Hitting the Wall: Nike and International Labor Practices
Hitting the Wall: Nike and International Labor Practices
It is ironic to see how an organization like Nike would response to its negative labor practices in quite an immature way, especially when it carries a big brand image in the industry and has a lot on stake to lose; with respect to its loyal clientele and future growth opportunities. In my opinion, Nike’s approach was almost prohibitive, specifically for the initial few years. I agree, later on in May, 1998 Knight announced a series of sweeping reforms however; what is shocking to me, it took Nike roughly 18 years to realize that some serious steps are needed to address the allegations and their future steps must go beyond and over than what they had committed themselves to. Nike was pressed by the circumstances to think this way as their bottom line had truly started to suffer. Evidently, since 1980’s the corporation had been plagued by a series of labor incidents and public relations nightmares but what has astounded me is “despite the criticism; they insisted that labor conditions in its contractors’ factories were not — could not — be Nike’s concern or its responsibility”. Initially, Nike was moving quite fast from one country to another just to accomplish their low cost manufacturing agendas. It is quite relevant, applicable and fair for any organization to outsource where they can save cost but it should not be on someone else expense where the organization is violating human rights and/or the labor is not even making enough to meet their bare minimum necessities. All these bad business practices of Nike got them in mainstream where they were not able to come up with innovative ideas to be in command of this bad publicity. As the matter was heating up Nike did try to address many issues which are surely commendable but the major issue of workers minimum wage was never resolved up until 1998. This is exactly where Nike was getting benefited from (low-wages). In response to the entire kiosk, Nike did
It is ironic to see how an organization like Nike would response to its negative labor practices in quite an immature way, especially when it carries a big brand image in the industry and has a lot on stake to lose; with respect to its loyal clientele and future growth opportunities. In my opinion, Nike’s approach was almost prohibitive, specifically for the initial few years. I agree, later on in May, 1998 Knight announced a series of sweeping reforms however; what is shocking to me, it took Nike roughly 18 years to realize that some serious steps are needed to address the allegations and their future steps must go beyond and over than what they had committed themselves to. Nike was pressed by the circumstances to think this way as their bottom line had truly started to suffer. Evidently, since 1980’s the corporation had been plagued by a series of labor incidents and public relations nightmares but what has astounded me is “despite the criticism; they insisted that labor conditions in its contractors’ factories were not — could not — be Nike’s concern or its responsibility”. Initially, Nike was moving quite fast from one country to another just to accomplish their low cost manufacturing agendas. It is quite relevant, applicable and fair for any organization to outsource where they can save cost but it should not be on someone else expense where the organization is violating human rights and/or the labor is not even making enough to meet their bare minimum necessities. All these bad business practices of Nike got them in mainstream where they were not able to come up with innovative ideas to be in command of this bad publicity. As the matter was heating up Nike did try to address many issues which are surely commendable but the major issue of workers minimum wage was never resolved up until 1998. This is exactly where Nike was getting benefited from (low-wages). In response to the entire kiosk, Nike did