Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TIME visited Nike plants in China and Vietnam recently and found them to be modern, clean, well lighted and ventilated, and paying decent wages by local standards--although by no means are they trouble free. Make no mistake: these are factories, not amusement parks, and even in developing Asia, where jobs are scarce and getting scarcer, this is not the employment of choice. It's low-tech assembly work that hasn't changed much since Nike chairman Phil Knight first started sourcing sneakers in Japan 35 years ago. Since then, the work has migrated in search of ever cheaper labor...
...money, I'll go back," he says. [TIME used its own interpreters.] The average monthly wage is 600 renminbi, or $73. The company provides meals and living quarters in spartan although adequate dorm rooms that sleep 12 and offer individual storage closets and ceiling fans for the summer. In Vietnam, by comparison, the minimum wage is $40 a month, and workers must pay for such accommodations...
Indisputably, there have been cases where supervisors abused workers, including a well-known incident at Pou Chen's Bien Hoa plant in Vietnam when several women fainted while being forced to run laps around the perimeter of three warehouses as a punishment. Workers there have no confidence in the grievance system, and some still fear reprisal from bosses. "The manager wants us to meet the regulated number," says a 27-year-old woman. "When we don't and there's a gap, they force us to work extra to meet the quota." Workers have also complained that they were paid...
...endorse them. Can't they find more money to pay the workers?" The short answer is no. Corporations pay the going rate for labor wherever they are. And Nike maintains that the rate is good. Research conducted by Dartmouth College, for instance, found that Nike subcontractors in Indonesia and Vietnam paid above subsistence levels, allowing workers to save a portion of their earnings. TIME found this to be true at Yueyuan...
...Nike's critics have argued that the company cannot monitor work standards credibly with its own staff or with hired guns such as former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, whom Nike paid to visit plants in China, Vietnam and Indonesia. He concluded that "Nike is doing a good job...but Nike can and should do better." Activists dismissed his report as propaganda. Of course, if Nike can't reverse its recent sales trends, job conditions won't be a problem for many of these workers. They won't have jobs...