Ah, your information about Nike isn't quite right.
Nike has never had factories... or they technically do but just in the US for the air bubbles in the shoes. Nike was originally just an importer of shoes from Japan, and then eventually they moved to have their own designs made in factories owned by other companies in China and Vietnam. When the news broke in the 70s, and then again in the 90s of sweatshop conditions in those factories (that they never owned) they themselves started inspecting these factories and refused to do business with any factory that wasn't up to their standards (which included fair wages, proper aged employees, reasonable hours, etc). My understanding is that they solved this problem decades ago, but conservative media still talks about it because they make shoes for a diverse set of customers.
One thing I'm not sure about with the tariffs, is if it applies to finished products or not. If Nike ships shoes from Vietnam but assembles the labels and laces in the US, does the tariff still apply?
I think the answer to a lot of your questions is to increase funding to the IRS, FTC, SEC, etc. So many rich individuals get away with not paying tax in the US because they are too expensive for the IRS to take to court. For every $1 invested into the IRS, it makes back $5-$9 by enforcing the rich to actually pay their fair share. Obviously lots more investment is needed to enforce companies, but the ROI would be very dramatic. The US could fund so much infrastructure and services if they could force individuals and companies to pay what they are supposed to.
Charity organization spending should be scrutinized... and usually a state's attorney general would investigate any wrong doing, but Trump fired a bunch of attorney generals, so I guess crime is legal now.
Musk's DOGE cut funding against so many agencies that were investigating his companies, which also won't be able to investigate any other wrong doing... so sure he can ask about how public servants get rich, but he's literally the person making corruption so much easier. $TSLA stock is way higher than it should be, because his own Musk Foundation is buying call options to pump up the stock, one of the many, many things he was being investigated for, which now, of course, won't be investigated. He told Tucker Carlson that he was going to jail if Trump didn't get in, and this is what he was talking about.
I don't cry about corporations coping tariffs either, but all those additional costs at every step of the supply chain get passed onto the consumer, so the people living paycheck to paycheck are the ones that will suffer the most.
I will answer in more depth later, but I'd you look into how Nike and others contract their production, while they don't have factories, they are definitely benefiting from slave and child labour.
Nike, specifically, has a huge number of safeguards in place to prevent their products and materials being associated with slave and child labour because of the stain on their past. As far as I can tell, they go above and beyond (ie, engage with 3rd party inspectors) to ensure they don't benefit because they face so much scrutiny from watchdogs and human rights groups. They literally cannot afford another controversy like they've had in the past now that they have so much more competition.
Yes, but they keep having issues. Essentially, they end up hiring firms that hire secondary firms, that hire third firms - it is a shell game. Many of the companies do it.
Ah, now we're getting to the nuance of it all.
How much money and effort should a company be required to spend in order to prove that they are ethically producing a product?
They have third parties that investigate the factory companies that make their products who are all above board and give them the green tick. That factory company hires another factory to make them cotton section of the product, the 3rd party investigates that too, and they're above board. The cotton section factory buys the cotton in bulk from another company, that cotton factory purchases the cotton from a wholesaler, that wholesaler buys cotton from individual farms and some of those farms have unfair labour practices. Is Nike responsible for every employment contract of every single part of their supply chain across various countries and continents?
If Nike's are sold at Footlocker, is Footlocker responsible instead? At what point are the countries the factories in responsible for employment practices in their countries?
In an ideal world Footlocker could trust that every single person in their supply chain is looked after properly, but what is Footlocker's financial responsibility in all this? What is Nike's responsibility?
We live in an interconnected world where products are made from pieces and materials from lots of different countries... how much investigation is good enough? It's easy to say that every part of it should be guaranteed, but I don't know how anyone can actually prove that without spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I'm not defending Nike specifically, I'm just saying it's all very complicated and very difficult and nuanced... and that capitalism's need to put profit over people is responsible for this mess. The need for corporations to show growth and increasing profit quarter over quarter caused all of this.
It's very possible that every single product in my house has an element of unfair labour practices, and I hate that, I know its a huge problem in the sugar industry as well as coffee and chocolate, and I would be shocked if every single part of my laptop that I'm typing this on was ethically provided. Where is the line between it being specifically a Nike problem versus an actual global problem?
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