On Thursday, the University announced a partnership with Nike to outfit all of Princeton's varsity athletes with the swoosh. Senior Associate Director of Athletics Jaime Zaninovich gushed that not only would the deal equip the University's athletes with gear of the highest quality, but also that Nike would be the "most appropriate partner" for Princeton because of its membership in the Fair Labor Association (FLA).
Nike is not an appropriate partner for Princeton. The company's long and well-documented history of mistreating its employees includes repeated incidences of denying workers the right to organize, failing to pay wages owed, failing to pay overtime wages and firing workers who protest poor working conditions. Frequently the object of international scrutiny, the company is by now quick to respond to media criticism of unfair conditions in its factories. Once the cameras turn away, however, the company's next step — as exemplified by its actions at the BJ&B Factory in the Dominican Republic — is often to shut down all operations at factories where employees have claimed their basic rights as workers.
Despite all of this and other evidence to the contrary, Princeton tells us that Nike makes an "appropriate partner" because of its membership in the FLA. This claim doesn't hold water. The makeup of the FLA's leadership precludes it from ever making unbiased judgments on working conditions in the factories where apparel for Princeton and other universities is manufactured. The FLA's board of directors does include representatives from NGOs and universities, but representatives from the apparel industry retain veto power over any of their proposed initiatives. The handful of western NGOs that do sit on the board are groups like the National Consumers' League — not worker rights organizations or worker representatives by any stretch of the imagination. The standards with which the FLA accredits apparel manufacturers were drawn up by apparel manufacturers themselves.
The inherent inability of the FLA to be a truly independent monitor of the apparel industry means that we have to find another way to protect the rights of the men and women who stitch together our sweatshirts and logo caps. Fortunately, there is an independent organization which rigorously investigates claims of abusive employment practices: the Worker Rights Consortium (WRC). One hundred and fifty-eight U.S. colleges and universities are affiliated with the WRC including Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Brown and Cornell. By working with local NGOs that empower workers to report instances of abuse, the WRC performs an independent auditing function that the FLA does not.
It's not surprising that the WRC regularly uncovers instances of abuse which pass through the FLA's filters. In 2001 at Nike's Kukdong factory in Puebla, Mexico, hundreds of workers staging a nonviolent strike were first brutalized by riot police and then, if they were identified as having participated in the strike, prevented from returning to work. The WRC conducted scores of interviews with the locked-out workers and discovered a lengthy pattern of minimum wage violations and other conditions which Nike's chosen auditor, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, had failed to uncover in its own investigation months before. The tendency of auditors, who rely on the continued patronage of the apparel manufacturers, to tone down bad news for their clients isn't shocking to us any more, but it should be more than enough reason for Princeton to endorse a transparent monitoring process which isn't funded by the apparel companies themselves.
Membership in the WRC would cost Princeton one percent of its licensing revenues and would be capped at $50,000 per year. Taking into account the frightening consequences for workers when monitoring of working conditions is lax, this seems like a small price. Those who outfit us in orange and black will pay dearly if we refuse. Thomas Bohnett is a Wilson School major from Princeton Junction. He can be reached at tbohnett@princeton.edu.
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