Sweatshops
Fynn Ampawn Manohchompoo
In the era of rapid global communication and trade, we find that colonial legacies, logics, and modes of wealth accumulation continue to structure international relations. In this sense, globalization exacerbates unequal political, economic, and cultural power dynamics created by colonial rule. For example, we can think of the term “sweatshop” and the way it has become synonymous with outsourced labor, where corporations based in nations with enough material wealth and influence on the global level can move into post-industrialization. Taking advantage of the situation of poorer nations, these wealthier nations trade manual labor (assembly) for mental labor (corporate marketing and design), and commission poorer nations’ manufacturing companies to produce wealthier nations’ goods (Davis-Blake and Broschak, 322). This is often to create a larger profit margin, as where there are higher rates of poverty, labor standards and wages are kept necessarily low, compared to the standards required by law in wealthier nations. Beginning in the 1990s, then, a corporation like Nike could base itself in the United States and sell a single pair of shoes for seventy dollars. At the same time it could take advantage of Vietnam, a country rapidly trying transitioning to a market economy post-independence from France and post-war destruction by the US, and pay their workers about $2.75 for the same pair of shoes (Clancy 13; Mantsios 34). In this way, Nike’s outsourcing took on a colonial-like model of exploitation, creating an economic divide between US mental laborers and Vietnamese manual laborers that has only increased with time.
The term “sweatshop” actually predates outsourced labor. It was a word coined in 1850s England to describe “‘cheap and nasty’ sectors of manufacturing,” where “sweaters” worked under unsanitary and crowded conditions for long hours in return for minimal pay, often barely enough to sustain one’s own life (Blackburn 54). Labor standards at this time were largely unregulated, and so clothing companies in England scrambled to organize themselves in the sweatshop model. It took legally enforcing standards of pay, beginning with the 1909 Trade Boards Act, to abolish sweatshops in England as an unviable model of labor domestically. Similar stories follow in other nations wealthy enough to raise labor standards, like the United States. The origin story of the term, “sweatshop” then gives us a glimpse into the power structure behind their present-day use. It is a model of labor typically outlawed where the corporate headquarters are located. Therefore, when it is exported to other nations, it can be used to profit off working people in poverty and political instability. The history of “sweatshop” also sets up a series of conundrums when one begins to investigate Nike.
Outsourced sweatshop labor is inextricably linked to the global interactions that make up what we understand Asia to be. Nike is one company that is deeply entangled in these interactions. In the 1980s, nations capitalizing on increasing global interconnection capacities expanded the supply chain model beyond previous imaginations. Japan, a nation at similar industrial and economic power levels to the United States by this point in time, began to send more of its production abroad, into Southeast Asia. When Japan experienced rapid inflation and recession in the late 80s, it lost control of these supply chains (Tsing 117). Nike was one of them. Beginning as a US outpost for the distribution of Japan’s production of athletic shoes, Nike transformed from its Japanese roots to American-style advertising and branding. That is what the founders were – advertisers and designers – with no manufacturing experience (117). As such, outsourcing was the only model for manufacturing, and Nike quickly developed supply chain networks across South America and Asia, especially in Southeast Asia. As of 2021, Nike sourced 51% of its footwear from Vietnam alone (McNall and Quoc Dang 80).
Sweatshop practices, like Nike’s in Vietnam, are discursively imagined and upheld in three main ways. Firstly, using the framework of Edward Said’s Orientalism, we find sweatshops as integral to the hegemony of Western imagination (Said 14). Through US corporate heads defining Asian nations as “other”, one can more easily visualize Asian nations like Vietnam as unfit to lead the global order and in need of a strong guiding hand from the West. We see this in the case of the Nike corporation, whose initial response to the allegations that its shoes were made in sweatshop conditions in Vietnam was to defend both the conditions and wages. One official argued, “The wages may be small, but it’s better than having no job” or “harvesting coconut meat in the tropical sun” (Clancy 13).
Fig. 1. All Nike facilities resume production in Vietnam, following rumors that COVID-19 would cause the company to run out of Vietnamese-made shoes, 3 Nov. 2021 (Thu). This raises the question of whether sweatshop conditions are truly “better” in the safety sense than harvesting coconut meat, as the Nike official cited above argued.
The defense of sweatshop conditions relies on Orientalist logic: such labor is appropriate for Vietnamese bodies given where they stand in the global hierarchy of development. They are the “cheap and nasty,” setting up Western companies like Nike to imagine providing a great lift out of poverty. The second way sweatshops are discursively upheld is through the contracted nations’ narrative. In 1986, impoverished in the aftermath of war with the US, Vietnam established its doi moi, or renovation, policies to experiment with a market economy. It laid the groundwork for private business and foreign investment. To lure foreign investment, especially from the US, Vietnam was forced to engage in a “race to the bottom,” lowering labor standards until they were “business friendly” (Mantsios 34). Sweatshops then became interwoven into the narrative of helping Vietnam succeed economically and upheld as a matter of national pride, despite creating an economic divide between contracted Vietnamese factory owners and their minimal wage-earning employees. Finally, sweatshops are discursively upheld through global narratives on women’s work and Asian women. Sweatshop conditions rely on Vietnamese women, clarifying that it is the Asian woman’s body that is most appropriate for the “cheap and nasty” labor that wealthier nations cast off. According to Kahle, Boush, and Phelps’ work analyzing Nike activities in Vietnam, 85% of the workers are young women, mainly from poor and rural areas, selected by a government hiring service (45). One reason for this is that most of Nike’s shoemaking work is sewing, which is culturally categorized as “women’s work” both in the United States and in Vietnam.
Fig. 2. 90,000 Vietnamese workers strike at a factory supplying Nike and Adidas, 1 Apr. 2015 (Saigoneer). When the main population employed is women, the main resistance also comes from women. This points to an unseen element of women’s work being “protest.”
In this way, Nike sweatshops work to enforce a triple status quo, one where Vietnam is inferior to the United States, one where national pride relies on a class divide, and one where women deserve the lowest wages.
The conditions of sweatshop labor today remain horrifically unjust. For example, a pair of Nike shoes today has increased from 1980’s $70 to close to $300 dollars, while the wage paid from that same pair of shoes to a Vietnamese woman sweatshop worker has only increased by 25 cents, to a full $3. As we continue to examine sweatshops, they reveal a unique contact zone from an anthropological perspective. Using Faier and Rofel’s framework of ethnographies of encounter, we see the dynamic and creative encounters of cultures with “unequally positioned stakes” (364). There are many different cultural members meeting and creating the international division of labor in the case of Nike sweatshop labor in Vietnam alone. We have Japan creating a model for supply-chain production and losing its stature. We have the United States’ corporate greed exporting a domestically illegal mode of labor to places where the labor standards have to be that low, creating inequality. We have Vietnam in an economic position of dependence on foreign nations, with its women working in the sweatshops, on the lowest link of the supply chain. We have Nike, a multinational corporation, in a legal grey area between strict and lenient labor standards, playing on narratives of Asia and women, defining who gets to sweat in running shoes and who has to sweat for them.
Fig. 3. 1980’s advertisement for Nike “Air Force 111” (Qoshi). Nike ran an advertisement campaign in the early 80s highlighting and honoring women in sports, at the same time that the company began outsourcing to Vietnamese sweatshops employing mainly women. It makes a staggering illustration of narrative control: who does a sweatshop allow to fly?
Finally, we have organizers both in the United States and in Vietnam – as well as worldwide – maintaining a loud voice for the struggle against sweatshops. The way all these cultural members continue to interact or draw apart has huge implications for whose power creates what narrative on the global level. Whose voice gets to dictate what happens? Japan, the US, Vietnam, or Nike? Sweatshop workers, labor organizers, government officials, or corporate executives? Overall, the term “sweatshop” is useful to understand how “global Asia” is created and imagined from a variety of perspectives, with implications for further discussion on gendered labor and cross-national cultures created in zones of encounter.
Works Cited
Blackburn, Sheila. “Ideology and Social Policy: The Origins of the Trade Boards Act.” The Historical Journal, vol. 34, no. 1, 1991, pp. 43-64, https://www-jstor- org.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/stable/2639707?sid=primo&seq=1.
Clancy, Michael. “Sweating the Swoosh: Nike, the Globalization of Sneakers, and the Question on Sweatshop Labor.” Georgetown Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, 06 Mar. 2016, https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473968745.
Davis-Blake, Alison, and Joseph P. Broschak. “Outsourcing and the Changing Nature of Work.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 35, 2009, pp. 321–40. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27800081.
Kahle, Lynn, David Boush, and Mark Phelps. “Good Morning, Vietnam: An Ethical Analysis of Nike Activities in Southeast Asia.” Sports Marketing Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1, 2000, https://web-p-ebscohost- com.offcampus.lib.washington.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=02a79f73- 7394-41cd-b173-779d8a8c791a%40redis.
Faier, Lieba, and Lisa Rofel. “Ethnographies of Encounter.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 43, 2014, pp. 363-77, doi: 10.1146/annurev-anthro-102313-030210.
Mantsios, Gregory. “Vietnam at the Crossroads: Market Socialism and the Vietnamese Labor Movement.” New Labor Forum, vol. 19, no. 1, 2010, pp. 32-39, doi: 10.4179/NLF.191.0000006.
McNall, Scott, and Ly Quoc Dang. “Neo-Imperialism and the Precarious Existence of Vietnamese Factory Workers During the Covid-19 Lockdowns in 2021.” Fast Capitalism, vol. 19, no. 1, 2022, p. 80-90, doi: 10.32855/fcapital.202201.006.
Qoshi, Aida. “WHO SAID WOMAN WA NOT MEANT TO FLY: The History of Nike’s Iconic Ad.” StockX, 20 Mar. 2019, https://stockx.com/news/who-said-woman-was-not-meant-to- fly-the-history-of-nikes-iconic-ad/.
Said, Edward. “Knowing the Oriental” & “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations.” In Orientalism, 31-73. New York, Vintage Books, 1979.
Saigoneer. “90,000 Vietnamese Workers on Strike at Factory That Supplies Nike, Adidas.” Saigoneer, 1 Apr. 2015, https://saigoneer.com/saigon-news/4160-90-000-vietnamese- workers-on-strike-at-factory-that-supplies-nike-adidas.
Thu, Nguyen. “Nike Vietnam ramp production and carbon commitments back up to pre- pandemic levels.” Vietnam Investment Review, 3 Nov. 2021, https://vir.com.vn/nike- vietnam-ramp-production-and-carbon-commitments-back-up-to-pre-pandemic-levels- 88875.html.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.