By
Rachel Wilson
Recently, debate has surfaced in the Wildcat and in the university about how we as a community will ensure that the clothes we buy in the bookstore and those worn by our athletes are made under humane working conditions.
Periodic inspection of factories by disinterested parties, called monitoring, is one way to investigate factory working conditions. Currently, companies such as Nike, and Peter Likins, favor a monitoring group called the Fair Labor Association while the Task Force On Human Rights and Students Against Sweatshops, a campus labor rights group, favor a group called the Worker Rights Consortium.
The issue of monitoring and sweatshops clearly spreads far beyond Nike's third-world factories alone. SAS's campaign and agreements with Likins cover all corporations we contract with: not just Nike. Despite this, due to its huge profits, the large scale of its global operations, and the fact that Nike is a member and ardent supporter of the FLA, Nike has emerged as an important case study for the sweatshop issue.
The Wildcat recently presented an op-ed piece by Amanda Tucker, Nike's senior manager for corporate responsibility, who claimed that "external, independent" monitoring has occurred successfully at Nike's factories.
She also implies that Nike supports "alternative" monitoring groups such as the Worker Rights Consortium.
Let's get a couple of facts straight here. The FLA has yet to perform any monitoring, and Nike consistently opposes monitoring of its factories by groups such as the WRC that are free of Nike's influence and control.
Tucker attempts to work around the first fact in her article by claiming that Price-Waterhouse-Coopers, an accounting firm paid by Nike to do audits, is evidence of "independent, external" monitoring. A comprehensive report released by MIT professor Dara O'Rourke (http://web.mit.edu/dorourke/www/) demonstrated PWC monitoring methods are deeply flawed: he found they rely heavily on information from managers and therefore missed many details concerning overtime pay and right to organize, to name only a few. Are we really to believe that a company paid by Nike shown to be on the side of management is "external" and "independent"?
Regarding Tucker's second assertion, the WRC is not just "an alternative" to the FLA but philosophically, fundamentally different from all other monitoring systems because it works with the worker. The FLA, in contrast, works with management, just as all other monitoring groups such as Price-Waterhouse-Coopers have done to date.
Next time you are in a store or factory, try asking workers what they think of the job while they are on the job, in front of other workers and management. Now try adding in the fact that in Indonesia, even just weeks ago, workers are attacked by groups of armed men and beaten for meeting with others to join a union. Would you still think, as Tucker seemingly would have us believe, that you will get an honest answer out of these workers about their working conditions?
This is exactly the point where the WRC is strong and the FLA weak: the WRC seeks to take complaints directly from workers, with no management interference. The FLA, in contrast, will use management controlled reporting and monitoring.
Monitoring that is independent of Nike management has never been allowed by Nike because they are afraid of what will come out. Just look at what Phil Knight, CEO of Nike and long-time contributor to University of Oregon, did when UofO joined the WRC: he pulled a proposed 30 million in contributions to UofO and refused to give more. Why did Knight do this?
Because he is afraid of the consequences of having his company subjected to monitoring that Nike cannot control and manipulate itself.
We need a monitoring group at UA that is independent of corporate management so we can get the whole story on what goes on in third-world factories from which we get products. As Nike has demonstrated again and again, perhaps most clearly in its recently editorial, Nike is not interested in telling you the facts about its third-world factories. Nike's puppet monitoring systems are intended primarily as a smokescreen and will not keep the university out of the sweatshop business. This is why we should not trust Nike when they tell us to support the FLA and spurn the WRC.
