Hitting the Wall: Nike and International Labor Practices

Hitting the Wall: Nike and International Labor Practices

Nike should be held responsible for working conditions in foreign factories that it does not own, but where subcontractors make products for them. It is fundamentally unethical to contract workers to produce product and allow the products to be sold with Nike’s name, but for Nike to then distance themselves from the conditions with which the product is produced. However, the case made a valid point that Nike should not be held to a standard that the rest of the industry is not held to. With that said, Nike can’t seek to absolve itself by pointing fingers at the rest of industry in an attempt to spread the blame. Nike should be held responsible for itself and the working conditions with which it’s products are made. Nike just happens to be the big fish that received, perhaps disproportionately, more of the attention on an issue that is much bigger than them.

While ethically, Nike should be held responsible, in a public relations sense, Nike should want to do their best to ensure that labor condition issues are kept to a minimum. As Phil Knight was forced to admit, fair or not, Nike had become the corporate face of the topic of abuse and slave wages. Such negative effects of public perception eventually trickled down to the bottom line.

Nike’s defensive stance toward foreign factory working conditions did not help their case, as it only forced to increase the vitriol and desire to hold Nike responsible. Being defensive about one’s responsibility in such a matter, from a perception standpoint, essentially amounts to trying to avoid responsibility when the public had and advocacy groups made up their mind that Nike was responsible. It also spoke to a certain degree of arrogance that they would be able to weather the storm without much effort.

As such, Nike needed to make changes to it’s policy regardless of it’s competitors because it’s competitors, such as Reebok and Adidas, were not...