{"id":3392,"date":"2019-03-01T21:19:33","date_gmt":"2019-03-01T20:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=3392"},"modified":"2019-03-04T12:38:04","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T11:38:04","slug":"nike-celebrates-women-but-asking-who-made-my-clothes-shows-whos-left-out-of-the-picture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/nike-celebrates-women-but-asking-who-made-my-clothes-shows-whos-left-out-of-the-picture\/","title":{"rendered":"Asking ”who made my clothes?” looks behind Nike’s celebration of women athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few days of February and beyond <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Nike’s most recent ad in its ’Crazy’<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a> series has gone viral in ways most film makers only ever dream of, with over 7 million YouTube views in its first five days. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>There are reasons why it should be so popular: narrated by Serena Williams it celebrates women’s athleticism, condemns the cultures of sport that denigrate women’s sporting success and shouts loudly about those women who defy the constraints that a stubborn attachment to sport as a masculine preserve imposes.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This is a piece of corporate self-promotion (it is an advertisement after all) that puts Nike on the side of angels, celebrating strong and defiant women where the structure of the slogan (”It’s only crazy until you do it”) also invokes the adage often attributed to Nelson Mandela: ”It always seems impossible until it’s done”, and there are few more sanctified in contemporary politics than Mandela. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Crucially, the ad resonates powerfully with last year’s <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>ask if your dreams are crazy enough<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a> \u00a0ad fronted by Colin Kaepernick (now that over 28 million YouTube views) that so annoyed many conservatives who seem offended that someone has taken a stand against systemic racism. <\/span>Nike seems to have a good market sense<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0to support justice, equality and civil rights, and not only in English language advertising – as shown in its recent ads fronted by German boxer <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Zeina Nassar<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0(in the wake of this week’s attack on sports hijabs by senior figures in the French government perhaps we could have a similar French language ad), Turkish kickboxer <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Irem Yaman<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a> \u00a0and wrestler <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Yasemin Adar<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>, and the fabulous <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Juntas Imparables<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a>. <\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>It is an inspired campaign and repositions Nike in its early image as the ’bad boy’ of the sports goods market.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There is no question that these women athletes, elite and otherwise, are to be celebrated, that women’s sport success, especially in domains conventionally seen as men’s, disrupt and undermine a potent political and cultural outlook that continues to cast women as weak, as inadequate, as less than real athletes. <\/span><\/span><\/span>There is no doubt that there is extensive interest in and celebration of women’s achievements in sports and physical cultures – witness the viral nature of the footage of Katelyn Ohashi’s\u00a0 <\/span><\/span>floor routine for the UCLA gymnastics team<\/span><\/span><\/a> at the beginning of December 2018, as of 1 March 2019 at 34.5 million YouTube views,\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>or the widespread sense that the IAAF’s testosterone rule (subject of last week’s Court of Arbitration for Sport deliberations) is unjust because it seems to be targeting a single athlete and is based in dubious science (it’s not that I see the study in question is necessarily unethical or lacking integrity, I do not have evidence either way, but it is a problem that the rule is based on a single study: that’s not how science works!). <\/span>We need to be careful about the risks when these celebrations accept performances by men as the measures of excellence or quality in sport: many of these successes by women do little in the big picture to unsettle the masculinist norm of sport cultures and measures. <\/span>(In case this is seen as some kind of anti-sport position, I note that my former office buddy Mark De Ste Croix<\/a>\u00a0has shown repeatedly that prevention of ACL injuries in women football players requires training programmes that are designed for women: the masculinist norm is dangerous.) Nike\u2019s corporate image here takes as given this masculinist norm: in most of these ads \u2013 and overwhelmingly in last week\u2019s Dream Crazier \u2013 women are not subverting the masculinist performance norms but are accepting them, and consequently the gendered sport system, in ways that sustain these normative measures – but that’s another story.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Nike has done well in depicting itself as a socially responsible corporation, an advocate for women in sport, a celebrant of women\u2019s physicality \u2013 and in a world where women\u2019s physical activity participation rates still fall well behind men\u2019s and where women all too often set aside their sport and exercise activities for their male partner\u2019s that\u2019s a good thing. Despite this, Nike is not being altruistic here (this is an ad!) but is looking to promote its athletes. This is about selling its products but more especially about selling its brand identity as socially responsible, as on the side of good, of justice (remembering that its corporate leadership are major contributors to Trump\u2019s Republican Party \u2013 we could question Nike\u2019s sincerity here). It\u2019s about making sure that when we don our Nike products we feel a little like we\u2019re standing with the good guys \u2013 with Kap, with Serena, with Caster, with LeBron and others who are challenging sports\u2019 orthodoxies and reminding us that there are social responsibilities beyond the boundary, and that that world beyond the boundary doesn\u2019t stay there.<\/p>\n

Standing with the angels makes good business sense. In the immediate wake of the Kaepernick ad last year Nike\u2019s online sales jumped by about 1\/3<\/a> despite the images of product burning, and the initial fall in its stock price was quickly recovered \u2013 a sure sign that corporate social responsibility pays off. But there\u2019s something missing from all of this celebration of performance and consumption, from this ringing endorsement of women\u2019s social and cultural rights. Consumption requires production, so I\u2019m left wondering about the women who make these products, and how Nike\u2019s quest for profits ties into its relationship with the workers who make the things we buy.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The textile industry, the third biggest globally, and the shoe industry are overwhelmingly places of women\u2019s labour: about 80% of textile and shoe workers are women. Paradoxically, given the profile and presence of women of colour in Dream Crazier, these women production workers are also overwhelmingly women of colour living in localities on the margins of socially responsible capitalism, in industrial zones where the law and workers\u2019 rights are often set aside. These might be Mexico\u2019s maquiladora, duty-free and tariff-free zones where clothing and other commodities are assembled, processed or manufactured and then often exported back to the country of origin, or they could be Indonesia\u2019s, China\u2019s, the Dominican Republic\u2019s or many others\u2019 Export Processing Zones (EPZ) where the same suspension of rules applies. They might work at the luxury end of the market, where in Italy provisions akin to EPZs set aside local labour and environmental rules yet the products still bear the \u2018Made in Italy\u2019 mark, which for shoes is usually considered a sign of excellence: don\u2019t assume ethical production on the basis of where a good is made. Some of these workers might be based in the over 250 Foreign Trade Zones<\/a>\u00a0within the borders of the continental USA (in effect, EPZs), let alone its dependencies and territories, or small factories or homeworkers across the EU (still including the UK!) where piece rates apply and wages are well below minimum requirements. Almost universally these are workers paid below living wages, subject to physical, sexual and other forms of abuse, working 12 or more hours a day and sacked for standing up for their rights as workers<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Workers across these industries and their supporters linked to organisations such as the Clean Clothes Campaign<\/a>, the Workers\u2019 Rights Consortium<\/a>, United Students Against Sweatshops<\/a>\u00a0and Labour Behind the Label<\/a>\u00a0(full disclosure time: I am the Chair of the UK\u2019s Labour Behind the Label Trust) are currently working on two key issues globally. The first is a living wage campaign (we are expecting to have a research report completed in the next few months), where one of the major issues has been definitions of a \u2018living wage\u2019. For many employers this is often assumed to be the legal minimum wage (which is almost universally inadequate), and for many campaigners is understood as \u2018wages and compensation (for standard working hours, i.e. without overtime) that is sufficient to meet basic needs and provide some discretionary income for workers and their families\u2019 (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Art 23.3<\/a>). Some brand’s codes of conduct adopt a definition similar to this (although often without the reference to family), and include a provision that wages must be paid in a timely manner \u2013 but the sticking point is always enforcement. I\u2019d be surprised if any factory workers in the textile and shoe industries were paid a living wage.<\/p>\n

The second area of global campaigning is supply chain transparency. This is a difficult area; these are industries that have a long history of subcontracting, and often of long subcontracting chains. Brands are coming under increasing pressure to make public full lists of their suppliers, including what those suppliers make, the size of the enterprise, its ownership and more: at present almost no brands have a sufficiently good public declaration of their supply chain. In a significant move this week the US-based Fair Labor Association<\/a>, an industry grouping, voted to require supply chain transparency of its members: exactly how this plays out remains to be seen, but it is a major development. In the sport sector, FairPlay campaigners associated with the London 2012 Olympics had a breakthrough when the organising committee agreed to make public its list of suppliers, although that advance has been difficult to sustain. This issue of transparency means, among other things, that we can better support workers in particular campaigns by seeking support from the brands they work for, especially where those brands have clear codes of conduct, as most, including Nike, do.\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Amid all of this work around production, there is one major nationally focused campaign, centred on Bangladesh. In the wake of the horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka April 2013 resulting in over 1200 deaths (the subject of a haunting reworking of an old Irish song by Rhiannon Giddens<\/a>) a joint protocol (the Accord on Fire and Building Safety<\/a>) was established to improve workplace safety. A compelling piece of research from Penn State University in March 2018<\/a>\u00a0shows that the only area where workers conditions had improved in Bangladesh in the previous five years is in workplace safety, and this is largely the result of the Accord. It is now up for renewal which the Bangladesh government is resisting in face of workers and brands seeking its continuation.<\/p>\n

It is not to write off the advances that Nike’s Dream Crazier highlights but to remind us that it’s an ad and to wonder who is obscured from our visions in its celebration of its athletes, its branded bodies and to look at what might be exposed if we ask ’who made your clothes?’. Celebrating women’s athletic success without pressing for better lives for those women who are caught in the tentacles of the sport industries is letting down the side.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the last few days of February and beyond Nike’s most recent ad in its ’Crazy’ series has gone viral in ways most film makers only ever dream of, with over 7 million YouTube views in its first five days. There are reasons why it should be so popular: narrated by Serena Williams it celebrates […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":3411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-okategoriserade"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/i-made-your-clothes.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-SI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}