Purpose of this web site: To assist logo corporations in developing humanistic ethics. Humanistic ethics foster non-violent, non-exploitive, more festive ways of managing their multi-tiered global supply chains. This is accomplished by deconstructing what is, in order to make "transparent" the underpinnings, the connection between "virtual corporation" (doing marketing and R&D) and the postindustrial supply chain operating mainly in Third World nations. My hope is that this critique will foster new an creative possibilities for living and working in keeping with the values of community, non-harmfulness, and sustainability. An example of transparency is disclosure of the locations of all factories in the global supply chain. Academic critique, in my critical postmodern sense is a methodology for developing new possibilities for relating consumption to distribution and production. One way I do this is by tracking stories of sweatshops in the sneaker and garment industry. *CLICK* For In the News Nike, Reebok, Adidas etc items.

WHAT IS NIKE'S STORYTELLING STRATEGY?

The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rod-palmquist/student-campaign-takes-on_b_643375.html

July 13, 2010

Rod Palmquist
International Campaigns Coordinator, United Students Against Sweatshops
Posted: July 12, 2010

 Student Campaign Takes on Nike Like Never Before

"Nike's at it again, and it's losing millions due to a powerful anti-sweatshop campaign led by United Students Against Sweatshops, the same student movement that forced Nike to disclose its factory locations and recognize garment worker unions a decade ago.
The sportswear giant consumers in the U.S. equated with sweatshops back in the '90's reported sales of $19 billion last year, but refuses to pay $2.2 million to Honduran garment workers in legally-mandated severance. The dispute dates back to January 2009, when two Nike factories in Honduras called Vision Tex and Hugger -- closed without paying 1,800 workers their hard-earned severance and other legally-required benefits. The total money owed per worker is approximately $1,300, equivalent to a manufacturing worker in the U.S. losing between $15,000-$20,000. As Antonia Lopez Andrade, a former worker at Vision Tex, explains in a letter to Nike "I suffer nights of insomnia and hopelessness over my mortgage, and keeping my lights on, and the water running."

=============================================================================

2008- Nike spins just enough damning information to remain 'credible' that the corporation is committed to enacting meaningful change (summary, email Jeff Ballinger Mar 2008). The midea reprints the Nike and Fair Labor Association (a Nike & Reebok financed organization) without getting to the root causes:

1. A predatory outsourcing system. see Business Week article.

2. The concession prices (i.e. Big brands have leverage to force down prices, and the wages that subcontract factories pay to workers).

3. Nike reports just enough damaging information in the monitoring reports about force overtime, underage workers, and unhealthy working conditions to appear credible, but it is the same ethical code and legal violations to wage and safety laws that have been going on for 15 years.

4. The monitoring reports that bring up segnificant issues are not resolved. Rather, Nike cuts off the contract, as it and Reebok did at Kukdong in Mexico, and transfers the production to another factory.

5. Nike sheds its 'sweatshop' label by revealing some abuses, and by getting ethics awards and apologetic research articles attesting to changes Nike has made since the early 1990s.

6. Nike has its own political and media fallout 'war room.' Nike hires professional PR spin control people. The first Corporate Social Responsibility Chief for Nike came out of the press office of the White House (Papa Bush); the current chief used to work for the BBC. Nike's priority is press manipulation first & foremost. You won't see anything on the "public policy side" of Nike (actually making changes) until this strategy becomes untenable. in the public shere.

7. Nike has to spend significant portion of its revenues on sustaining an advertising counterstory to the string of scandals and labor law violations. See Business Week article. Nike is spending more on ads than all competitors combined. This alone would make one fabulous business school case-study. Consider the cost to shareholders of the continued story spinning. Consider that it would cost less to bring poverty wages to the level of living wages by changing the conditions.

$20 millin a year in advertsing to present a story of Corporate Soicial Responsibility could go a long way to fixing the real problems of inadequate wages and continuing egregious levels of forced overtime. Within a decade, the savings in ads would pay for changes.

WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW?

August 2008 - Oregonian - Nike's focus on keeping costs low causes poor working conditions

Dobson says usually Nike can only prompt changes in plants where its goods make up the majority of production. She defends the effectiveness of Nike's Code of Conduct, a set of standards for workers established in 1992, and the quality of the company's monitoring system.

Independent monitors

But Leslie Kretzu, cofounder and director of Educating for Justice, a New Jersey-based social-change organization, says there's no evidence to show that the Code of Conduct has diminished human-rights abuses. She says Nike should allow independent researchers into its factories.

"If they wanted to find out about these problems, they could invite people like myself, or students from United Students Against Sweatshops or people from academia," Kretzu says.

Dobson says Nike has invited in experts from the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency, and the Fair Labor Association, a monitoring group. But Jeffrey Ballinger, a longtime anti-Nike activist, says Nike and other companies co-opted some monitoring organizations who agreed to partner with them.

"Monitoring was a huge dodge from the beginning," Ballinger says. "If they put four factories in competition for 100,000 Air-whatever shoes, they can't go back and say, 'Give the workers Saturdays off,' because the contractor needs to make money."

When the debate over working conditions made news in the 1990s, consumers started to avoid Nike products. This time, they remain largely on the sidelines. Critics such as Ballinger, who is in Vienna writing a book on Southeast Asian labor practices, say company managers distracted journalists and shoppers through a "masterful" public-relations job.

"There'll be business-school case studies written about how they extricated themselves from this problem," he says. "But it didn't help the workers."

from 2007 --

The implication from Jeff Ballinger about Nike's track record: "Larger, longer-term suppliers have WORSE records, according to Locke."

Here is an excerpt from Richard Locke et al's 2007 study:

"Findings help Nike, Inc. to evolve its compliance strategy
Cambridge, Mass. — Global brands are more likely to influence the improvement of working conditions in their suppliers' factories in developing countries by providing technical assistance to suppliers and empowering employees on shop floors. New research by an MIT Sloan School of Management professor found this approach to be more effective than monitoring codes of conduct, which is currently the leading way that global brands and labor rights organizations address poor working conditions.

Richard Locke, the Alvin J. Siteman Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, and his former student Monica Romis, compared working conditions in two Mexican garment factories that supply athletic footwear and apparel giant Nike, Inc. Although they both passed compliance with Nike's code of conduct, only one factory earned high scores in overall employee satisfaction with workplace conditions.

The key difference, according to Locke, is that the factory with the higher satisfaction scores implemented ‘lean manufacturing processes’ — a term referring to manufacturing methods based on maximizing value and minimizing waste in the manufacturing process — that resulted in employees having greater autonomy and power to make day-to-day decisions on the shop floor." Read More

For a copy of “Beyond Corporate Codes of Conduct: Work Organization and Labor Standards in Two Mexican Garment Factories,” please contact the MIT Sloan Office of Media Relations: mediarelations@mit.edu

HOW TO BRING ABOUT HUMANISTIC ETHICS INSTEAD OF AUTHORITARIAN ETHICS AND SPIN DOCTORING

Humanistic Ethics. Erich Fromm is a Critical Theorists from associated with the Frankfurt School. I will extend his 1947 book, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics ( NY Rinehart & Co, Inc). Humanistic ethics is an alternative to corporate ethics codes that tend to be socially immanent (practical ethics, which tends toward relativism) or a perversion of universal ethics (seen as authoritarian ethics claims of corporations to the authority of what is or is not ethical). Humanistic ethics competes with authoritarian/universal ethics (ethics from above, which now means from the corporation) and immanent ethics (its all relative, and we do what is practical). Humanistic ethics for Fromm (1947: 8) is a way to find "objectively valid norms of conduct." The three spheres of ethical discourse (universal, immanent, & humanistic) are dialectic to one another in the ethical systemicity of global business and society. Each ethical sphere has its particular criteria for conduct.

For example, the global apparel or sneaker sweatshop worker (85% young & female) submits hopelessly to the authoritarian power, which has two parts. First, the physical force and violence of sweatshop contractor factories where by all accounts (corporate monitors & independent monitors, exploitation keeps recurring). Second, the mental power of global corporations telling and selling narratives of legitimating of why its ethical codes are substitute for democratic participation, living wages, etc. The legitimation includes why democratic systems of organization, living wages, etc are just not done in those other countries.

Nike's authoritarian ethics for example says what is good or bad for sweatshop workers. Nike's immanent (practical) ethics says that in the situation of Third World factories, Nike need not pay living wages (keyed to the standard of living of the country), and can cut and run each time those young female workers start to organize to demand humanistic ethics be applied.

There is an important concern with what critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1990, 1993, writing 1919 through 1920s) calls 'answerability' ethics. Like Fromm's (1947) humanistic ethics, Bakhtin wants an ethical position that is more than a set of universal or practical codes. To be answerable means to understand one's participation in the systemicity (Boje, 2006). For example, if a consumer buys sneakers or garments made in sweatshops then they are complicit in the global sweatshop supply chain that extends from the sewing machines of a sweatshop in the Third World to the retail counter of a Footlocker, Nike Town, or Wal-Mart. Even hearing a story of a young woman's struggle to throw off the shackles of authoritarian corporate ethics or more practically immanent (what we do is relative to conditions of each country) corporate ethics. Through advertising and uncritical education in the news, and school, the consumer is socialized to not reflect upon their own answerability. Good is that which is praised in the Nike ads, what appears as lower cost in the Wal-mart. The consume defines good as what the majority of fellow consumers do. Reflexivity is frowned upon in business ethics, particularly authoritarian/universal ethics and more utilitarian immanent/practical ethics. For Nike what is ethical is limed to what is useful to fulfill Nike's needs. To the contractor sweatshop, what is good is to fill Nike's orders, and the specifications of those orders do not include a margin for living wage or women who would self-organize to demand one. As Fromm (1947: 11) puts it "A thing is called good if it is good for the person who uses it."

This is how Kant's categorical imperative (formal ethics) gets perverted into the practical ethics (one can lie, cheat, steal under such and such conditions, i.e. relativism). In other words how a universalistic (let one act to make their maxim a universal since the Golden Rule is we would not want others to lie, cheat, or steal to/from us). The universal categorical imperative of a humanistic ethic gets perverted into either/both a corporate authoritarian ethic (its good for you, if its good for me) or immanent practical ethic (whatever is relative to that country, the corporation can also do, and that is what good is). The consumer follows along. If its a lower cost to me, then its good for me, even when the conditions of the worker are in sweatshop conditions. The advertising tells it this way. Won't the sweatshops someday be no more, so your purchases are actually helping. And there is always the rationalization, 'well its better than not working, or working agriculture, or as a prostitute.' In other words, categorical imperative that could drive a global humanistic ethic becomes subverted into authoritarian corporate ethics or relativistic partnering with consumers in a relativistic ethics.

What is good for the global sweatshop supply chain from sweatshop to multinational corporation to the Wal-Mart is a docile female work which is what is for the chain a 'good' worker. The good sweatshop worker acc pets poverty wages, does not organize, and is always to frightened to rebel. Women workers who rebel and organize, do not please authoritarian power or consumer power. Corporations in the global sweatshop chains claim that their ethical codes and the reports by their monitors of sweatshop behavior, is proof positive that the corporation practices. But is this really virtue ethics?

"Unless the authority wanted to exploit the subject, it would not need to rule by virtue of awe and emotion submissiveness: it could encourage rational judgment and criticism -- thus taking the risk of being found incompetent" (Fromm, 1947: 12).

Nike holds disobedience, and lack of submissiveness of its female sweatshop workers to be a lack of virtue, a moral sin. "The unforgivable sin in authoritarian ethics is rebellion" (Fromm, 1947: 12). Workers and consumers are being rebels when the demand answerability, not more authoritarian codes and monitor reports about the same sweatshop breeches as a decade, no make that four decades ago.

How does virtue ethics get perverted into authoritarian ethics? Humanistic ethics combined with answerability is a critical reflection upon complicity. Answerability ethics takes Kant's maxim of the universal to the next level. That is, instead of each individual not stealing, the call is for changing the systemicity that is keeps producing sweatshops and corporations contracting sweatshops into their global supply chains in the first place. Answerability brings the theory of a humanistic ethics into Being. It challenges the authoritarian and immanently practical ethics of sweatshop contracting corporations. This includes a challenge to the old saw that the corporation is merely acting according to natural market forces, which in modern times is the sole criterion of ethical values (and is exceedingly relativistic). Aristotle's virtue, as Fromm (1947: 13) puts it, "in the modern sense is a concept of authoritarian ethics."

PROGRESS: At my university (New Mexico State) the United Students Against Sweatshop (USAS) chapter is working cooperatively with the Bookstore where campus apparel is sold to identify which factories have living wages, allow independent organizing, and police toxic work conditions.  Through this effort we encourage all factories to actually enact humane work conditions.  We therefore support Nike in Kukdong, but continue to be skeptical of Nike claims of living wage and positive work conditions in its other 740 factory contracts around the globe (see GLOBE PROJECT). Campus campaigns in solidarity with workers are changing multinational corporate hegemony by exposing corporate advertising to be the spectacle of grand illusion.

NMSU is very close to becoming a signor to the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). 

Thank you for stopping by.

David M. Boje, Ph.D. 

6 years after it was exposed as an unethical corporation, Nike is still exploiting sweatshop labor, still paying Indonesian workers a few nickels an hour while rewarding its PR celebrities with millions. After all the campus campaigns and culture jamming, kids all over the world still proudly flaunt the swoosh. In fact, Nike has grown so cocky of late that it’s starting to make fun of its critics" Latest Adbusters

I am sometimes asked why I don't write about other sweatshop supply chains. So I looked about El Paso and the University. Sweatshops. Here is what I found at the University bookstore (This is a first step that any of you can begin to conduct where you shop). 

The other question I am asked, is Why Nike, why not the subcontractors? Next need to research Pou Chen and the other major Korean and Taiwan subcontractors who own the factories. That is the next frontier. But to do this, we have to FIND the factories. Also, The Kuk Dong Story: When the Fox Guards the Hen House By David M. Boje, Grace Ann Rosile, &  J. Dámaso Miguel Alcantara Carrillo -- New Mexico State University-- March 25, 2001; Updated April 2, 2001

Finally you can order a 'no sweat' sneaker at http://www.blackspotsneaker.org/ Consumers have built their own NO SWEATSHOP & VEGAN financial base and are going into competition with NIKE and all the sweatshop enterprises:

Article SF Gate on No Sweat

Boston article on No Sweat

Iregular Times - No Sweat

CLICK HERE FOR NIKE SLIDE SHOW
Web Site revised September 17th, 2000

Does Knight Fear The Light Of Day? A New Report On Nike Exposes CEO Phil Knight's Failed Promises

We submitted in October, 2000 RESEARCH by 4 Academic study teams to research Sweatshops in Athletic & Campus Apparel Industry. Meanwhile several academics with an apologist-corporate attitude are admitted to Nike factories and publishing pro-Nike findings. I call this Junk Science, since the studies mold science to corporate ends. 

On August 3rd, 2001 we 45 meet again to plan how to study factories that remain secret except to corporate consultants and academics peddling junk science. See Professional Development Workshop by Academics Studying Athletic and Campus Apparel proposed for August 4, (Saturday) 2001 in Washington D.C. Also see RECENT REPORT "Still Waiting for Nike to Do
It,"  Nike's Labor Practices in the Three Years Since CEO Phil Knight's Speech to the National Press Club - Released May 2001 -By Tim Connor - Published by Global Exchange. The report details each of the promises broken, including the one to facilitate university research.

Contact: Hoon Park, General Manager, Kukdong International Mexico, S.A. de C.V. Retorno de los Continentes No. 38, Col.
Rancho los Soles C.P. 74210, Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico. Phone: 011-52-2-446-1020-3; Fax: 011-52-2-446-1024; Email:
kukdong@avante.net.mx VICTORY for the Women of Kukdong  - December 18, 2001 Responding to letters from over 6,000 people from 17 countries (thanks for sending CLR copies of your letters!) Nike has publicly declared its intent to resume orders with the Mexmode, formerly Kukdong, garment factory in Atlixco, Mexico. The factory produces sweatshirts for Nike and Reebok, and licensed Nike sweatshirts for a number of US universities that have adopted No Sweat purchasing policies. If Nike keeps its promise to resume placing orders with the factory, possibly in the spring of this year, the workers' achievement of the only independent union with a signed collective agreement in a Mexican maquiladora factory will be secure. The proof of Nike's commitment to not cut and run from the factory now that the workers have won an independent union will be the timeliness and volume of orders it places with the factory. Nike campaigners around the world will be watching.

Another form of critique focuses on image-deconstruction -- MUCH OF THE NIKE CRITIQUE IS WHAT IS CALLED "Culture Jamming." 

2000 March 2 - ESPN story Just don't do it By Tom Farrey - All poor Jonah Peretti wanted was a pair of customized sneakers. But here's what happened when the MIT grad student tried to take Nike up on its offer to stitch the term of his choice -- "Sweatshop" -- onto a pair of "Personal ID" shoes that the company markets online:

• Your NIKE ID order was cancelled for one or more of the following
  reasons.
  
  1) Your Personal ID contains another party's trademark or other intellectual property.
  2) Your Personal ID contains the name of an athlete or team we do not have the legal right to use.
  3) Your Personal ID was left blank. Did you not want any personalization?
  4) Your Personal ID contains profanity or inappropriate slang, and besides, your mother would slap us.
  
  If you wish to reorder your NIKE iD product with a new personalization please visit us again at www.nike.com
  

TODAY SHOW - Nike's new web site feature allows you to select a name to have stitched to your Sneakers. If you have Real Player check out what happened to an MIT student.

TRANSCRIPT of TODAY SHOW February 28, 2001 with Jonah Peretti  and Nike's  Vada Manager

Culture Jamming is one form of critique, but there is also a need to do basic historical and comparative research.

Nike Factory Locations:

According to Nike's 2001 annual report, virtually all of the company's footwear is produced outside the United States, the majority in China (40 percent), with significant amounts in Indonesia (31 percent), Vietnam (13 percent) and Thailand (13 percent). In fiscal year 2001, about 5 percent of Nike apparel was manufactured in the U.S. and the remainder in 28 other countries, including Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia and Malaysia. Below is Nike's historical charting of its migration across the globe.