The Problem Of Sweatshops Labor: Analysis Of Nike Case
The term “sweatshop” refers to factories or other assembly facilities that pay their workers extremely low wages, commonly as low as $. 15 per hour, and that tend to force the workers to labor in dangerous conditions. It is also somewhat standard for those who own or run sweatshops to force their employees to work long hours, six or seven days a week. As a result, employees in sweatshops sometimes collapse on the job.
Nike is one of the world’s largest athletic clothing manufacturer, which makes over $20 billion annually. Nike is also a visible target of those who have attempted to stop the kind of inhumane acts that sweatshops have. This paper will attempt to answer why Nike uses sweatshops and how it impacts them. The case of Nike will first be described more fully and then the issue of the moral status of sweatshop labor will be briefly discussed.
Nike began to have problems with reports of sweatshop conditions in its facilities in the 1990s. There were at that time reports, for example by Business Insider, that Indonesian workers in Nike sweatshops were being paid as little as $0. 14 per hour. Nike had ignored similar reports for some time. Nike refused to confirm the allegations for years, but public protests proved to have an impact on the company’s sales. Soon enough, public trust in the brand began to disappear as well. Eventually, Nike’s co-founder, Phil Knight, took a stand against inhumane employment practices in 1998. Since then, Nike has made every effort to fight workers’ abuse in their factories, and it worked. Two decades later and Nike has become the leading sportswear brand worthwhile.
The conflict that Nike has made “every effort” to fight the abuse of workers in their factories is simply not true, but the rest seems accurate.
One fact in any discussion of the problem of sweatshops is that corporations such as Nike have relocated their manufacturing facilities overseas specifically because of the low wages that they can get away with paying their workers, as well as the low standards for worker safety accepted by the countries’ governments. So it is important not to see sweatshops as a problem emerging accidentally. If it were not for sweatshops, companies such as Nike would not be in countries like Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. A related fact is that if Nike’s factories in poor countries were not abusing workers, including by paying them wages that seem to make labor in some factories little different from slavery, then Nike should not mind granting inspection organizations access to their facilities so that they can be inspected.
However, Nike’s record on granting inspectors access to its facilities has been poor. The Worker Rights Consortium (WRC) is the world’s “only independent labor rights monitoring agency and accepts no funds from corporations or unions”. It is greatly important that these monitoring agencies do not accept bribes from corporations, of course, because of the almost inevitable terrible work conditions that would follow from accepting funding by corporations the WRC is meant to review and inspect. For example, Nike employs its own monitoring force, and, unsurprisingly, it never seems to find any violations. In 2000, Nike, which had on prior occasions granted WRC investigators access to its facilities, denied them access to a factory in Mexico. There are not any legitimate reasons for doing this if Nike has nothing to hide. More recently, Nike granted the WRC access to Hansae, a company that Nike subcontracts to. In December of 2016, the WRC released a report describing mass faintings (of workers who became exhausted by overwork in illegally high temperatures inside the facilities), wage theft (which can be either forcing workers to labor “off the clock”, or altering their official numbers of hours worked after the fact), the forced working of overtime, and even firing pregnant women. Other inspections have found Nike facilities to feature severe restriction on worker access to bathrooms, exposure to toxic materials, and even bolting and locking exit doors so that workers cannot escape the crushing heat and poor ventilation.
Nike has occasionally pledged to improve conditions for its workers, such as the temperatures of the facilities and their ventilation. On the specific issue of wages, however, Nike has been consistently inflexible. When labor began to organize in Korea and Taiwan in the early 1990s, which would certainly have meant demands for increased wages, Nike’s response was to close factories and move its production to Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. Again, this should not be surprising. Nike’s very reason for offshoring production to poor countries is the extremely low wages that it is able to pay workers there. On one hand, it is natural and humane to try to keep corporations from exploiting sweatshop conditions. On the other hand, the bottom line is that every step that Nike takes in this direction means a loss of profits. A final problem that must be mentioned is that Nike, in common with other corporations, partially shields itself from criticism about sweatshop conditions by using subcontractors. By doing this Nike can have the best of both worlds, it can leach the benefits of using sweatshop labor while attempting to maintain denial regarding how precisely the subcontractors conduct their business in poor countries.
Most discussion of sweatshops by those critical of them simply assume that sweatshops are morally wrong. This position may be correct. However, there is a standard defense of sweatshops that must be considered before we can draw a conclusion about the ultimate moral allowance of them. The defense holds that, while sweatshops may be unfortunate in certain respects, they actually benefit workers. They benefit workers because, on this line of argument, they give them jobs that the people would otherwise not have. Surely it is better to have a low-paying job than no job at all. One writer alleges that closing sweatshops “would mean trapping [poor] nations in perpetual poverty”. The idea that poor nations need to go through a phase in which their people work in sweatshop conditions, before they can rise out of poverty, cannot simply be ignored. Many respected economists have made this claim. On the other hand, this argument would be stronger if its supporters could point to an example of a poor country that was able to rise out of poverty with the help of sweatshops. Critics have stated that there are no such cases.
The argument that having a low-paying job is better than having no job is not quite so easy to dismiss. Surely it is often true that sweatshop workers have no alternatives; if it were not true, then corporations like Nike would expectedly not be able to get away with the practices mentioned in the previous section. The claim that sweatshops make the poor better off is sometimes called the “non-worseness” claim. One problem with the claim is that there is another option, corporations such as Nike could simply pay higher wages. It is certain that Nike could do this without greatly reducing profits. As noted earlier, Nike has over $20 billion in revenue each year. It is estimated that Nike has around 70,000 employees worldwide. Now suppose that Nike decided to devote $1 billion, to paying its workers a fair wage. This would come out to over $14,000 per year per employee. In many parts of the world, this amount, is above what is considered to be a fair wage, or a “living wage”.
The argument in question is not that any working conditions at all, or any wage at all, is justified by pointing to the fact that many of those who work in sweatshops have no alternative employment. Instead, the argument is that so long as working conditions are not ridiculously bad and low, the fact that no alternative employment is available justifies forcing workers to labor in sweatshops. However, as extreme as the conditions mentioned in the previous paragraph are, there is no clear sense at all in which they are.
In conclusion, this paper has briefly discussed the problem of sweatshop labor that is used by companies such as Nike. The discussion should not be meant to imply that Nike is alone in its abuse of workers. It is arguable that Nike is only the most visible example of labor practices that are prevalent among corporations that have relocated their manufacturing facilities to poor countries. Nevertheless, Nike has been accused of serious human rights violations and this problem is not less morally urgent for being a problem that many or most corporations have created. After describing some of the abuses that Nike has been accused of, the paper took a quick look at some counterarguments that defenders of sweatshops have made. The problem with these arguments is that the disagreement that sweatshops help poor countries grow economically has not been justified with a single example. And the problem with the view that a low-paying job is better than no job at all is that this line of reasoning could be used to justify literally any treatment of workers, no matter how barbaric.
