(And my apologies for the gender bias in the above post.)
Yeah, you’re right. In order to force Wal-Mart to accept its responsibilities to its workers, all food stamp benefits received by their employees should be cut off immediately.
No, they should be charged to Walmart and taken out of their profits.
BTW,
Dictionary definition of living wage:
living wage
n.
A wage sufficient to provide minimally satisfactory living conditions.
Going to apply that to all companies who have one or more employees on food stamps? Why not just double or treble the minimum wage? Wouldn’t either plan prompt Wal-Mart (and any other company with lots of low-paid workers) to engage in major layoffs?
I see a couple of significant issues with your analysis Sam. Two basic smell tests it doesn’t pass. I’ll show you the tests and then go into why I think they failed it. First test, 650,000 is a LOT of people. That’s a stupidly huge number of employees for a company, virtually ANY company. Wal-Mart employs ~1.2 million. You’re saying Nike has about half as many employees as Wal-Mart? Their production must be damn low or they’d produce far more than the market demands per year. Let’s say they can make 1 pair of shoes per hour. Let’s also say they work European or even less hours per week. Say a five day work-week at seven hours per day with eight weeks off per year. That’s 650,000 * 7 * 5 * 44 = 1,001,000,000 pairs per year. The US athletic shoe market is a $13 billion-per-year industry that sells more than 350 million pairs of sports shoes annually. Hmm, a company with ~10% of the market in dollars produces nearly three times the total number of pairs sold per year. Something smells here.
Second smell test. Your number for net revenue/worker was “about $1,846 per employee” as a maximum because it doesn’t take into account the wages of Nike’s 26,000 regular employees or other expenses such as debt. According to the CIA World FactbookGDP - per capita: purchasing power parity - $5,600 (2004 est.) Nike not only employs scads of people in Asia, but that it pays them absolute crap even in when measured by the local scale. In fact, there aren’t many local scales on which this pay WOULDN’T be crap.
Nope, your analysis doesn’t work, here’s my thought as to why.
You made an assumption without supporting evidence. You are assuming those 650,000 employees in the non-US factories Nike has contracts with do work exclusively for Nike and no other companies have contracts with them to produce non-Nike goods. I find it difficult to believe we have such a large market for Nike shoes that it takes over half a million workers full-time to fill it. I strongly suspect those “contracted” textile mills have other clients they produce goods for. In fact, I found a data point which seems to indicate that at least some of those factories produce both Nike and Puma goods. ["On April 6th, 2005, one week prior to the release of Nike’s 2004 Corporate Responsibility Report, a respected labor rights group in Indonesian reported that workers at a Nike contract factory were paid wages that were extremely far below the legal minimum wage, violating both Indonesian labor law and Nike’s own Code of Conduct.
FNPBI reported that workers at the factory, Didachi Makmur Abadi, owned by South Korean investors had gone on strike to protest the starvation wages. The workers were producing 40 pairs of shoes per hour for the Nike **and Puma corporations. **"](http://www.educatingforjustice.org/stopnikesweatshops.htm) Bold added.
I’m betting more than Nike and Puma use those textile mills and that they make more than shoes in many of those factories. At 40 pair per hour with 650,000 employees working 7 hrs a day, 5 days a week, 44 weeks a year they would produce 40 * 650,000 * 7 * 5 * 44 = 40,040,000,000 pairs of Nike shoes. The US Census Bureau’s World Population Clock says “the total population of the World, projected to 12/28/05 at 07:14 GMT (EST+5) is 6,487,824,373”. So in 2004, following your assumptions as to what those 650,000 workers were doing with their days, bolstered by additional data I found, it looks like Nike produced enough shoes in 2004 for every man woman and child on the planet to have ~ 6 pair of Nike shoes.
Enjoy,
Steven
Either or. Works for me. Min wage should be about 10 bucks an hour (some say 14) if adjusted for inflation. If businesses were able to survive back in the 70’s paying people that much, they should be able to now. As Mr Mudd put it so well, its a feedback loop. Walmart puts everyone out of business that pays a living wage, hires their employees at welfare wages expecting the goverment to pick up part of their payroll for them (corporate welfare) and then those people have no money to shop anywhere but walmart and other stores that pay their employees walmart wages. It brings the whole economy down and it will keep going down until we collapse.
No, it would make them raise wages and raise prices a little so the little guys with a conscience would have a snow balls chance in hell of competeing with them. Win-Win.
I’m going by Nike’s own corporate information sheet, which says:
Later, under ‘Asia-Pacific’ it says:
Now, if that means “Nike employs people from factories that have half a million workers, but we only employ a fraction of those, and the rest work for other companies”, it’s pretty damned misleading.
Are you sure you don’t want to throw a few more unwarranted assumptions in there? I have no idea how many man-hours each shoe takes to make. Also, are you forgetting that Nike makes golf clubs, sport balls, eyewear, timepieces, electronic media devices, skates, bats, gloves, and other equipment designed for sports, swimwear, cycling apparel, children’s clothing, school supplies and eyewear?
Your first smell test has giant holes in it.
Okay, now you lost me. What does the PPP of Chinese workers have to do with anything? And I think you missed the point of the $1846 per worker. That’s not how much revenue they generated - they generated almost 10 times that much. That’s how much NET revenue they generated, AFTER their salaries were paid and all other expenses in the manufacturing and selling of goods is paid.
And Vietnam, where some of these workers are, has a PPP of $2700, and Indonesia, where a lot of workers are, $3500. By the way, this is up dramatically from a few years ago, when the PPP in Vietnam was only about $900. Vietnam has been seeing growth rates of 7-9% for the last decade. You know why? Because the government is actively courting companies like Nike, and the investment in infrastructure occuring due to those factories being built there has driven up productivity.
So, my ‘assumption’ is wrong, even though it’s backed by every cite I could find, and the basis of your deciding I’m wrong is what you ‘suspect’ it. Is that correct?
Again, what are you betting this on? There’s no evidence in this article that Nike is over-stating the number of employees it has. And why should it? I’ve looked through about a dozen newspaper articles on Nike tonight, and every one of them implies or directly says that Nike has the number of contract employees I said it did.
Man, that’s a lot of shoes. Too bad you forgot about all the other stuff Nike makes, or that would be more impressive. Unless your estimate of 40 shoes per hour is accurate across all factories, of course. If you don’t count all the employees who work for nike but don’t actually make the shoes. You know, truck drivers, janitors, secretaries, machine repairs, warehousing, shipping, packaging, marketing, sales…
When come back, bring actual data and not assumptions and suspicions backed by GIGO math.
It doesn’t mean that.
What’s astonishing is that you’re so easily misled into thinking that it means anything like Nike employing over half a million people.
Look, right here in Canada, The Incredible Clothing Company is a Nike-contracted factory. They employ several hundred people.
That does not mean that those several hundred people are producing Nike gear every time they go to work. Like other Nike-contracted factories, only a small portion of their product is produced for Nike. The rest is for other clients.
Therefore, it makes no sense to talk about distributing Nike’s profits amongst them as if you were talking about salaried Nike employees.
Nike has never overstated its employees. They are quite clear:
You are the only one who has overstated Nike’s employees.
Nike is a client of those contract factories – they do not provide full-time employment to the workers in them, and you can’t pretend to extrapolate the potential value of the labour derived from them without knowing how much actual work is done for Nike.
Please.
Sam Stone
I reckon you should comment upon UK child labour laws until you know what you are actually talking about.
Industry demand for child labour, and thus low wages, has always existed in the UK and still does, there still remains an agency that is tasked to ensure that the strict laws regarding hours and type of work are not breached.
Even with the presence of this agency, the demand is still there and the law has to be enforced.
Without enforcement, child labour would explode as bad employers seek to find the lowest cost for their enterprise.
The 1833 factories act outlawed child labour below the age of 9, but it was the education act that soon followed that compelled all parents to send their children to school that actually had the biggest impact.
Since those days, the lower age for child labour has steadily increased, and now its at 16 years of age for full time workers.
I distinctly remember when 14 was the age for full time workers, and again it was the education act that compelled children to stay at school to 16 that ended that practice.
Inasmuch as you say that child labour in the UK died a natural death, nothing coulbe be further from the truth, it had to be legislated and employers made the same arguments about families needing the income of their offspring to survive(conveniently ignoring the fact that it was the poverty wages paid to their parents that drove children to work in the first place)
I’ve included a link for you, and its pretty simple stuff but is informative.
http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/snapshots/snapshot13/snapshot13.htm
The use of child labour has its roots in poverty, in undercutting costs and is symptomatic of a completely uncontrolled capitalist society where the workforce is not organised in a way to protect themselves from its depradations.
Unions can and do make efforts to educate their membership, by educate I mean in the formal academic sense of the word, far from being stuck in some golden era of economic boom where labour is in short supply, most unions seek to bring on and aid those who wish to further themselves both proffessionally and in whole life work/life balance too.
Why should unions not make representations to the legislators ?
Without such representations, work would be far more dnagerous than it is today, no matter what the union knockers think, there is a huge imbalance between the economic muscle of the enterprise and the individual, to such an extent that this is recognised in UK employment law - I could dig out the cite from my books on health and safety and the various quotes, or you could accept this at my word, doesn’t matter either way to me.
Is there a middle here somewhere? There is corruption on the part of some labour unions and some corporations. Laws and law enforcement are needed in order to regulate them.
Few companies really want full competition. They only want a “free market” to the extent that it lets them take control of things to their own advantage.
Certain things should be socialised (meaning “tax-supported services provided by the government”). These include law enforcement, emergency services, certain infrastructure (roads, bridges, and public transportation). I would argue that health care insurance, unemployment insurance, and (to a lesser extent) pensions should also be socialised. This would benefit workers and employers and competition.
The corporate structure essentially ensures that there are no real owners in many commercial organisations. The people who are owners on paper – the stockholders – often have little influence on how their property is used. The management – often unanswerable to anyone – is in the position of having absolute control and incentivised to loot all they can while placating the shareholders with high stock prices. Such incentives lead to decisions that achieve short-term goals but long-term disasters.
On owners: Once you require the labour of another human being’s in order to make your operation work, on a moral and ethical level, it’s less yours than it used to be. An owner might be contributing capital, but workers are contributing their time, in essence, their lives. Each day worked is one day closer to death. That’s a sacrifice that should be respected equally with the contribution of capital to a commercial concern.
That is why they are paid. Slavery is frowned upon these days. It is a mutual agreement the same way you might pay a lawyer to spend a day drafting a will for you. Do you start to develop paternalistic feelings for that lawyer at the end of the day?
As opposed to days off when this isn’t the case? That is just life and has nothing to do with any employment.
You act as if there’s some obvious dividing line between slavery and not-slavery. If you got paid a penny a day, would that be not-slavery? I wouldn’t think so. But it’s not obvious where the line is to be drawn. This is a standard that has to be set on a societal level. It’s not just up to an individual employer to say “This is it; I’ve done enough.” It’s up to society to say that a day’s work is worth at least this much cash, this much security, this much right to petition for redress of grievances, etc.
When everyone can get paid at the level of a lawyers’ fee then we have something to talk about here. Most people have to take whatever jobs they can get (like $2/hour temp jobs). It would be of no use to society for everyone to be trained as lawyers. Someone has to be a temp. Someone has to work as a retail clerk. Someone has to work as an unskilled labourer. Therefore, the temp should be given some tools to ensure fair compensation and reasonable security. Sure, those are not easily defined standards, but the employer on his own shouldn’t be allowed to decide.
On those days you get to decide what to do with your time. When you hand that right over to your employer, I believe it’s worth far more than just one day’s pay. I think an employer is also obligating himself to a level of fair dealing and joint interest in the the concern. And that means a level of compensation that is based on just more than “I could get someone else to do this for less.”
There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.
-Henry Ford
If we had more more employers who understood that statement, we would have less need for unions and a stronger economy.
I would suggest that you learn a little something about Henry Ford and American history before you post something like that. It makes you look like an uneducated schmuck. Informed people will know what I am talking about. I will let you look up it up.
Oh I know about Ford and American history. I said if more people understood the statement, not if more people emulated the man. Work on your reading comprehension.
You know, I spent more time this morning trying to find other cites about how many employees make Nike products. EVERY cite I’ve been able to find backs up my numbers. Yes, it’s clear that these are subcontracted factories, but it’s not clear at all that Nike products are only a small part of what they do. One cite says that if Nike left Asia, 350,000 people would lose their jobs - and it was dated 1999. Another cite says, “Nike employs hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.”
First of all, it’s nonsensical to talk about Nike’s 26,000 salaried employees, since no one is claiming that they are working in sweatshops. They’re not. That 26,000 is largely employed in western countries, and they are mostly white collar workers. Management, advertising, distribution, clerical, engineering, design, etc. It’s the workers in the factories we are talking about them, and I maintain that there are hundreds of thousands of them, because everything I can find says that’s how many there are.
If you don’t agree with that number, fine. Put up your own, and back it up with cites.
And you can, of course, provide cites that show how much factory capacity is dedicated to Nike products as opposed to others, since it’s your assertion that Niuke’s own web site is misleading in stating the number of people working for it.
Just for yucks, and since I’m bored, here are some cites I just hit (most of these very anti-Nike):
Nike Workers In Indonesia Protest Production Cutbacks
4,000 workers, just to make athletic bags. Not exactly the main line of Nike products.
Note that you can’t have it both ways. If these aren’t ‘really’ Nike workers, and are just workers in an independent factory that makes all kinds of stuff, then why exactly is Nike responsible for their working conditions? On the other hand, if these are workers that are employed specifically to make Nike products, then my original claim of 650,000 employees worldwide is correct.
Your turn. Provide some cites refuting those numbers.
Do the characters in your dreams end each workday by joining hands and singing “Imagine”, too? You’re talking about using economic penalties to enforce your code of morality. No, thanks.
Nothing to do with morality, but survival of this country. As wages get dragged down our deficiet gets more and more bloated. More people move from working full time and supporting themselves to working full time and going on welfare. How long do you think we can continue this nonsense?
I would love a raise in min wage. It would mean so much more business for me, at least in my retail shop. People who come in a buy a cup of coffee might be able to afford pie too. It sad when people who used to make a decent wage have to run a tab till payday to buy freakin coffee. Plus, it would make my competitors pay their employees more so I wouldnt be at such a disadvantage. Raise it high enough and I could pay my workers more. I want ever one of my workers to be making more money, but its impossible when I have to compete with people who pay min wage.
Some other factors to consider:
I think a lot of folks here are forgetting that a contracted company (and its employees) are not totally under the control of Nike. Even if Nike, in good conscious, doubled the contract price for their production of shoes (or any other Nike product), and tells the executives of that contract company to double the wages of each employee, do you really think they can force an overseas company to comply…contract or not? Some overseas companies have little or no regualtion like we have here, so “cooking the books” is definitely plausible to show Nike that the contracting company that they did double the wages when they actually didn’t. In that case, the contracting companies should have a share in the blame.
Another thing: Some of these contract companies probably produce for other apparel companies, and some from other countries. Now I am just guessing here, but maybe Nike might actually pay more in contracts than some of these other companies, which makes Nike a better contract than these other companies? What looks deplorable from our POV, might look great from the contracting companies’ POV? If Nike didn’t pay enough, wouldn’t they have trouble competing for these contracts?
On the other hand, as long as the wage earners receive increases over the years and are actually improving (but obviously not as fast as everyone here desires), would it actually be better (for these wage earners) if Nike decided to pull out of the foreign contracts and produce domestically?
I’m not asserting that this is true, but I am wondering if that (either one or both) might be the case.