Working Hard, Working Poor by Fields Gary S

Working Hard, Working Poor by Fields Gary S

Author:Fields, Gary S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Global Journy
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2012-07-15T16:00:00+00:00


CONSUMER MOVEMENTS AND CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

You have read throughout this book that a good way to understand what private companies do is to see them as trying to maximize profits. If this is the reality, it follows that those who wish to harness the energies of private companies in the fight against global poverty must support those activities of companies that contribute to poverty reduction and try to change those activities of companies that work against this objective. At times, this means working to change what is in companies’ profit-maximizing interests to do. Let us see how the consumer and corporate social responsibility movements have made a difference.

A highly visible organization on campuses around the United States is United Students against Sweatshops. Students have organized anti-sweat-shop campaigns, mandating that the clothes bearing their collegiate logos be manufactured under fair and ethical conditions.

In 2006, more than 200,000 University of California (UC) students committed to purchasing clothing bearing UC campus logos only from factories that pay a living wage, follow adequate labor standards, and allow workers to form independent unions or other worker-sponsored organizations. In response to such pressure, Nike examined the working and environmental conditions in 569 factories around the world that produce the company’s apparel, equipment, and footwear. It then issued a Corporate Responsibility Report criticizing its own supply chain conditions and pledging to improve conditions.32 Deciding that Nike hadn’t upgraded factory conditions sufficiently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison discontinued its relationship with Nike in 2010.

Closer to home for me, in February 2009, Cornell University terminated Russell Athletics as a supplier of Cornell merchandise. An investigation conducted by the Fair Labor Association and the Workers’ Rights Consortium found that Jerzees de Honduras, a Honduran textile factory owned by Russell Athletics, had shut its doors rather than accede to workers’ demands to form a union. As a university spokesman stated, “Cornell is committed to respecting the rights of workers around the world, and we expect the companies that are licensed to produce Cornell apparel to share that commitment.”33

To the extent that such consumer movements are important, they affect companies’ enlightened self-interest. If consumers can credibly threaten to take their business elsewhere, as the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, and Cornell did, companies may realize that their brand is at risk34 and respond by upgrading conditions of employment—in effect, doing well by doing good.35

For the workers of Honduras, the Russell story has a happy ending. In November 2009, after more than one hundred universities including Cornell severed their contracts, the company agreed to rehire 1,200 Honduran workers. And pressure from university students helped in the case of Nike too: in August 2010, Nike set up a $1.5 million relief fund, job training programs, and paid health care for workers who had been laid off from Nike subcontractors Hugger de Honduras and Vision Tex. A novel feature of this agreement is that it marks the first time a major corporation accepted responsibility for misconduct by a subcontractor.36

Most recently, a garment manufacturer in



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