Nike

The sport-shoe industry has a lot of problem in their production involving exploitation of children and manufacturing in sweatshops. A majority of the athletic shoes are made in Asian sweatshops and a lot of them are produced by children. Nike is one of the companies who has received a tremendous amount of criticism about their production. Information about extremely bad working conditions has been reported and they keep coming in. Their usage of sweatshops in their production is massive and the environment in these is horrible. Workers that produce Nike shoes has reported that they are being both physically and mentally abused.

Nike is a company that, like many others, do not produce their products itself but have contracts with various manufacturers in different parts of the world. Today these manufacturers are mainly located in countries such as China. This is because the nations lack of laws and restriction of how workers are to be treated. When Nike was founded in 1972 the company had their majority of manufacturers in Taiwan and South Korea, but as the workers power grew larger in these countries, they started to develop labor unions and go on strike, Nike moved more and more of their production to other countries, like for example China.

In the 1990s the stories about the inhuman working conditions, use of child labor, physical and mental abuse, and the ridiculously low wages at the Nike production sites started to spread. A lot of human-rights groups reacted to this, among them Education for Justice, Global Exchange, and Students Against Sweatshop Labour. This drew the attention of the media and Nike met heavy critic about their way of production.

With the attention from both media and human-rights activists, the factory workers started to realize their own value and began to protest against the way they were treated, even though demonstrating and things like that are illegal in China. Nike got anxious and began negotiations with the government to ensure that China would keep their laws and restrictions concerning prohibiting the labor unions and limiting the workers freedom of speech. If the salaries was still too high, according to Nike, they would work around the problem by paying an apprentice wages longer than customary and allowed.

Soon the situation escalated and the factory workers no longer cared if it was illegal to raise their voice about the injustices. In April 1997 around 10 000 Indonesian Nike employees went on strike and they led the way for the Chinese. Over the next 3 years, 3000 employees in China joined the striking trend and protested against dangerous working conditions and low wages.

The world started to put a lot of pressure on Nike and the company was forced to do some changes. In 1998, Nike removed all, or at least most, of the petroleum-based chemicals from their production. Then, a year later, in 1999 Nike allowed the wages to be raised in Indonesia. Another important change was that Nike agreed to have random inspections from independent international organizations, such as the Fair Labour Association. Allowance of independent monitoring might be the biggest success for the human-rights activist’s struggle to get Nike on the right track. The company also started their own team of inspectors who monitor the factories and then discuss the conditions with the manager. 2002 Nike formulated the Code of Conduct, which  is rules and standards that are there to regulate the working conditions and safety of the workers at the factories that produce Nike’s products. In 2004, Nike started the Responsibility Report which meant more regulations and increased frequency and width  of monitoring. One could now get full lists of the factories producing Nike products.

Nike has made an effort when it comes to human-rights, but is it enough? According to the Educating for Justice group at least 50% and maybe as much as close to 100% of all the factories that are manufacturers to Nike need more hours per worker than the Code of Conduct allow. They also claim that 25 % to 50% of the factory workers are forced to work 7 days a week. The Educating for Justice group has as well found that some of the employees of the Nike manufacturers are still paid less than the permitted minimum salary.