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
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?