It changed elements of its shoe manufacture to reduce hazards to the workers who make them. It began producing reports to talk about its progress. And it put more focus on audits of factories to identify problems. Still, the popular view of the company as a villain refused to go away.
In , one particular incident summed up the problem. The company had offered customers the ability to have a word of their choice stitched onto their new Nike trainers. Then just at that point, there came a crisis that threatened to take it right back to the beginning. In the run-up to the World Cup, photos were presented to the company of pictures of Pakistani children stitching Nike footballs — a direct repeat of what had happened ten years earlier. It turned out that the supplier, Saga Sports, having become overwhelmed with orders linked to the approaching World Cup, had gone against the rules by sending balls out to be made at local homes.
There was a significant cost to dealing with this problem. The company decided to pull the product anyway and to cancel its contract with Saga, moving instead to Silver Star where all work would be done on factory premises. The impact on former supplier Saga was enormous, essentially driving it to bankruptcy.
However, recent reports seem to betray this new image and harken back to the height of the Nike sweatshop scandal. Is Nike hypocritical as a brand? Does Nike use sweatshops even to this day? A sweatshop is a place of work — usually a factory — that abuses its workers by putting them in immoral and inhumane working conditions. Sweatshop workers are often paid much less than minimum wage and are made to endure abuses like long working hours and unsafe environments.
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One advertisement from a labor-dispatch company offered Uyghur workers still in their teens. Employers could add Xinjiang police officers to stand guard 24 hours a day. In another instance, the report cited a local government document from September counting Xinjiang laborers transferred to factories in Henan province, including the Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou.
If an auditor interviews a worker, the worker may be reluctant to speak openly, especially if a manager is near. It would likely be a similar situation trying to speak to a worker from Xinjiang working against her will.
They can be more targeted, for example. If a problem is prevalent in one region, focus the audit on spotting that problem. Audits also need to go beyond the factories supplying brands directly with finished goods and look at those providing the raw materials. If companies truly want to avoid forced labor in their supply chains, they have to know where their cotton comes from too.
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