Revelations about outrageous practices in Asia's booming factories are nothing new. CBS, for example, had a similar report in 1993 on a Nike factory in Indonesia. On Nov. 3, an article in the Outlook section of the Washington Post exposed the military-like regimentation in three huge factories in Dongguan, China, where Taiwanese owners employ 40,000 workers to make sneakers for Nike and nine other companies, Reebok, L.A. Gear, and New Balance among them. In short, in today's global marketplace, there is a staggering amount of documentation of victimization of the most vulnerable Asian workers, mostly women. But in the United States, the names of the guilty do get publicized.
Reaction here is mild, however, and for many reasons.
One is that corporations like Nike manage to hire big names to defuse embarrassing issues. At the Nike stockholders meeting, for example, Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, a paid board member of Nike, defended the company. Top leaders of more than 120 nations are gathering there to discuss the future work of a powerful new international organization, the World Trade Organization, or WTO for short. Its operations will affect the lives of all the world's peoples. Yet, except on pages of business news, the WTO's work is one of the best kept secrets of our time.