The Case Of Nike

Nike has a responsibility for the working conditions of their employees who produce Nike products. In cases of multinational companies, the question of whose ethics and standards to follow is in dispute. Best judgement and reasoning and a combination of the countries’ standards combine to decide on appropriate treatment. In Nike’s case, as part of their strategy, they moved work overseas to save on labor costs. However, the employees still work in Nike factories making Nike products, and Nike has responsibility to protect their working conditions and workers’ rights. They should guarantee workers are being paid fairly according to the minimum wage, ensure their overseas factories comply with child labor laws, and certify the working conditions

Nike could have better anticipated that sooner or later the maltreatment in sweatshop factories would be exposed, especially when the company began to grow quickly. Groups of critics become larger as the company grows, thus making it difficult to hide any malpractices or issues of corporate social responsibility. In response to the sweatshop labor issue, Nike attempted to improve the working conditions in their overseas factories, implement a factory code of conduct, and even start a voluntary CSR initiative called the Fair Labor Association. The association hired Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the UN, to inspect some of the Asian plants. Young’s findings stated conditions “certainly did not appear to be what most Americans would call sweatshops.” Nike leveraged these findings and bought large editorial advertisements to showcase this statement in hopes of reversing their negatively drawn image. However, this was somewhat ineffective in several ways. First, Young only visited 12 Asian factories out of a total 700 factories in 56 countries. Young’s findings cannot be generalized for all Nike factories. The findings stated Nike was doing a “good job” and “operating morally” but failed to address minimum wage violations. Additionally, The Code of Conduct was supposedly posted in all factories, but multiple reports from the Vietnam Labor Watch, the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, and Ernst and Young still reported unfair working conditions, violations of

Nike has not created and implemented an effective approach to social responsibility. When Nike published a Corporate Responsibility Report in 2005, they realized its business processes and production pressures often clashed with the code policies and led to violations and employees and managers cutting corners. Nike also designed a self-run monitoring program to rate factories on a letter scale based on the requirements in areas such as work hours, wages, grievance systems, chemical management, fire safety, and protective equipment. However, the results failed to end any of the significant problems. Reports of a factory in Bangladesh stated management punished employees for learning about labor rights, and reports of a factory in Malaysia discovered workers paying an outrageous recruitment fee and being denied their passports until it was paid off. While Nike has made attempts to improve conditions in these sweatshops, there has been little proof of any serious