Nike:Sweating Out Fashion

I'm currently making a website about how Nike used sweatshops up until the 1990's. I felt this was a great topic for my second major project in one of my classes because I want to describe in full how Nike has been, for decades, producing major sweatshop factories in foreign third world countries. Sweatshops have been known for their dangerous environments for workers. These factories usually have fast moving open machinery, extreme temperatures, and ridiculous lengths of working hours. Nike had originally began sweatshop operations in countries such as South Korea and Taiwan, but after stricter labor laws were enforced they looked for other foreign third world countries to choose from. For many years Nike denied any accusations of running sweatshops in countries such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and China. Nike singled these countries out because of very cheap labor and laws that prevented workers from forming a union. Without these unions, Nike factory operators could set the wages they paid the workers which sometimes were only 70% of the workers basic living needs. No unions also ment that they were free to hire child labor and could set the amount of hours that the workers had to work, often exceeding 60 hour work weeks. Though Nike was wrong for what they had done to these workers for many decades, Nike is one of the few major shoe companies that has taken responsibility for sweatshop labor. To take action against the use of sweatshops, Nike as audited roughly 600 of its factories since 2002 to make sure they are not promoting illegal labor. If these companies don't meet the required score after they are audited, Nike threatens to shut-down the plants.