TO THE EDITORS:

The title of Assaf Sagiv’s defense of globalization, “Just Do It,” is taken, of course, from Nike’s successful ad campaign. Yet from the standpoint of traditional Jewish ethics, Nike’s conduct points to a number of troubling moral issues related to globalization.

For example, the policy of “chasing after the cheapest labor supply” does terrible injustice to the divine blessing to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it,” known as kibush (Genesis 1:28). In the thinking of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, kibush is a mandate calling for man’s self-actualization as a creative being. He fulfills this mandate by breaking away from a state of dependency and using the power and freedom thus obtained to discharge his responsibilities to both God and fellow man. Kibush is achieved by the fulfillment of ordinary activities undertaken in pursuit of a livelihood, accompanied by a sense of duty and responsibility to God and fellow man alike.

But if workers receive less than subsistence earnings and are abused in various ways, then the pursuit of a livelihood is accompanied by a deteriorating sense of responsibility toward one’s fellow man. This was the case with Nike, which moved its operations from the United States to Taiwan and then South Korea when its American workers organized to demand reasonable wages. When democracy took hold in Taiwan and South Korea, however, Nike moved production again, this time to China, Indonesia, and Vietnam, where governments violently suppress workers’ rights. Economic activity in this case is certainly devoid of any sense of duty and responsibility.

Furthermore, in some countries local labor laws, even on paper, do not measure up to the most minimal internationally agreed-upon standards. In Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, several core labor conventions of the International Labor Organization have gone unratified, including the right to organize. Minimum wages in these countries are well below the poverty line. Not surprisingly, the kibush mandate gets its severest thrashing when the profit motive drives companies to relocate to these countries.

A case in point is the study by economist Linda Lim, whom Sagiv quotes. During her visit to Vietnam in 2002, she found that workers at the Nike factory there earned only $670 a year. By Western standards, this is an appalling sum. But Sagiv urges us to consider that the minimum annual wage in Vietnam at the time was a mere $134. In other words, Nike workers in Vietnam were earning five times the minimum wage.

I question very much Sagiv’s sanguine interpretation of this data. If workers at Nike are really so much better off than their local counterparts, why aren’t unskilled workers camping out outside Nike headquarters in the hope of getting hired? The answer is that unskilled workers in sweatshops suffer terrible abuses. Nike’s own record is a case in point: The company voluntarily agreed to an industry-wide agreement known as the Workplace Code of Conduct and hired former UN ambassador Andrew Young to review its implementation. Young’s conclusion was that it was his “sincere belief” that “Nike [was] doing a good job in the application of its Code of Conduct.” Nevertheless, Young himself criticized the company for not having in place some kind of third-party monitoring. Criticism of the Young Report was widespread for its failure to pick up on such issues as poverty-level wages, excessive overtime, minimum-wage violations, corporal punishment, and a militaristic management style to control workers.

It is no doubt true that when companies such as Nike set up operations in places like Vietnam, they have a substantial impact on increased GDP in the host country. But what about the plight of the downtrodden, unskilled workers they hire? To be sure, since 1992 Nike has voluntarily adopted “codes of conduct,” the key provisions of which include a maximum of sixty work hours per week; at least one day off in seven; minimum wages; zero-tolerance of corporal punishment and abuse; and a minimum worker’s age of fifteen. Yet these high-sounding principles can easily become a sham unless an independent audit system is in place to insure their enforcement. Only when adequate enforcement procedures are in place will Nike’s favorable impact on the aggregate level of the host country’s output combine with a meaningful effort to dignify the downtrodden workers it employs.

Aaron Levine
Yeshiva University
New York

ASSAF SAGIV RESPONDS:

Many thanks to Matthew Mausner and Aaron Levine for their considered comments. Mausner dismisses my essay as “propaganda” that distorts the globalization debate, and claims that I ignored certain facts that would shed a different light on the subject. He claims, for example, that global “free trade” is unfair to developing countries because it floods their markets with subsidized agricultural produce from the affluent West, which leads to local farmers being excluded from the market. This results in the bankruptcy of the third world agricultural sector and the descent of the population traditionally engaged in farming into destitution.

There is a grain of truth in the picture he paints, but he is mistaken in concluding that my article ignored the problem. True, the protectionist agricultural policy of the economic powers—the United States and the European Union—may well be the antithesis of the spirit of fairness of free-trade economics. However, the protests of the Seattle demonstrators and their like are often misdirected. As I pointed out, the agency charged with controlling the global markets and the main target of their assaults, the World Trade Organization, does not condone this crass violation of the rules, and on various occasions has taken a stand against it. Only last September, for instance, in response to an appeal by Brazil and a number of African countries, the organization decided that the American policy of subsidizing its cotton sector, thus causing world markets to be flooded with cheap produce, was illegal. Its decision was finally ratified in March of this year, despite an appeal lodged by the United States. In similar circumstances, also mentioned in my essay, the WTO opposed the European economic bloc by defending the economic interests of developing countries. Sadly, the anti-globalization movement ignores the positive role of the WTO in such cases, preferring to depict it as the bonded servant of the economic superpowers. This betrays a simplistic understanding of the organization’s function that motivates many critics to portray the struggle against globalization in Manichean terms—a war of the children of light against the children of darkness—instead of tackling the complexity of the topics under discussion.

Mausner also criticizes my effort to allay current fears about the growing power of corporations. In my essay, I remarked that autonomous governments do have formidable powers to resist pressure from multi-national corporations and have on occasion exercised them resolutely. Mausner, however, argues that the power to resist is a privilege of only larger and more established countries, whereas smaller countries, like Honduras and Nigeria, have been ground under the wheels of global capital. On this point, too, there is a grain of truth in what Mausner says, but once again he prefers to ignore several points that are inconsistent with his thesis. He forgets, for example, that the increasing involvement of multi-nationals in developing countries not only “compels” these economies to open their doors to the forces of global capital, but also gradually exposes them to more advanced norms of work management as well as to political and moral control. It is worth remembering that the multi-nationals are in any case required to account to public opinion and other agencies in the West, and cannot—unlike local hegemonic powers operating in non-democratic countries—do everything they have a mind to. Accordingly, even if their influence on these countries and on their leaders is not always curbed as it is in the West, this does eventually have positive consequences, if only because corporations are for the most part required to abide by higher standards—economic, but also moral—than those of the developing economy.

Aaron Levine’s letter describing the scandalous working conditions in the “sweatshops” of developing countries also ignores this essential point. As I pointed out, this is a real problem, and therefore “Western governments all have a role to play in preventing the worst abuses.” However, I also tried to indicate the positive aspects of sweatshops that make them a necessary feature of every developing economy. Levine takes exception to this line of defense, and in particular to the argument that the salaries of unskilled workers in the factories of multi-nationals in Southeast Asia are higher in comparison with the minimal amounts they would be paid if they chose to work in locally owned factories. “If workers at Nike are really so much better off than their local counterparts,” he asks, “why aren’t unskilled workers camping out outside Nike headquarters in the hope of getting hired?”

But in a manner of speaking, they are. In an article published in January 2004, New York Times colum-nist Nicholas Kristof recounted that “Here in Cambodia, factory jobs are in such demand that the workers usually have to bribe factory insiders with a month’s salary just to get them to employ them.” It is no different in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and other poverty-stricken countries; for much of the local population, the choice is between grueling work in the sweatshops and wallowing in the filth of the streets.

Sadly, many Western observers do not understand this, and their self-righteous reactions have already caused untold damage. unicef, for example, reported that the international embargo on the Nepalese carpet industry in the mid-1990s led to factory closures and forced thousands of Nepalese girls to take up prostitution. In another example, a number of anti-globalization workers’ groups joined forces in 1995 in a public protest against working conditions in factories sewing footballs in Pakistan. As a result, Nike and Reebok were forced to close their sweatshops there. What were the consequences? Tens of thousands of Pakistanis found themselves out of work, and the average family income in the country fell by close to 10 percent. No less serious was the damage caused by the moral indignation aroused in the West by the employment of children in the sweatshops of Bangladesh: The public storm caused a German clothing manufacturer to dismiss 50,000 children it had employed. A survey carried out by the British relief agency Oxfam discovered that thousands of the dismissed children later turned to prostitution or crime, or else simply died of hunger. We would do better, then, to state the truth bluntly: Sweatshops are not a workers’ paradise, but surely they save thousands of people from a living hell.

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