... cite? My search found that Nike was guilty of breaking minimum wage laws and even child labor laws.
I'm not finding anything right off.
Part of Nike's problem on wages is that it has run at least three different systems for manufacturing: their own plants, directly contracted plants, and secondary contracted plants.
The secondary contracted have been a pain in the ass to them all along because it's kind of like the old Roman tax-farming system: they pay for a contract for making X pairs of shoes, and the outfit they contract with tries to squeeze out as much profit as they can when they contract with actual factories, and the factory owners squeeze out everything they can. It's a stupid system (as a number of us at OSU and U of O told Phil Knight once), because there's no incentive at all along the way to do anything but squeeze by cutting costs and corners. That's where most of the problems have been; IIRC, right around the turn of the millennium, Knight promised to end all secondary contracting because they had no control over the manufacturing process at all.
Theoretically the directly contracted plants shouldn't have been a problem, because there's direct Nike supervision. I don't know if it was naivete or what, though, but until the late 90s Nike did very little of that supervision, and trusted the local owners and managers in southeast Asia. That was a big issue with some protests when I was at OSU, which included some student athletes threatening to make public service announcements telling people to not buy Nike (when that came also from Knight's alma mater, U of O, he sudden;y decided there was a need for hands-on oversight... we assumed he meant he'd go over, but I don't know if he did). I do remember a statement sent out to all us obnoxious "we'll buy elsewhere" types saying they'd amended all those contracts, as of renewal dates, so the minimum wage would be at least $1/hr. (and we sent some rather nasty letters back to Knight, suggesting he could get action faster than that by "friendly" contract upgrades, renegotiated to give the factory owners improved terms in exchange for higher wages).
I'm not aware there's ever been a problem at factories Nike actually owns/owned. Those have had American management. But IIRC the figures from when I was at OSU, out of hundreds of factories, Nike only actually owned less than a score -- seems rather strange, to me; if I owned a company, I'd want to own my own factories (the only thing I could figure was that in order to expand rapidly, they grabbed at whatever capacity they could find).
In a way, as Knight admitted in a statement back when I was part of being a thorn in his side, there have been two Nikes: the American-managed company with a liberal management drawn heavily from U of O, and the foreign-managed mess of poorly- to non-supervised facilities. He pledged to make it just one Nike... I haven't paid attention to how he's done on that. I do remember trying to grasp that in Nike-owned factories they were paying for an hour what in some of the others they were paying for an entire day -- often a ten hour day.
BTW -- and I don't have a source at hand for this; sorry -- in the last few years, Nike and others have been under pressure from the United States to NOT improve the conditions.
Culprit: Walmart.
