Last Saturday night was "Nike Night" for the Mariners' baseball game at the Kingdome. In an unprecedented promotion, 54,000 unwitting baseball fans were, after the national anthem was played, locked into the cavernous concrete structure, not allowed to leave, given inadequate toilet facilities, charged $6.00 for each inedible Kingdog as the only available form of nutrition, and, regardless of age or health, forced to spend the next fourteen hours sewing sneakers for resale in the outside world.

Well, not exactly. But Nike and kindred transnationals (Disney, Guess, Starbucks, and many others) have become notorious for widespread labor abuses in the bold new global economy: sweatshops, use of child labor, use of prison labor, human rights abuses in conjunction with brutal dictatorships and armies, attacks on union organizing efforts, and (not coincidentally) obscene executive salaries and obscene profits. In the last two years, the public awareness of and use of terms like "sweatshop" and "corporate welfare" has skyrocketed. It's happened without benefit of any large-scale, organized political advocacy against corporate malfeasance-- indeed, it's happened despite relentless, daily glorification of our Corporate Uber Alles world by advertising, politicians, and news reports.

General public awareness has not translated into any meaningful political opposition, let alone any kind of check on sociopathic corporate behavior. Yet. But it might--soon, at the present rate. So the counter-attack is in full gear.

Systematic of the aggressive, pro-active, and very slick damage control is the utterly fraudulent "No Sweat" agreement, announced by Bill Clinton and a phalanx of his corporate puppetmasters on April 14.

The agreement, brokered by a Presidential Task Force and signed by textile industry execs, major human rights and labor activists, and Clinton's administration, allows companies to affix a "No Sweat" label to their products if they adhere to standards of the agreed-upon Code of Conduct. As with Starbucks' Code of Conduct (reported in ETS! #31, April 8), the devil is in the details, or lack thereof. Among the problems:

"Companies shall pay the local minimum wage or prevailing industry wage." Nike is one of the many flagrant current violators of this provision; its Indonesian workers, for example, don't even earn Indonesia's minimum wage. That minimum wage is determined based on the government's calculation of what can buy the minimum caloric intake needed to stay alive. More importantly, it's not the countries setting these minimum wages; it's the companies themselves, as they pressure countries to bid against each other to attract and keep foreign investment and factories. To comply with No Sweat, it will be as easy for Nike et al to lower minimum wage laws as to raise wages. The agreement amounts to an industry promise to comply with standards its own business practices create.

The agreement accepts a 60 hour work week (48 hours plus 12 hours mandatory overtime) as the norm and then exempts itself "in extraordinary business circumstances." Such circumstances aren't defined, and could be anything; the limit is meaningless.

"Employees shall be compensated for overtime hours at the legal rate or, where none exists, at a rate at least equal to their regular hourly compensation rate." Since there is no such "legal rate" in many of these countries (and it's under attack in the rest), all this is essentially saying is that employees should be paid. Truly a breakthrough.

To verify whether companies comply with even these paltry standards, the agreement states that independent external monitors shall be used. Most current Codes of Conduct would fall under these standards; for example, Nike uses the accounting firm Ernst & Young, which issues secret reports to Nike that aren't available to the public, international labor or human rights groups, or local activists in the relevant countries. Far from being "independent," this provision merely whitewashes self-reporting by insisting that the cost be paid to a different corporation.

Most Codes of Conducts already adopted in response to public pressure over Third World working conditions (ala Starbucks) have been image boosters for the companies involved, but--because of lax to non-existent enforcement-- have been meaningless for actual workers. Meanwhile, labor rights of all workers continue to erode under the relentless pressure of global capitalism. The "No Sweat" agreement codifies this arrangement by giving corporations financial incentive (those image-friendly labels) to enter into agreements that don't challenge fundamental inequity, while buying off the more gullible or cooptable portions of the movement demanding reform. It is, in other words, vintage Clinton.