[PEN-L:11028] Nike hullaballoo in Vietnam

[jlgulick@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Pen-L'ers,

What do you make of the latest hullaballoo surrounding Nike's labor
practices in Vietnam, and the "independent" Andrew Young-headed
inspection team which vindicated Nike's "clean and modern" factories in
Vietnam ?

My two cents: On the one hand, Young was deliberately recruited by
Nike (but hired as an "independent" consultant) to give Nike a clear
bill of health, his visit was announced far in advance, and he was
accompanied on his "tour" by a Nike p.r. person. So obviously he wasn't
about to witness any of the abusive shopfloor practices (like physical
harrassment, and making workers run laps) routinely employed by
Korean and Taiwanese managers in the assembly plants of Nike and its
subcontractors. And Nike's full-page ad in the _San Jose Mercury News_,
basically amounting to "we're doing well, but could do better" was
unctuous transnational corporate propaganda.

On the other hand, I can hear the "anti-globalization" populist left
denouncing Nike's claims that they pay more than the prevailing wage
in manufacturing as untrue, when in fact I don't doubt that it is true,
given that Nike can offer premium "efficiency wages" and super-exploit
young women (soon discarding them) at the same time. Once again I fear
that the "anti-globalization" populist left which is calling for a boycott
is falling prey to targetting a specific very powerful corporate actor
instead of capital itself. (Not that I am necessarily opposed to a Nike
boycott -- given its stupendous cultural hegemony the world over, it might
offer educational spillover into a critique and action against "the
system"). But the populist left really weakens its cause when it focuses
on wages and working conditions (b/c many workers in the plants, even
away from managerial oversight or conditions of suspicion, will probably
tell you that given the options, wages and conditions aren't that bad).
It's easy for Nike and its p.r. people to counterattack on this front.
One of the main points of a critique should be the overall distorting
effects it has on an economys such as Vietnam's, making it more (for lack
of a more sophisticated analysis) "dependent" on external markets,
foreign investors, local capitalists, and skewing the allocation of
national resources.

I find it interesting (and wonder whether I have the proper information)
that the Vietnamese CP is supposedly encouraging workers in the Nike
and Nike subcontractor plants to assert their demands and wage strikes
(at least those officially approved by the CP trade union federation
leadership, there also have been a lot of unsanctioned wildcats). Is
this just a way for the Vietnamese CP to take some of the heat off its
back as it selectively pushes forward re-entry into the world market,
or does Vietnam offer a substantively different model of "state capitalism"
(or "market socialism w/_x_ characteristics") than does China ?

Interested,

John Gulick
Sociology Graduate Program
UC-Santa Cruz