The Profit of Nike

In Carol A. Stabiles essay, "Nike, social responsibility, and the hidden adobe o production," she covers a few topics associated with Nike. The one I found most interesting was the part about the sweatshops. Nike hires laborers in Indonesia for below minimum wage to make very expensive sneakers for consumers in the United States that those workers would never be able to afford. Nike spends hundred of millions of dollars on their advertisement campaigns against other sporting good companies, yet they have a history of not paying their laborers well.

While Nike pays their laborers in Asia almost nothing, they pay their star athletes an enormous amount of money to wear their clothing. Athletes like Lebron James and Tiger Woods have signed over 100 million dollar contracts each with Nike to just wear their clothing and do advertisements for them. While these people just wear Nike clothing to get paid, the workers making their clothes are making around two dollars an hour. But the case that Nike would bring up is that even though they pay these athletes multimillions of dollars, they profit immensely because consumers will go out and buy Nike golf equipment and Lebron James basketball sneakers. Nike workers, work harder and much longer hours than athletes like Lebron James or Tiger Woods, which creates an uneven state of political economy.