posted October 11, 1999

NIKE MAKES PARTIAL DISCLOSURE

After years of pressure, anti-sweatshop activists have wrested an important - if partial - concession from Nike. Nike has posted on its web site the names and addresses of 41 factories in 11 countries where it produces apparel for five of the U.S. schools where it has licensing agreements: Duke, Georgetown, the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Arizona. The factories assemble sweatshirts, T-shirts, shorts and other apparel bearing the school names and logos.

In 1998, the National Labor Committee (NLC) began to make disclosure a key issue in the movement to end sweatshop abuses. The NLC continues to press for disclosure in its Wal-Mart campaign. A wave of student sit-in's in the spring resulted in some schools promising to require their licensees to disclose the factories where their school logo clothing was being produced. Meanwhile, Nike had agreed in principle to disclosure in connection with its licensing agreements.

Many hope and expect that Nike's move will prove to be a precedent. It should be noted that the 41 factories represent a small percentage of Nike's 541 production sites worldwide and that this development is a small step toward transparency in the $2.5 billion collegiate licensing industry, which in turn is but a fraction of the apparel industry.

For details on the disclosure, see Nike's web site <www.nikebiz.com>.

Jo-Ann Mort, communications director for UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees), said, "This is a small, but significant victory gained by the student movement. Not too long ago, Nike and other corporations insisted that public disclosure would destroy their business." [As quoted in the New York Times]

<><><><><> IMPLICATIONS OF NIKE DISCLOSURE commentary by Trim Bissell, national coordinator, Campaign for Labor Rights

Whether clothing is made for college bookstores or for mainstream retail outlets, the point remains the same: Consumers have a right to know where their clothing is made, under what conditions and at what wages. We should press Nike to disclose the names and locations of all of its factories. We should press other companies to do the same. Nike has not been magnanimous in finally disclosing a few score of its factories. Rather, it has discharged a small part of its responsibility. The fact that this partial disclosure is big news reflects poorly on the industry rather than reflecting especially well on Nike.

The student movement, with United Students Against Sweatshops in a justly-earned leadership role, is positioned to build on the momentum of Nike's announcement. There is little question that student activists ought to continue to mobilize energetically around the issue of disclosure.

There is a question, however, as to what we ought to do with the information we have extracted from Nike and similar information which we hope will be forthcoming from others in the apparel industry who have hidden their labor practices beneath layers and layers of secrecy.

In the best-case scenario, disclosure will allow activists in the global north to link up with workers in the global south who are organizing unions against tremendous odds so that we can provide solidarity, contributing to the recognition of real unions and the bargaining of decent contracts.

Monitoring systems undoubtedly have a constructive role to play in a number of worker struggles. However, it would be a great mistake to believe that our principle response to disclosure should be to set up monitoring systems and to believe that monitoring systems in themselves will result in the empowerment of workers.

Workers and the unions of their choice are the best monitors of their own factories. Disclosure is one of the steps toward our being able to connect with those worker-monitors. Certainly, we are not going to find emerging unions in every one of the 41 factories which Nike has posted on its web site. But we would hope to find that organizing is happening in some of the factories. Assuming that we can find a way to establish communications, we can begin to learn what kinds of solidarity activities the workers in those factories are requesting from our movement.