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Nike and International Labor Practices
Nike has long been known as the only brand of shoes to wear. Since its inception in the early 1970s, teenagers have seen the brand’s “swoosh” as a mark of cool. With their celebrity endorsements with people like Tiger Woods, kids have wanted the shoes so that they could be like their sports star. Nike was headed to the top rung of the athletic shoe industry until it hit trouble in the 1990s with news leaking out about labor violations in its factories overseas.
Executive Summary
Nike’s company strategy is a clever one. One that founder Phil Knight thought of while still in school at Stanford. Instead of paying Americans to put together Nike’s shoes, Knight thought that it would be a better idea to take manufacturing plants overseas to places where labor is much cheaper than in the U.S., places like Taiwan and South Korea. With 86% of its products being produced in one of those two countries and Nike employing a large number of people who lived there, the countries became richer and richer until Knight decided prices were too high to manufacture there anymore (Hitting the Wall, 3). He decided to move the factories to places in China like Indonesia where countries were practically begging for foreign investment. Production was going well until the early 1990s when labor strikes rose to 112 in 1991 and news began to leak out about the terrible conditions Nike’s labor force was working in. The company was using underage workers and underpaying them to the point that a family couldn’t even survive off of the wages made at a Nike factory. From this point, Nike’s sales began to slip and returned into the media’s spotlight ...