Ok, cigs I can see…bad idea for anyone but especially the poor…but its an addiction and hard to stop.
Lottery tickets are usually popular with the poor because the see it as the only way they will ever break free of poverty. And most of them are right. It may be poor use of resources, but spending a dollar here and there so you can actually have something to dream about…what ever gets you through the night.
Pawn shops…Hmm…I’ve been poor enough to pawn stuff once or twice so that I could get my car fixed. Its not a great solution but for some people its really the only way they have to get cash in an emergency.
Rental places…well…if you have no other way to get furniture and you dont wanna sleep on the floor… (I’ve never rented furniture before, but I know people who have)
High intrest credit cards and loans…because they cant get low intrest ones…duh.
The new flashy whatever? Must be hanging out with differant poor folk than me. I have no idea what you are talking about here.
You really have lived a sheltered life havent you?
Like I posted earlier, anyone can do something about it, if they use their talent, brains, and effort. I ask my employees who are struggling if they would like some advice on financial matters…most of them are more than happy to listen, if they wish to talk about their current condition. I usually learn that there is some sort of vice that they are spending a disproportionate amount of money on, and they realize that they need to curtail that activity to dig out of the hole. Many have debt from earlier spending sprees when they were immature years ago, still paying 20%+ interest on that debt, which I find criminal. Also, I find that many of them didn’t bother asking anyone how to get out of the endless cycle until I asked them.
Raising the minimum wage might help in the short term, but to a person in debt, it is not a solution…I find that proper financial advice is far better than a raise when it comes to long term solutions. Of course raises do help, but without financial disipline, it’s marginal relief at best. The employees are like family to me, and I feel like a father (or brother) to most of them when I help them set things straight…but only if they want to. Otherwise, no money that I throw at them is gonna help and the cycle continues.
It is clear – it’s common sense. I doubt very much that you would accept any of the cites you’ve provided if they were asserting anything apart from something you hope to represent as true.
This is a common sense thing. If I contract with Molly-Maid to clean my house, and the Molly-Maid office I contract with employs thirty-five workers, do I employ thirty workers? If I am not currently placing orders with Molly-Maid, does the office close up and send everyone home?
Take a look at any of those contract factories, and find one that is dedicated to putting out Nike gear. More typical are factories like Okamoto Hosiery. They employ 425 people, and list their main clients as “Major nationwide general merchandising stores, sportswear retailers etc.” So this is a factory (on Nike’s list of Active factories) which adds 425 to the number that you are treating as “Nike employees.” How about Primo Leather Products? They employ 180 people and mainly make belts and suspenders.
Go through the list and see how many produce nothing but Nike gear while they run.
This is naive. Talk to people who’ve worked for, say, companies in Taiwan that supply WalMart. WalMart suppliers have to totally overhaul their supply stream if they want WalMart’s business. Shipping, record-keeping, the way palets are stacked and wrapped, label design – WalMart dictates all of this, and they’re notoriously extortionate about it. Suppliers comply, of course, because it’s the price of doing business. What WalMart wants, WalMart gets. Like Nike, it has spectacular purchasing power. They have responsibility for how they use it just like we all do. You and I may be able to get top electronic gear cheap if “it fell off the back of a truck,” but we both know that, while it represents an immediate savings, in the long run it contributes to some negative things. We don’t, because we’re ultimately responsible for how we spend our money, and we don’t wish to be complicit in anything that’s unethical and hurtful to other people.
Nike has responsibility for the conditions of the contract workers who produce its products – and ultimately the responsibility lies with the consumer.
Remember also the specific context of why we are talking about whether or not these people are full-time Nike employees – your absurd argument that the cost of producing Nike gear is such that, distributed amongst it employees, annual revenue would be around $2,000 pc, from which the cost of labour, material, advertising, distribution, warehousing, and taxes must be subtracted before Nike could determine its profits, if any.
Really, it’s a bit of a lark that such a point is being politely argued at all – it is such a jaw-droppingly stupid assertion that it beggars belief.
Nope, I grew up in one of the tiniest poor towns in one of the poorest areas of the country (Northern Louisiana.). I was raised by a single mother that was a schoolteacher. Despite the fact that I broke myself out of the cycle by being the only one in my high-school graduating class to go to college, I still remember my roots well. If there is one thing I know, it is poor culture.
I bet you didn’t have me stereotyped that way at all did you?
You are working from a false assumption…that people are poor because of poor financial decisions. Some are but most are either poor because they were born into and have not the means to get a decent education or because they lost their jobs and had to go from middle class income to a poverty line one. I known a suprising number in the later catagory.
Raising the min wage would help hault the self destructive spin lowering wages are putting us into. The answer is not to teach people how to survive on nothing…because if no body buys anything our economy colapses. The solution is to get wages up so people can live a decent life and everyone benifits.
I only know about you what you post. Perhaps you’ve forgotten…perhaps things were totally differant in the small town you grew up in. Perhaps you’re deliberately being obtuse. But you come across as totally clueless and naive. You got to go to college, thats more than most of the poor in this country get to do. There are only so many scholorships to go around.
Your mom was a school teacher (so was mine) so we both had an educational advantage that most poor kids do not have.
Hint: that’s because there is some obvious dividing line between slavery and not-slavery.
You’d be wrong. If you offer me a penny a day to make shoes for you and I accept it, that is not slavery. If you lock me in a room and force me to make shoes for you, that’s slavery, whether you give me a penny per day or $15/hour.
Well then, all those lefty sites are being misleading, aren’t they? As is Nike’s own web site. In what other industry would you find someone saying that they ‘employ 25,000 workers’ simply because they order a single product from another company that happens to have that many workers? It makes no sense. And the cites I posted all seem to claim that these are people employed doing nothing but making Nike products.
No, but when Nike says they employ 5,000 workers in a factory, how do you know that they aren’t taking this into account? For example, maybe that factory employs 15,000 people, but only 33% of its output is dedicated to Nike products.
As a further sanity check, I find that the U.S. market for athletic shoes is about 200 million pair a year, of which Nike owns a 35% market share. Which means Nike sells about 70 million pairs of athletic shoes in the U.S. alone per year.
Now, it’s kind of hard to find productivity figures for shoe factories, but one cite I found quoted the labor cost of a pair of shoes at $3. Another cite had the labor cost at $2.50, in the same ballpark. If those workers make $3/day, then that’s one man-day of labor for each pair of shoes.
Note that this roughly corresponds with my earlier site saying that a factory of 25,000 employees makes a million shoes a month.
So… If 25,000 employees make a million shoes a month, that’s 12 million shoes a year. To make the 70 million Nike sells in the U.S would then require over 100,000 workers.
And shoes only make up a small fraction of Nike’s total revenue.
Looks like this sanity check matches my earlier numbers.
As a further sanity check, I found this company, which seems to be one of the large subcontractors of athletic shoe manufacturing. It has 140,000 employees, and makes 80 million shoes a year. This is also in the ballpark of my other sanity checks.
All of this points to my earlier figure of 650,000 people employed making Nike products being accurate, and not just the total number of people employed in the garment industry that has some percentage of product diverted to Nike.
I’m getting pretty tired of people totally misreading what I said, and then calling me stupid for having said something I didn’t say. Let me repeat for the hard of understanding:
Nike has gross revenue of 13.7 billion dollars. If in fact they have 650,000 workers, then the revenue per worker is $21,076. Now, given that these workers make on average less than $5000 per year, why is that such a hard number to believe?
Nike’s NET revenue is about 1.2 billion, or $1846 per worker, out of which they have to pay shareholders their dividends (about 300 million dollars), pay taxes, invest in new production, pay bonuses to staff or whatever. The point to this number is to show that on a per-worker basis, there just isn’t a lot of extra cash lying around. Certainly not enough to pay all their overseas workers a ‘living wage’.
Isn’t it funny how the two of us, who both come from very poor backgrounds, are being attacked by people claiming that we can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be poor? I can’t count the number of times someone has tried to shut down debate on me by claiming that I can’t possibly know what it’s like to be poor. And the irony is that often the person making that claim comes from a nice cushy background themselves, and THEY are the ones who don’t know what it’s like to be poor.
bdgr, what’s your financial background? Middle Class? Poor? I come from a single-parent family, and knew nothing but a minimum wage existence until I was in my 20’s. How about you? By the way, my mom was not a school teacher. She was a clerk in a grocery store. My brother has a grade 9 education. Only one of my four grandparents graduated from high school. So there’s no ‘educational advantage’ here.
You seem to be the only person here who thinks that Nike is claiming they employ 650,000 workers. Your quote (“approximately 650,000 workers are employed in Nike contracted factories around the globe”) does not claim what you think it claims. Yes, it’s an impressive number chosen to make them sound like a company that has a huge impact on the world. No, it is not a claim that they have 650,000 employees. Continuing to argue as if per-employee calculations based on this number are reasonable is making you look like you just can’t admit it when you make a mistake.
No, it’s not a false assumption; it is one factor of several that can make someone poor. If you were born into poverty, you do not assume you parent’s debts, but you do create your own. As for losing a middle class income, you can survive if you didn’t overextend your income to cover for a house or car (or both) that was beyond your means, otherwise you did become poor when your house forclosed (and the loan was larger than the value of the house) and the car(s) were repossessed. I saw that happen to a few neighbors when the recession hit in the early 90s. Financial planning and better spending habits could have saved that from happening.
Hault the destructive spin? No…just lessen it slightly. But coupled with fiscal responsibility, you could actually hault it. I never said that you can survive on NOTHING. But you can survive longer by not getting sucked into bad buying habits, regardless of your wages earned. I lived without a credit card until I needed one to rent a car for my honeymoon, and that bill was paid with the money I saved explicity for that endeavor. No stinking CC company was gonna get 19.99% interest off of me!
Also, like Shag and Sam Stone,I too came from poverty. Besides not wanting to be impovershed again, what else would give me the drive that I have today?
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but that’s not like most of the poor that I know. Many of them live where there are no pawn shops, rental stores and check cashing places. Lottery tickets are a new-fangled thing and considered “gambling.” Often they are widows would aren’t interested in “the newest flashy whatever.” They reuse aluminum foil and coffee filters and never throw out leftovers. Shoes get resoled. They save on electricity and wear extra clothes, often bought second hand, to keep warm. They fill up on starches, sometimes eating starch straight out of the box. Sometimes they skip medications to save money.
There isn’t just one kind of poor person or two kinds. Every poor person is an individual. Many could use financial training. Others could give money management lessons.
bdgr, I’d rather work in your place for a next-to-nothing salary than somewhere else that paid me well. Keep your heart alive. I predict that you will be a much loved and long remembered character in your community.
Varied. My parents never had a lot of money, but we didn’t starve either. Dad was a sharecroppers son who worked his way through college back when that was still possible. He was a preacher and became a psychologist but never made much money because he believed that helping the poor was more important than making money. He became a gradute school social work professor for the seminary and ran a counselling center for the poor. Whe wrote of few books, but always for charitable organizationss. He retired from there and taught gerentology in Kansas then retired a second time. He now does some guest lecturing.
Mom grew up on a small farm in Arkansas. She went to teach school, then college, then gradute school school music theory…again for the same seminary so she never made much money. She has a doctorate in music education.
After I got out of high school, I did some college (electronic engineering major) and then dropped out for reasons I wont go into…some of it bad choices, some of it outside of my control. I worked as a tech on xenix machines for tandy, did some free lance prgramming…worked as a bouncer and did security work for a friends security company for a while, was damn near homeless for a big part of time and found myself supporting a house full of people on no money and working security in exchange for rent. I was making 40 bucks a week at one point and supporting myself and four people…one of which blew his brains out in my kitchen because he couldnt find a job and didn’t want to be a burdon on anyone anymore. He had no family, no education or way to get one. We lived in a slum appartment and had no heat, no hot water, and no air conditioning in the summer.
After the suicide I got arrested for a crime that I didnt commit and therefore lost my security license so I lost my home. I found myself without a job or a home, and couldnt get one so I couch surfed and did what I could for a couple of years working short time odd jobs until finally I was aquitted in a trial that lasted a whopping 10 minutes before the judge told me I wasnt guilty and threw it out.
I worked as motorcycle mechanic for a while till that dried up, and then as a psych tech working with closed head injury patients (Got hired because I was big the patients were violent and I knew a little about psych) then moved on to working with adolescents and abused childre on a llocked inpatient psych ward.
I was laid off from that job the day I brought my son home from the hospital. I got the axe because the head nurse didn’t like me because he was a seminary dropout(and knew who my dad was). Wierd how that kind of thing happens when you dont have a union.
I moved to Utah because a friend said he could get me a job. He was wrong and I spent a year there working 70 hours a week or so and getting paid for 40 and slave labor wages as a computer tech/service manager for a computer store. I was on food stamps the whole time and my got really sick and we couldnt afford medicine for him…I had to go around begging for samples until we found a doctor who had some. Eventually I got back a big enough tax return to make the move back thanks to EIC and the help of a dear friend who road a bus from texas to help us move home.
We stayed with my parents for a while while I got a job as a computer tech first at a computer store, then at a software company…then as an admin for a very corrupt insurance company and finally I became a server admin for a large defence contrator supporting 10k or so users. Despite the fact that they often went to me when no one else could fix a problem and a folder full of comendations in personell when layoffs came I was out the door along with 30 or so other people. The company was making money, but with the tech job market the way it was around here they layed us off and made the poor souls who stayed work over (salary) to take up the slack . More money in someones pocket.
I couldnt find another job to save my life. I picked up few consulting gigs here and there…but mostly sold off stuff to survive. I had been in the process of opening a recording studio as a side business and selling off the equipment I’d collected over the years to this end kept the power turned on most of the time.
After finally realizing that I wasnt going to be getting another job in IT my folks took everything they had and went into business with me. Pretty much brings us up to date…I would consider myself poor now, but as the business grows that will change
So to summerize. Growing up, I was poor early on to barely middle class maybe later. After I left home I hit very poor and near homeless, and without occasional help from family I would have been in very bad shape indeed…possibly homeless more than once.
I saw first hand how bad things can get for people when they have no protection (like a union) and no safety net. I consider myself very lucky because I have seen first hand many people who did not have the advantages I have had.
Debt is not the problem. Few really poor people even get the chance to be in debt. If your born poor, your options in this world are often limited. Many people can work hard and catch a few breaks and overcome it. Many more cant. Especially with the state of public schools in a lot of poor areas.
sure…but what about the people who have finanaced a reasonable house and car, and find themselves with a 10th of the income they had…or less. Are you suggesting that no one should ever buy a car or a house unless they can pay cash? our economy would tank in hurry. even with decent financial planning losing your job for a couple of years is a very destructive experiance.
When you have no money there is not much in the way of buying habits to have.
SHOW ME WHERE. Give me some cites. I just did backflips to check those numbers half a dozen different ways, and they all come out in the same ballpark.
I’m willing to concede that I might be wrong, somehow, but so far no one has shown one iota of evidence that I am, and everything I can find or calculate pretty much agrees with that claim.
Listen to me. YOUR FUCKING CITE DOES NOT SAY NIKE HAS 650,000 EMPLOYEES. The only way to get into your “ballpark” is to grossly misinterpret their statement about their contracted factories, and you’ve already been corrected on this point.
“Nike employs approximately 26,000 people worldwide. In addition, approximately 650,000 workers are employed in Nike contracted factories around the globe.” This clearly means Nike employs nowhere near 650,000 people. In post 167, you almost seemed to grasp this point when you said that it’s misleading for them to mention it on their web site (in fact, it is only misleading if you’re really not paying attention or have your head up your ass).
The maddening thing is that I actually agree with you on your primary point: Nike probably doesn’t have the money (or control) to make sure all the factory workers get a “living wage”, nor does our concept of a living wage even necessarily have any relevancy in bangladesh. But it’s baffling to me that you can continue to assert that nobody has refuted your claim that Nike has 650,000 employees, and you continue using it as the basis for “back of the envelope” calculations.
At 650,000 that would be 108 pair of shoes a year per person per year…about So what, it takes three days for each employee to make a pair of shoes? Ok…a few jackets thrown in…a day to make each shoe and a day to make a jacket. I cant see that happening. The process uses a lot of automation…its not like they are hand making these things.
I already posted a link to a manufacturing company that boasts the ability to make 80 million shoes a year, and employs 140,000 people to do it.
Nike sells 70 million shoes just in the U.S., and the U.S. accounts for less than half of Nike’s shoe sales, and shoe sales only make up about half of Nike’s revenue.
There seems to be a fallacy here that there is support for your argument just because there happen to be poor people and those people have had a tough time of it. I didn’t grow up poor so I suppose you can take or leave my opinion.
Part of having a successful economy is actually having businesses in that economy. I’ve seen what happens to communities where it is no longer profitable for the company to continue doing business there. Unions are a big reason why most of our steel comes from somewhere else. Unions drove up wages so much that the companies were no longer competitive.
**Shagnasty’s ** philosophy might be a bit harsh, but I’m curious how bdgr would feel if his business was threatened? I’m sure he’d say that he would work with his employees and be generous and everything and I’m sure he would. But what happens when your generosity isn’t enough and they threaten to unionize?
The employees don’t care about you and your business. They care about getting paid and receiving benefits and as far as they are concerned, you have infinitely deep pockets. If you go out of business, they’ll bitch and moan about layoffs or whatever. Eventually they’ll just go find some other job but you’re business that you built from nothing will have been destroyed.
Guys. Nike employs 26,000 people. Those other half million people belong to their outsourced factories, suppliers, distributors, vendors, and other third parties.