Transcript Slides on the Nike Town Meeting

Nike Town Hall meeting
Nike debate
 A ‘Town Hall’ meeting
 One group of people at front are Nike
executives
 Second group is activists critical of Nike
 The question: Should Nike change its
approach to global sourcing?
 Audience plays roles of stakeholders
Your group should pick one or two
of the following roles
 Nike employees
 Stockholders
 U.S. labor leaders (or ordinary union members)
 Human rights activists (maybe rivals of the debaters)
 Asian workers flown to the U.S. by human rights activists
 Economic development officials of Asian countries
 Ordinary concerned citizens
 In this role, it’s fine to just be yourself
 4 people on each team (executives and activists)
 Extra credit – up to 7 extra points on final exam
midterm
 The rest of us will prepare questions for the debate
Preference given to people
whose essays have shown
good critical thinking
 “The treatment of workers in Nike’s factories has
significantly improved over the past few years”
 True or false?
From the Fortune article you read…
 “Richard Locke, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of
Management, released findings in 2006. They were
stark: Despite "significant efforts and investments by
Nike ... workplace conditions in almost 80% of its
suppliers have either remained the same or
worsened over time.
 Nike rates its factories on a scale of A to D;
in a fiscal 2006 audit of 42 factories, seven got A's,
and 13 got D's because of multiple transgressions,
like
 failing to pay the local minimum wage or
 making employees work more than 14 days in a row
without a break.
When writing papers…
 Evaluate the evidence on whether what your source
says is really true
 Nike says suppliers are required to treat employees
fairly and well.
 But does the evidence enable us to tell whether the
suppliers really treat employees well?
 When writing about ethics, you especially need to get
your facts right!!
 People are likely to tell you self-interested stories