- Title
- Rerouting the race to the bottom? Transnational corporations, labour practice codes of conduct, and workers' right to organize: the case of Nike, Inc
- Creator
- Connor, Tim
- Relation
- Moral imperialism : a critical anthology p. 166-182
- Relation
- http://nyupress.org
- Publisher
- New York University Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2002
- Description
- Up until April 2000 the founder and CEO of Nike Inc., Philip Knight, enjoyed a close relationship with the University of Oregon. The university had named its library after him and another building after his father. For his part he had donated more than $US50 million to the school and was expected to give a further $US30 million towards expanding the campus sports stadium. The relationship deteriorated sharply on April 14 when Knight learned that his alma mater had decided to join the Workers' Rights Consortium (WRC), an organisation established by student activists and unions to monitor factory conditions in the production of collegiate licensed apparel by Nike and other companies. Knight announced that "the bonds of trust, which allowed me to give at a high level, have been shredded" and that he would be making "no further donations of any kind" to the University. He criticised the WRC as a misguided attempt "to bring apparel jobs back to the U.S." and praised instead the Fair Labor Association (FLA), another monitoring organisation established by a coalition of corporations (including Nike) and human, consumer, labor rights groups. In the same month Nike cancelled planned sponsorships with Brown and Michigan Universities, two other campuses which had joined the WRC. The company's actions were condemned by the student activists who supported the WRC, publicly criticised by the non-corporate groups involved in the FLA and sparked vigourous debate in the press. The episode is a small indicator of the intensity of the debate over labour practice codes of conduct. Such codes have arisen in response to the concerns of a growing international anti-sweatshop network of unions, consumer, student and activist groups who commonly argue that the globalisation of the world economy is forcing governments of countries with few other comparative advantages to engage in a "race to the bottom" in which they compete for investment by suppressing workers' human rights, particularly their rights to organise and bargain collectively. Some groups involved in this movement are seeking to enhance workers' power to respond to the mobility of transnational corporations by seeking to build transnational alliances between unions, but these initiatives are in turn often frustrated by suppression of workers' right to organise at the local level. This paper considers the potential of those codes of conduct which engage civil society groups to advance the protection of union rights, taking as a case study the three codes which most strongly intersect with the debate on Nike's labour practices: Nike's own code, the FLA and the WRC. While only a minority of companies have adopted such codes, and even fewer have monitoring systems in place to ensure adherence, corporations like Nike are finding that a growing global civil society movement is in no mood to allow credibility with regard to labour rights and other social issues to be easily bought. Equally Activists are encountering strong resistance to independent and rigourous monitoring of corporate labour practices.
- Subject
- corporate social responsibility; labour rights; Nike; corporate regulation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1056627
- Identifier
- uon:16064
- Identifier
- ISBN:0814736149
- Language
- eng
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