half of your life, why not spend money for good shoes,” said Dooley. “I love Jay’s and rare shoes that no one else has.”
It costs Nike approximately $16.25 to make one pair of sneakers, which can retail for over $150 in stores, meaning Nike has made $8,700 just from Dooley.
Keady has founded an organization called Team Sweat, whose goal is to win a collective bargaining agreement against Nike which will include better wages.
Indonesia is not the only country in the world suffering social injustice, says Keady. There are over 1,000 factories with 1 million workers in 52 countries. Keady’s goal in Indonesia is to create a model for change that can expand to these other countries.
To donate or join Team Sweat, visit Keady’s web site at teamsweat.org.
May 18th, 2010
Published in MoxieToday
by Avi Scher
The Rutgers chapter of the United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) recently delivered a letter to President McCormick demanding that Rutgers end contracts with Nike due to human rights violations at two Honduran factories the company has worked with. The factories in question, Vision Tex and Huggers de Honduras, closed in January 2009 with no prior warning and have yet to pay nearly $2 million in legally mandated severance pay to roughly 1,800 former employees.
According to Zachary Lerner, one of the leaders of the movement, this is a direct violation of the University Code of Conduct that must be addressed by the University. Lerner stated that a March 4 deadline was set for the University to make a decision before further action is taken and that McCormick plans on meeting with a delegation of students over the next couple of weeks to address their concerns.
A statement released by Nike in response to concerns at Purdue University, said that both factories were subcontracted by a Honduran contractor. It claimed that the only order for collegiate apparel from the two companies was produced by Vision Tex in 2007 and that the factory was informed in June 2008 that Nike would no longer be placing orders with them after December. The last order placed with Hugger was completed by the end of 2007.
However, the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) – which Rutgers is a member of – claimed that despite reducing orders at the of 2006, Hugger manufactured a small but substantial amount of Nike goods until its closure and produced collegiate apparel on four occasions. Based on worker testimony and shipping invoices the WRC believes that the majority of the product lines at Vision Tex were dedicated to Nike until it closed.
A similar controversy over the source of Rutgers’ apparel occurred last year leading to the University’s decision to not renew contacts with Russell. In the Russell case, a Honduran factory was shut down when its employees attempted to form a union. USAS helped convince nearly 100 colleges across the nation to end or suspend licensing agreements which allowed for Russell to use their logos on products. Russell subsequently reopened the factory and rehired all 1,200 workers.
United Students Against Sweatshops meets Wednesday nights at 9:15 in Scott Hall 101. They can be reached at sparkachange@gmail.com.
May 18th, 2010
Team Sweat:
When I read the article below on the Nike-sponsored visit by university athletic directors to factories in Vietnam and China, I thought, “Is it really possible that someone running a major department at a major university could be this absolutely naive?”
The unfortunate answer is, “yes.”
Based on the article, here is a short list of questions for Purdue Athletic Director, Morgan Burke, to consider the next time Nike offers him a paid vacation to the east.
1. Did you speak to any workers off-site and with translators/advocates that they trust?
2. What are the current wages for the workers in these plants and what can those wages buy in the local marketplace?
3. Did you ask to speak with any of the THOUSANDS of workers that took part in 12 strikes at Nike factories in Vietnam this past year and find out why they did their work stoppages?
4. Did you ask the factory managers how much Nike pays on average for a pair of sneakers, what the cost breakdown is, how much is directed towards wages, and if the money Nike pays is adequate to provide a living wage?
Thanks Mr. Burke for providing Nike yet another opportunity to use Purdue’s name and reputation in their public relations scheme to mislead consumers, investors, and athletes.
Peace, Jim Keady
The Purdue University Exponent
Athletic director visits Nike factories
By Andrea Hammer
Publication Date: 02/01/2010
Purdue University AD, Morgan Burke
The Purdue athletic director spent 10 days in Vietnam and China touring factories and said he doesn’t feel he saw any “sweatshops.”
On Jan. 14, Morgan Burke left with a group of other university athletic directors on a Nike-sponsored trip to Nike’s factories in China and Vietnam. During their time, they saw five factories which Burke described as mostly “well-kept, organized and controlled.”
“In addition to actually seeing their product, you can take their corporate governance and responsibilities stuff that you can see on the Web and see how it plays out when you’re there in person,” Burke said.
Burke said several of the factories he toured employed upward of 20,000 people. He felt he was informed going into the trip because of his background in a steel company prior to his years at Purdue. Burke said all of the factories he visited in both Vietnam and China had operations that are similar to practices in the U.S. Things like company housing, on-site clinics and a grocery store for employees were not uncommon for employees of the factories.
While he was in Vietnam, he visited one factory that employed 20,000 people and produced shoes for Nike. While touring the factory, he said he used his background to look out for important safety issues.
“I looked for things like if they had hydraulic equipment – are there leaks? Are there safety guards on moving equipment? And it was all there; it was very well maintained,” he said.
At the same factory, he saw a high school where many of the workers were finishing their high school education. He explained some of the students would go to school from 8 a.m. to noon and then work the second shift from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m.
For those that aren’t familiar with licensing agreements, Burke explained that there are two agreements between Purdue and Nike; one that allows Purdue to get their uniforms for athletic teams and another that allows Nike to produce Purdue apparel that’s sold in stores like Folletts.
Burke said this trip was planned prior to the problems that have arisen in Honduras, concerning two closed factories in which workers didn’t receive about $2.1 million in severance pay. He also said he didn’t believe this was a staged trip for those attending to see only what Nike intended for them to see.
“I don’t get the sense at all that I was brought over there to just see certain things; I had too much freedom to get out in the factory and walk around for that,” he said. “I think (Nike was) pretty proud of what they’d accomplished.”
Purdue Organization for Labor Equality member Gautam Kumaraswamy, a junior in engineering education, said in an e-mail he feels Burke’s trip was a nice vacation that didn’t have much to tell on the conditions of Nike’s workers.
“The consensus among all experts is that the only credible way to investigate conditions is through independent monitoring where visits to factories are unannounced, and an environment where workers are free to speak without fear or intimidation from their employers,” Kumaraswamy wrote. “The trip, in essence, was a Nike (public relations) stunt where they were able to ‘wow’ their clients, and Morgan would not have gotten anything near the true picture.”
May 18th, 2010
In the article below by Michael Connor from Business Ethics, Connor notes statements by Nike CEO, Mark Parker that are found in Nike’s 2007-2009 CSR Report.
“This report is published at a tipping point. It’s time for the world to shift… We see sustainability, both social and environmental, as a powerful path to innovation, and crucial to our growth strategies.”
My response to Mr. Parker’s statement… words, words, words. It all sounds good on paper, but what is going on in reality for factory workers in places like Indonesia is far from the slick, graphic-laden CSR report that Nike issued this year.
Of particular note to me in the report was the VERY tiny section on workers’ wages. For the top brass at Nike, the issue of wages only merited one page and a paragraph in the entire report. This is inconceivable to me, given that when one speaks directly with workers, the number one issue for them is always WAGES. This lack of content on the wage issue was particularly distressing given the fact that Caitlin Morris, Nike’s Director of Innovation and Sustainable Business, had accompanied me to Indonesia in July 2008 and heard workers share over and over and over again, that the most important issue to them was/is an increase in their wages.
Par for the course at Nike. They are far from a tipping point on social responsibility.
Peace, Jim Keady
Nike: Corporate Responsibility at a “Tipping Point”
Business Ethics
by Michael Connor
The old business maxim that “what gets measured, matters” is overused but nonetheless powerful, especially when applied to corporate responsibility: when information and metrics are combined with disclosure and transparency, corporate posturing on issues that affect society can be quickly replaced with fact-based analysis and discussion.
One current example is Nike Inc.’s newly-published Corporate Responsibility (CR) Report for fiscal years 2007 to 2009. It’s a slickly-produced multimedia display of data and information - in fact, Nike says, an independent panel of stakeholder advisers at one point concluded the volume of information contained in the 176-page written report was so “overwhelming” that it required a rewrite.
“This report is published at a tipping point. It’s time for the world to shift,” Nike CEO Mark Parker writes in the report’s introduction. “We see sustainability, both social and environmental, as a powerful path to innovation, and crucial to our growth strategies.”
That’s a huge change from the 1990’s, when Nike was a poster child for corporate villainy stemming from sweatshop labor practices in Southeast Asia factories. Since then, the company has charted a very different course in corporate citizenship and, in many important respects, has succeeded.
Grappling with Issues
This latest report places a big focus on environmental sustainability, with Nike sharing its vision of “reaching a closed-loop business model where the goal is to achieve zero waste in the supply chain and have products and materials that can be continuously reused – no pre- or post-consumer waste.”
What’s most interesting about the report, though, is that you can see Nike grappling, in public, with some tough choices. The narrative demonstrates what can happen when a company begins reporting regularly and in-depth, and with an apparent commitment to intellectual honesty, about core issues.
For Nike, labor and human rights continue as a top priority and corporate worry. The company’s three main product lines — footwear, apparel and equipment — are made in approximately 600 contract factories that employ more than 800,000 workers in 46 countries around the world. Nearly 60 percent of the work force is in North Asia, 31 percent in South Asia. One major difficulty is that contract apparel factories generally produce for multiple brands, making it a difficult to maintain standards.
To listen to Nike, monitoring those contract factories for working conditions, wages and overtime – and a host of other issues, including possible unionization – is not easy. “While we can point to many examples of improvements, challenging issues remain for our company and our industry in systemically identifying and tackling how to affect long-term system-wide change,” the company says.
“In evaluating where our targets fell short, we saw a consistent pattern: a focus on auditing against a set of criteria sometimes results in on-the-ground improvements for workers, but it rarely produces systemic change in the area of concern,” Nike says. “On further reflection, we realized that, if we want to make sustainable improvements for workers, we need to significantly change the way we engage and interact with our supply chain as a whole.”
One potential solution, Nike reports, is collaborating with other brands on factory audits and, maybe more importantly, working with competitors on developing remedies for labor problems as well as standardized codes. And then there are improvements that can be made by Nike alone. Example: “Asking factories to manufacture too many styles is one of the highest contributors to factory overtime in apparel. We have an opportunity to reduce this pressure by reducing the number of apparel styles and partnering with the factories to improve efficiencies through lean production methods.”
Increased Reporting
There’s more detail in the Nike report than most any layman could digest and understand, and Nike critics – such as Oxfam’s Nike Watch, and a new activist initiative, TeamSweat – are likely to find weaknesses. That’s as it should be. No one should be satisfied simply because the company has issued a report, even one chock-a-block with narrative, charts and bar graphs.
Some critics of corporate responsibility reports believe they can’t help but be self-serving. And, in fact, more companies are reporting. Sixty-six of the S&P 100 firms produced a formal sustainability report with performance data in 2008, a 35 percent jump from the 49 reports produced in 2007, according to a report from the Sustainable Investment Research Analyst Network (SIRAN), a working group of the Social Investment Forum (SIF). However, the SIRAN survey found that only six S&P 100 firms publish complete sustainability reports that meet the highest “A” level reporting standard set by the Global Reporting Initiative.
In the end, it’s difficult to see how more reporting can’t help, as long as it’s done well. Nike’s latest effort is a good example of how the process can lead to data being gathered, metrics developed and performance benchmarks set. The process grew out of Nike’s public floggings in the 1990s, says CEO Parker, when “we learned to view transparency as an asset, not a risk.”
May 18th, 2010
NIKE OWES WORKERS
By Chris Zois
Roosevelt University Torch
April 19, 2010
Students protest out Niketown in Chicago
Roosevelt students protested outside of Nike Town, a retail Nike store, on April 14 as part of United Students against Sweatshops “Just Pay It” campaign.
After the protest two Honduras garment workers, who have worked at Nike factories, spoke in Fainman Lounge later that day.
The protest was just one of the events the USAS has set up in order to get equal working conditions for Nike factory workers.
The event centered around the closing of two Honduras factories in early 2009. The workers are still owed back wages and legally mandated severance pay of $2.2 million.
In a press release from the university about the event it is reported that “Nike spent $3.4 Billion Dollars on endorsements in 2008. That means the money owed to workers in Honduras is less than .1[percent] of Nike’s annual endorsement commitments.”
Along with Roosevelt students, the protest also had students from DePaul University, Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.
Brian Brown, senior, said this event came together after they had met with members of the USAS.
“We had been organizing here [at Roosevelt] but it wasn’t until we talked to a member of the USAS that we started to look at the broader campaign as well,” Brown said.
Two Honduras garment workers, Gina Cano and Lowlee Urquia, held a discussion with students, discussing their experience for working for Nike factories following the protest.
Rod Palmquist, a member of USAS, said he, other members of USAS, Cano and Urquia are currently on a tour giving lectures to schools associated the “Just Pay It” campaign.
“We are going around to universities that are involved with our cause,” Palmquist said. “We want to show people that the working conditions need to be fair and the actions of Nike affect more than just the workers.”
According to the press release about the event, “The two factories, Hugger de Honduras and Vision Tex were shut down without notice in 2009. The Workers Rights Consortium (WRC) released a report exposing Nike’s hypocrisy in addressing the issue.”
Neither Cano nor Uquia speak English so their responses were translated for the audience.
Uquia said their pay was docked for health care and other amenities; however, he never received such benefits.
Both women said they have fellow co-workers who have passed away because they did not receive proper medical treatment.
Uquia said the factories’ closing has affected more than just the workers.
“These closings have affected our families and other factory workers families,” Cano said. “We got 26.5 percent of our severance but that is still not enough.”
Uquia said she had to take her children out of school because she could not afford to keep them there.
Palmquist said that these tours are geared to educate universities on the harsh conditions of the factories.
Palmquist said the University of Wisconsin-Madison has canceled its contract with Nike because of the factory’s working conditions.
The university is currently considering being affiliated with the WRC.
Brown said the university has talked to members of the WRC and Barnes & Noble in hopes of establishing a partnership.
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