Likewise, Nike never did move into the Philippines in a big way in the 1980s, a period when democracy there flourished. Thailand's democracy movement of 1992 also corresponded to Nike's downgrading of production in that country. Employers always call in the police and they come and interrogate the workers. Then the workers are fired. Nike has never lifted a finger on behalf of any worker fired by its contractors after police interrogations.
Economists measure growth by such standards as the gross domestic product.
It is true that recent decades saw a rapid industrialization in Indonesia. For maybe 200 families, many of whom became multi-billionaires, there also was a rapid growth in wealth. For the great majority of Indonesians, however, this has been a period of immeasurable pain. By design and by default, the agricultural foundation of Indonesia's economy has collapsed, causing millions of peasants to leave the land and to head for the cities, where they became a desperate army of the unemployed, lined up outside the sweatshop hiring gates. Fundamentally, what is wrong with Indonesia's economy is that is impoverishes hundreds of millions in order to enrich a few hundred.