What effect has the Girl Effect had on Nike’s own supply chain?

September 7, 2016 8:34 AM

Nike Boasts of Empowering Women Around the World while the young women who make its products in Vietnam are intimidated, belittled, and underpaid.
posted by Rustic Etruscan (20 comments total)

Nike: "We're going to empower women around the world, especially those who buy our products. We aren't in the business of empowering those who make them, but you want us to pay lip service, so here's a carefully crafted statement from a white woman who makes over six figures."
posted by Kitteh at 8:48 AM on September 7, 2016 [9 favorites]

'Just do it' takes on a whole new meaning.
posted by RolandOfEld at 8:58 AM on September 7, 2016

I don't think that's entirely what the article is saying Kitteh. I think it's more that, despite actually some notable successes by the "Girl Effect" organization, the women in the supply chain have not seen their lives improve enough.

Basically this:
"“Investing in the Girl Effect costs Nike a lot less than it would cost to ensure that the hundreds of thousands of young women and girls employed in Nike’s supply chain are paid a living wage,” said Tim Connor, a lecturer on corporate and employment law at the University of Newcastle in Australia, who has followed Nike’s labor issues for two decades. “But ensuring [that] a living wage is paid to those young women would be a much more effective way of empowering a much a larger number of women.”
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:58 AM on September 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh snap Greg, that is pretty raw.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 8:58 AM on September 7, 2016

Essentially, it looks like Nike has found a way to cleverly improve the lives of women in their factories to a point, freeze them at that point, and then collect acclaim for being progressive. Hooray! Glad I only wear addidas. (cue flood of articles about addidas being made from baby seals or something)
posted by Potomac Avenue at 9:05 AM on September 7, 2016

Basically, pretty much everything we buy is made with slave labour because we want it cheap and we want it now. It sucks.
posted by Kitteh at 9:08 AM on September 7, 2016 [12 favorites]

I don't think that's entirely what the article is saying Kitteh. I think it's more that, despite actually some notable successes by the "Girl Effect" organization, the women in the supply chain have not seen their lives improve enough.

Kitteh's point is correct. "Enough" is generous to Nike and its contractors.

Although they may be unfamiliar with Nike’s global campaign, the goal of the women I spoke with sounds a lot like the Girl Effect—to raise themselves and their families out of poverty. Each of the 18 women, however, reported pay so low they could not even meet the basic needs of their families, let alone save money or contribute to their communities. (Four had been laid off less than three months before we met, after their factory building burnt down; they spoke only about their wages and child care, cautious of giving critiques that might jeopardize their chances of getting hired back.) They told me that they would need to earn between three to four times their current salaries to offer their families a basic level of economic security. The average monthly wage for manufacturing in Vietnam was $200 in 2015. Their stories highlighted something the Girl Effect campaign is silent about: the importance of a living wage.

I also found evidence that Nike’s contract factories breach basic Girl Effect tenets of freedom from exploitation and harassment, security, safety, and Nike’s own Code of Conduct, put in place to prohibit, among other things, harassment, abuse, and nonconsensual overtime. Women who worked in different factories told remarkably similar stories of being subjected to arbitrary punishments—such as financial penalties and threats of dismissal for making manufacturing mistakes, not working quickly enough, or coming in late, along with intimidation and ongoing humiliation by managers.

posted by Rustic Etruscan at 9:11 AM on September 7, 2016 [7 favorites]

Actually, this is an issue which is explicity about the effects of Nike's supply chain on girls and women.

Of the estimated million-plus workers... almost a third work in Vietnam, the single largest host to Nike manufacturing in the world. With at least 75 contracted factories there, Nike is a major driver of employment in the country. About 80 percent of workers in Nike’s Vietnam factories are women and girls; some may be as young as 16, the minimum age for certain factory work in Nike’s Code of Conduct. Many migrate from poor rural areas in the central and northern provinces of the country to industrial parks in the south. According to Nike, they are often “the first women in their family to work in the formal economy.”

So yes. Nike is specifically exploiting and disempowering a group that is largely comprised of women and girls while talking about empowering women and girls. This is hypocrisy in a particular way and it's worth talking about and solving from the perspective of women and girls.
posted by ChuraChura at 9:20 AM on September 7, 2016 [15 favorites]

Basically, pretty much everything we buy is made with slave labour because we want it cheap and we want it now. It sucks.

To me the issue is that, broadly, the people who manage or own capital have too much power to squeeze profits out of labor. "We" want everything cheaply partly for ideological reasons (novelty! belief that we should have lots of stuff! increasing bias toward rich-people-worldview in our culture!) but also because "our" real wages are declining. Owners of capital put the squeeze on us as consumers by shrinking our wages so that it's hard to pay a price that reflects a living wage, and then "we" do their work by putting the squeeze on these women since we can't/won't pay more. Just like "we" put the squeeze on Uber drivers and check-out clerks and so on to forever do more work for less money, even as we're experiencing the same squeeze in our jobs.

I think that some of us could afford to buy mostly things produced at a living wage, but most of us can't.

Of course, lots of Nikes are very expensive too, so presumably people who find it easy to afford Nikes could switch over to shoes produced at a living wage - there's that.

New mid-range Nikes look like they cost around $80. Made in the US New Balances cost around $175. Leather sneakers made in Maine by Rancourt cost around $260 - those are the ones where I feel the most confident that working conditions are okay.

The trouble is that even something that's expensive-for-average-people (like $80 sneakers) isn't nearly as expensive as living-wage production.
posted by Frowner at 9:30 AM on September 7, 2016 [10 favorites]

Direct link to Chapo/CTH episode that's being referenced here.
posted by kyp at 10:19 AM on September 7, 2016

Christ, it's almost like if you can't beat the NGOs, just establish your own.
posted by bitteroldman at 10:31 AM on September 7, 2016

Michael Moore talks to Phil Knight (from Michael Moore's film The Big One).
posted by nikoniko at 10:33 AM on September 7, 2016

I've worked in education and non-profits large and small for the past 10+ years. With the ever increasing cutbacks in government services and funding of this kind of work, corporate and private philanthropy are basically deciding:

1. What causes are worth working for (and it's not always the most important because ideology and self-interest)
2. What approaches to take to fix them (see above)
3. Who gets to do the work (and it's not always the best qualified people because connections)
4. What success looks like (all of the above)

The deeper I get into this work, the more terrified and jaded I become.
(And then I go binge watch some sort of flavor of Star Trek)
posted by smirkette at 11:00 AM on September 7, 2016 [6 favorites]

Given I've linked my real identity, and my real employer to this account, I will be especially careful not to drift into hyperbole other people feel comfortable with.

But I do hate that this is framed as a corporate failure, and not a market failure. This is something that every single supply chain has to deal with. I can guarantee you that Adidas and countless other brands have just as little control over the enforcement of their Code of Conduct. Because Nike gets an outsized amount of scrutiny, and thus actually worries how to manage this perception issue. So they can justify to their shareholders the cost of a better managed program.

But that's still only to a point. Because they have Adidas, VF, etc all right behind them, using the same factories. So they can't justify changing their cost structure at a point that would lose their #1 status. And the factories can easily decide not to continue contracts, rather than take on expensive capital or labor fixes.

And then there's the final problem. Large corporations struggle with how to do good. Smaller corporations can profit off their philanthropy because people don't look very hard. They understand Tom's is a drop in the ocean. But Nike is a giant. And so people think that Nike can afford to completely disrupt the system. So any amount of good is typically met with a negative reaction. My company struggles with this for environmental issues, because people freak out at the idea of chemicals. So instead of getting mad at other companies for using all the bad chemicals, we're punished for reminding people there are chemicals in your clothes. Even if we've eliminated a huge chunk of them. Since the market does not reward positive action, these programs are usually not well publicized. Which means that they don't influence the rest of the industry.

It creates this market segmentation where ethical consumption can't scale up.

Being a collective action problem, I am unsure of how you change policy to meaningfully change their lives. Vietnam competes with Bangladesh and other nations for textile manufacturing. So a country wide change might help the people in that nation, but dramatically shifting policy would also shift jobs out of Vietnam. Industry wide collective action would be more sustainable, but without real market consequences, it's hard to enforce or enact. The US/EU can impact consumption in their jurisdiction, but that would most likely just segment factories into "high oversight US product" - "low oversight everywhere else". I don't think it's a hopeless effort. But I am a lot more understanding when programs are unable to fulfill the overstated expectations we set for them.
posted by politikitty at 1:08 PM on September 7, 2016 [10 favorites]

Wanting to purchase cheap goods is one thing. Wanting a fair wage and the ability to purchase a quality product that will last a reasonable time is another. People can buy cheap crap at Walmart made with near slave labor that will fall apart in no time, or they can buy expensive Nikes made with near slave labor that will last.

Either way, workers will be majorly exploited, purchasers will overpay for what they are getting, and the only ones who benefit are corporations making massive immoral profits.

There are fair wages and honest profit. Little of that happens under American capitalism.
posted by BlueHorse at 3:59 PM on September 7, 2016

Large corporations struggle with how to do good

They don't care at all about doing good. The perception of doing good is perfectly fine for their purposes.
posted by Dark Messiah at 8:46 AM on September 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

They don't care at all about doing good. The perception of doing good is perfectly fine for their purposes.

I don't really understand this line of thinking. It doesn't matter what corporations care about. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders, and the market (i.e. you and everyone else who purchases things) refuses to reward corporations for acting ethically.

So their hands are tied. They legally can't care about doing good. They can only care about mitigating the risk of scandal.

We created that dynamic. Not the corporation. That's why I see it as a market failure and not a corporate failure.

The bigger issue is acknowledging that as a citizen of another nation, we have very little say in what another nation does. On the one hand, it sucks sitting on our hands and trying to use economic development and diplomacy. On the other, I haven't seen brute force work too well.
posted by politikitty at 10:25 AM on September 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

For any sort of meaningful change to occur, we would need to radically alter the nature and structure of capitalism and the corporation. A new economic system that isn't exclusively beholden to profit, and shareholder value ($$$ über alles) would need to replace the current system. It is a market failure if one believes that the market should/could factor in anything other than shareholder value, and current/future profit.

If any of you haven't watched the excellent documentary The Corporation yet, I highly recommend it.
posted by nikoniko at 11:36 AM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]

Most funding comes from the private sector, and corporations have been taking up a larger role there. And again, it's more rhetoric than real. If you look at Goldman-Sachs and Nike, if you read their materials, you think that they are literally, that they have resources for every girls' NGO in the world! No: I've been through all their tax forms, they invest most of their stuff in their own programs, or in media campaigns to just press their narrative.

I find this such an interesting parallel with the pharmaceutical industry who argue they need to charge exorbitant amounts of money for their products to recoup the cost of the skyrocketing R&D process for bringing a new drug to market - but who apparently actually use most of their profits toward marketing rather than research.
posted by supercrayon at 2:42 PM on September 8, 2016 [2 favorites]

It is a market failure if one believes that the market should/could factor in anything other than shareholder value, and current/future profit.

That conflates corporate interests and market interests. Suppliers only care about profit. Consumers care about all sorts of things. To make profit, suppliers care about what consumers want. But that hinges on the idea that consumers will pay for that differentiation. Consumers respond strongly to branding and advertising. But they respond pretty weakly to sustainability.

I'm not sure what a non-capitalist solution could look like, since the people in this article being exploited are in countries with policies we can't control. If we turn America into a slice of non-capitalist heaven, how do we do that without turning a blind eye to Vietnam or Bangladesh? These women are able to be exploited because their economy doesn't have better options available. Diverting that economic activity towards US manufacturing doesn't make them better. It just makes us feel better. And that's a perfectly justifiable reason to purchase things ethically. But it's a decision that improves the quality of life for people living in a privileged nation over improving the quality of life for people in a much poorer nation.
posted by politikitty at 4:08 PM on September 8, 2016 [1 favorite]