Just Stop It It’s interesting that Nike, in spite of pledging to improve working conditions in Asian factories, only reacts when they’re caught in the act (this time, by the BBC). Nike’s “Transparency 101” program finally pledges to publish their PriceWaterhouseCoopers monitoring reports, but only the reports from South America are online. Not that it matters, since PWC is following Nike’s guidelines and not international labor guidelines, as this analysis from Dara O’Rouke, an MIT professor shows. The report shows how PWC finds minor violations at ignores:
Also see reports from folks who tried living in Jakarta on Nike-level wages.
Essentially, Nike is unwilling to proactively solve this problem, because that would be both unprofitable and bad public relations. They do just enough fixing and explaining to make their corruption look accidental. Then they bombard us with advertising that sell themselves as cool, betting correctly that the mass market would rather be hip than conscientious.