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Jeff Ballinger's Argument Against Nike

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Jeff Ballinger's Argument Against Nike
Eliseo Arteaga
Rao
Bus 187
9-19-11

1.
I do not believe Jeff Ballinger has a convincing argument against Nike. I do believe he has a convincing argument against labor conditions in Indonesia. He states that in 1988, of the 17,000 violations reported in that year only 12 were prosecuted. While this statistic is very alarming about the poor labor conditions in Indonesia, it has no proof as to where these violations were originating from. It is very likely that some of the violations were coming out of the factories that Nike had under contract, but there is no way to distinguish, out of the 17000, how many of the violations Nike was responsible for. It just seems that Mr. Ballinger has a personal vendetta against Nike.
Nike’s response to the allegations is not convincing at all. The initial reaction from Nike was to stay quiet about its labor conditions. In fact Nike’s response tends to make a person feel like they knew about the horrible working conditions that are in their factories but they are turning a blind eye. Nike goes on to say that they
…show more content…
The initial reaction from Nike was to say that it was not their responsibility to oversee what was going on overseas. Nike did try to have someone investigate the situation; however Nike only had the private investigator look into the poor labor conditions. The problem was that the world wanted to know about the issues about child labor, and compensation. If Nike had wanted to let this bad publicity die down, they should have allowed an independent company investigate the entire situations. After their findings Nike should have apologized for any wrong doing and then Nike should have tried to correct the problem. Nike would have looked bad for a short period of time. But they would have looked more accountable had they acknowledged their mistakes and try to alleviate the problems. In the end Nike created more of a problem for

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