Nike has been the target of recent campus protesters alleging the company does not meet acceptable labor standards. A few University students even go as far as saying that Nike CEO Phil Knight’s decision to halt future donations to the school is proof that there are Nike sweatshops.
The company, however, is trying to portray a different picture.
University senior Louis Capobianco, one of 16 students selected from across the country to monitor international factories that produce collegiate apparel, described his experience in Mexico as very positive.
“It was definitely a worthwhile experience,” said Capobianco, a political science major.
Through an application and interview process last December, Capobianco was selected to represent the University and the United States as an investigator of labor standards in Mexican factories. A total of 32 factories in North America, Latin America and Asia were audited by university students who filed a report for Nike.
The merits of this program are extremely valuable, said Dusty Kidd, Nike’s director of labor practices.
“The students told us we can definitely improve and we’re doing that right away,” Kidd said.
While many people have knowledge about workers’ conditions in Nike factories, Capobianco said most have a negative perspective. Based on what he experienced in two Mexican factories, however, Capobianco said that the labor violations were minimal.
“I hope that (the report) informs a lot of people about both sides of the issue,” Capobianco said. “I feel that people know a lot about the negatives. We want to let people know that Nike is rectifying the problems.”
According to the students’ report — available at www.
nikebiz.com/labor/index.shtml — the Mexico factories are “up to par with health and safety standards both locally and as written by Nike. In the past, Nike has been accused of placing workers in environments that were toxic in air quality and exposed them to dangerous chemicals. Overall, the assessment of safety standards was of a positive nature.”
There were some conditions that should be improved upon immediately, Capobianco said. For example, in one factory that he visited, workers put in a 10-hour day with only a half-hour lunch break, which is legal under Mexican law. But such rigorous work days are not in Nike’s best interest, Capobianco said.
At most of the factories, students reported that workers’ compensation was not a problem. Some overtime grievances were filed, though, and need to be looked at by Nike management, according to the report.
“Factories are a fact of the global economy whether we like it or not,” Capobianco said. “We have to accept that and try to make them better.”
The students recommended that the factories provide workers with a better education and better information regarding grievance procedures and the Nike Code of Conduct.
The students “have taught us a great deal,” Kidd said. “We take their observations and recommendations very seriously and commit to report back in three months what we and the factories have accomplished.”
Capobianco and the other students went through three days of training to prepare for their visits. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the Nike factory auditing team, trained the students for 10 hours a day.
“The students challenged Nike and themselves and were wonderful,” said St. John’s University Father James Maher, who coordinated the student selection and training. “We hope this process of independent monitoring will move the issue forward … beyond inflammatory rhetoric, toward the global realization of human dignity in the workplace.”