News -- No Sweat -- Union-Made Casual Apparel

While we are on the subject of evil...

HISTORICAL EVIL:
"The Triangle Fire," by Leon Stein with a new introduction by William Greider. (Cornell University Press, 2001.)

EVIL IN THE RAG TRADE:
"NO SWEAT: Fashion, Free Trade, and the Rights of Garment Workers," edited by Andrew Ross. (Verso Press 1997.)

BORDERLINE EVIL:
"Border Witness," by Maureen Casey and Brian Casey. (The New York State Labor-Religion Coalition, 2002).

COSMIC EVIL:
"Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy," by Susan Neiman. (Princeton U. Press, 2002.)

LabourStart Headlines:

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Spin to Win

How Nike Profits by Lies and Distortion
April 21, 2003 Corporate Speech Steamroller
By Jeff Ballinger

What's wrong with this picture? In the late 1990s, the Mitsubishi corporation settled a sexual harassment case in Illinois by agreeing to pay over $43 million. In early 2001, Nike admits that contract-factory managers in Indonesia fondled and harassed many young Indonesian women, but the company offers no compensation. Instead of demands for real protection of workers, the few journalists that write about Nike's 2001 report applaud the company's candid appraisal of mistreated workers! By the way, the same complaints that were found in Nike's report were thoroughly documented in a 1991 press report titled "World Shoe Giants Rape Worker Rights" which appeared in over three full pages in the Indonesian daily newspaper, Media Indonesia.

Just a couple of days ago, a friend and I stood in front of a fancy Boston theater and handed out leaflets to the crowd going inside for "The Reebok Human Rights Award Ceremony." Since Reebok sources shoes and apparel the same way that Nike does -- from contractors operating in the world's most corrupt and repressive countries -- it is never difficult to cobble together a flier which draws attention to a few groups of aggrieved Reebok workers. Last year, Dita Sari, a very courageous young Indonesian woman, actually refused the sweat-stained fifty thousand-dollar Reebok award because of the pitiful wages and abusive conditions suffered by Indonesians, Mexicans and Vietnamese working in Reebok-contract factories. To read the Los Angeles Times column about Dita Sari ("Running from Reebok's Hypocrisy") go to here.

Also in mid-April, a large and well-respected environmental group conducted its annual conference in New York. On the program were two women with ties to Nike. One is the chief of the overall "Nike Corporate Responsibility Program" and the other was a co-founder of the Nike-funded "Global Alliance." Three months ago, I wrote to three members of the board of this organization that I know personally and expressed my concerns. Was I hoping that the two would be dropped from the program? Nah. I knew that wouldn't happen. The organizers could have added a speaker to the program that provided a bit of balance (see Mark Hertsgaards' book about how poverty - sweatshop wages - adds to environmental degradation: "Earth Odyssey"). My point here is that big corporations can easily invest in reputation-management activities by flying people around the world to every "sustainability" or "triple bottom line" conference and thereby earn kudos as a concerned and responsible corporate citizen - just for showing up. Then, you are invited to speak before hundreds of earnest activists at a conference - in public relations terms: priceless!

Jeff Ballinger knows Nike. He went to Indonesia for the AFL-CIO in 1987 -- about the same time that Nike contractors were moving operations to China & Indonesia from Korea and Taiwan. After several years working with local labor rights and legal aid activists, Jeff quit his job and started "Press for Change" to help Nike workers take their stories directly to consumers. He's now also working to bring union-made clothes to conscientious consumers through www.NoSweatApparel.com

A new book by Daniel Litvin, "Empires of Profit" (see www.etexere.com ), dedicates an entire chapter to Nike's we're-the-good-guys campaign. It's titled, "The contortions of corporate responsibility: Nike and its third-world factories". Nike's exploitation of Indonesian, Thai, Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese workers -- through a brutal contracting-out system -- made the company the target of solidarity campaigns in many countries.

For those of us who have observed these "contortions" up close, it has been a sad spectacle of well-documented human rights reports ground into dust by corporate "spin". For example, while Nike's checklist of contractor compliance issues includes "freedom of association", the company's officials have demonstrated nothing but scorn for brave workers that have been sacked for organizing protests. In a similar vein, now that independent unions have begun to gain some ground in Indonesia, production is shifting inexorably to China. Simply put, the very things that anti-sweatshop campaigners put at the top of the list - defending workers' right to organize and those workers' demand that Nike contractors sit down in dignity to collectively bargain -- have been obscured by a blizzard of corporate self-reporting and other Nike-financed artifices aimed at reassuring consumers about the Nike corporation's high regard for contract-workers' aspirations.

Nike had succeeded in changing the media frame; reporters and columnists have mostly quit writing about workers and local activists challenging brutal Nike contractors and now focus almost exclusively on the "conduct code checklist".

Anti-sweatshop activists may remember that Nike hired a key communications operative of the first President Bush in 1997 and, a year later, an experienced Democratic campaign media expert. They oversee a staff of over ninety "corporate responsibility" personnel assigned to tamp down criticism and to make a convincing case regarding Nike's ostensible dedication to policing 550 contract factories. In addition to this huge in-house public relations operation, Nike founded its own non-government organization (NGO) several years ago; Nike has already delivered more than half of a $14 million pledge to the Baltimore-based "Global Alliance for Workers and Communities". The founder of this dubious undertaking, Rick Little has advised businesspeople to "contract-out corporate responsibility" operations. Officials at Nokia and Lucent have recently answered his pitch with millions of dollars, basing their decisions, presumably, on the work that Little has done for Nike.

In California, a consumer has sued Nike for lying about having fixed "sweatshop" conditions in Asian factories. Long-time environmental activist, Marc Kasky alleges that the footwear giant defrauded the sneaker-buying public throughout the mid- to late- Nineties. Because a high percentage of Californians care about sweatshop-tainted sneakers, the legal theory goes, Nike's demonstrably false statements regarding improvements in wages and distortions about other abusive conditions amounted to an unjust enrichment. California's Supreme Court decided last year that the case should proceed to trial and the state's attorney general agreed with the legal theory that Nike could be forced to disgorge profits from sales in California - an amount that could easily run into the tens of millions of dollars.

This would all seem a bit fairy-land -- enhancing the voice of and power of consumers while our most basic liberties are increasing imperiled -- were it not for the Enron, WorldCom, Martha Stewart and Harken Oil grotesqueries. The public may be in a mood to take Nike's multi-billionaire CEO, Phil Knight, to the woodshed - but it is possible that the angry masses will not even hear very much about this case. Nike has shrewdly shifted the dispute to Washington in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The hearing at the high court will not reach the issue of whether or not Nike officials spoke truthfully about wages and working conditions in Asian factories. The First Amendment is being invoked to create, in effect, a corporate right to lie. Major news organizations have already weighed in with "friend of the court" briefs that denigrate the notion that corporations owe consumers a modicum of honesty. Lawyers for the media conglomerates argue that the public should be able to sift out the truth from the rough and tumble of debate. But, really, how are under-resourced NGOs supposed to compete with the public relations operations of a company like Nike?

It's remarkable that we have come as far as we have, in retrospect. With the Campaign for Labor Rights (CLR) at the forefront of efforts to get protestors in front of dozens of Nike outlets and Footlocker stores in a coordinated fashion, the campaign to draw attention to the Nike workers' struggle for fair treatment drew in unprecedented numbers of concerned N. American citizens. It was the first sustained challenge to the reigning neo-liberal orthodoxy that "Free Trade Benefits All." Thousands of the young people that CLR energized added their voices to the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, challenging the way that the rules of the game were being written.

What makes the Kasky lawsuit threatening to Nike is the prospect that this case may actually probe the truth or falsity of the corporation's claims, if it proceeds to trial in California. If Kasky's lawyers are granted "discovery" - the right to request documents from Nike's files - the situation for the apparel/footwear giant could take an ugly turn. In the critical 1996-7 period, for example, Nike produced and circulated a "video press release" to many television stations in the U.S. Since it relies heavily on the commentary of an ex-CIA agent, Douglas Paal, it may raise deeper credibility issues for Nike than the company's "everyday" misstatements and distortions about wage levels and the like. The same is also true for Nike communications with contractors that led to scurrilous charges corporate spokespeople made against Indonesian and Vietnamese workers who courageously organized strikes and protests throughout the mid- to late-1990s.

The likelihood that the Kasky case will evolve into a corporate right-to-lie has led a Boston-based publicist, Jeff Seideman, to scold his colleagues. He chided the Public Relations Society of America for supporting Nike in the Supreme Court case and wrote an opinion piece for PR Week last December that says that his industry loses respect amongst the general populace by associating itself with a truth-optional position.

More generally, however, the attempts by sweatshop firms like Nike to quell criticism threatens to taint institutions such as the United Nations. Nike's CEO, Phil Knight made an extra effort to photographed next to UN chief Kofi Annan when the Global Compact was launched. (For a complete examination of the perils presented by the UN's Global Compact, I highly recommend "earthsummit.biz" by Joshua Karliner and Kenny Bruno.) Similarly, Knight stood next to Bill Clinton at the White House during the inaugural meeting of the Apparel Industry Partnership, which later morphed into the Fair Labor Association. Almost seven years since that Rose Garden ceremony, the FLA has yet to command respect in the field of labor rights. In fact, many student "anti-sweat" activists have put pressure on campus administrators to sever ties with the association.

On the more positive side, it should be noted that there have been recent gains made by the determined efforts of students backing the Workers Rights Consortium and the United Students Against Sweatshops. Using a rights-based approach - which CLR helped to pioneer -- the student activists have weighed in on the side of independent union organizers in Indonesia, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, New York and several other places where university-logo apparel is being made.

Another area where there are promising indications is among the "socially responsible investment" community. The pension fund of teachers and professors (TIAA-CREF, total funds invested: $260 bil.) has recently dropped Wal-Mart and Nike from its "Social Choice Account". That said, much labor rights work remains to be done with TIAA-CREF and the SRI community generally. Stay tuned!