Word: nike
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...past few weeks, the Nike motto appears to have changed from "Just do it!" to "Just do it our way, or else!" In a disturbing display of industrial and financial power, Nike Chair Phil Knight recently reneged on a promised $30 million donation to the University of Oregon, and the company cancelled a multi-year, multi-million dollar apparel contract with the University of Michigan. The reason: both schools are affiliated with the human rights monitoring group the Workers Rights Consortium (WRC). Nike, a member of the Fair Labor Association (FLA)--a monitoring group backed by the government, several apparel...
...transparent nature of the WRC plan has clearly discomfited the industry. Nike went so far as to cancel a sports equipment deal with Brown University, citing the school's role as a founding member...
...Nike overreaction is best illustrated by an incident which took place last fall, when I took two university-based "anti-sweat" activists to Indonesia. We were contacted by union officers at the sprawling Nikomas Gemilang factory, where more than 18,000 young Indonesians were making shoes for a Nike contractor; they wanted us to visit the factory. We weren't on the property for more than three minutes before a breathless Taiwanese manager chased us down and told us that no one could visit the factory without Nike's permission and, further, that we could not even see the dormitories...
...Nike, predictably, criticized our visit as unhelpful. In retrospect, we did not even need the factory visit. With the help of some Indonesian students, we spoke with scores of workers and did some rudimentary "faux bargaining" calculations. Had the workers won a meager seniority clause increase of 15 cents per worker per day for each year of seniority, a worker with four years' experience would earn $1.70 a day, instead of $1.10. This does not sound like much money, but in this huge factory, it would cost the contractor $10,000 a day! No wonder the vast majority of Nike...
...just in time to avoid being tarred as the Nike of corner cafes, Starbucks, the nation's largest gourmet-coffee company, caved last Friday, agreeing to launch a line of Fair Trade-Certified beans. The politically correct coffee is grown on small farm cooperatives rather than large plantations. It sells for a minimum of $1.26 per lb.--which goes directly to the farmers rather than the middlemen, who often pay growers less than 50[cents] per lb. The increase means that the farmers, who hand-pluck their beans and carry them down the mountain in 100-lb. sacks, can afford...