Fair Labor Standards Monitored and Enforced In Nike Philip H. Knight, CEO of athletic shoe and apparel maker Nike Inc, met track coach, Bill Bowerman and athlete Phil Knight at the University of Oregon in 1957. They formed Blue Ribbon Sports, (Nike‘s forerunner in the year 1962. They started importing high-tech sports shoes from the Japanese company Onitsuka Tiger. Blue Ribbon Sports began its own shoe line by sub-contracting in 1971 and soon after in 1972 they launched the brand Nike. The main focus was on innovation so they started producing innovative training shoes and this led them to become a major player in the American athletic shoe market. In the year 1978, they were officially known as Nike Inc. and the sales of its product expanded to South America and Europe which was a turnaround in their history. The company offered a common stock of about 2 million to the public in the year 1980 and this contributed towards its rapid growth and expansion throughout the decade. In spite of the early economic recession in the 1990s, Nike‘s turnover was US$750 million in 1987 to $4 billion in 1993. Nike‘s stock was to hit $76 and future orders had reached a record high by the spring of 1997. Mechanization had not been considered very much effective in manufacturing shoes due to the fragile materials used and also the short life spans of styles of athletic shoes. Therefore shoe manufacturing was highly dependant on labor. Apparel manufacturing had brought Nike into new countries but this was largely on the basis of the quota system as opposed to the need to find lower labor costs. However, working in relatively low-paid employment in footwear or apparel manufacturing often becomes less attractive to factory workers and Nike looks for cheap labor. The development of Nike‘s Code of Conduct for labor practices arose out of a mixture of internal concerns and the aspirations for improvement of labor conditions, and external media and activist pressure on the company labor. They constituted a new NGO engagement strategy which would eventually lead to the establishment of formal partnerships with NGOs to address the educational, health, and safety needs of Nike workers and socio-economic development issues in Nike manufacturing countries. The major development in the evolution of Nike‘s Code of Conduct and labor policies came in the mid-1998 when the company launched a series of new initiatives. These included:   * Introduction of new minimum age requirements for the workers in their factories (18 for footwear factories and 16 for light-manufacturing of apparel, accessories, and equipment)   * adoption of US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for the air quality permissible exposure limits for all footwear factories   * Expansion of education programs for the footwear workers   * Inclusion of NGOs and other stakeholders in current independent monitoring Fair Labor Standards Monitored in Nike:   * Forced Labor. They do not use forced labor in any form such as prison, Indentured, etc.   * Child labor: They do not employ any person who is under the age group of 18 for the production of footwear. In Nike, they follow employee standards and they made it compulsory that no person below the age of 16 are not employed to work to produce