How Business Happens - NIKE

Good news from Vietnam... workers are rioting in NIKE plants. Since this is how freedom grows, it is to be applauded. In a classic scenario, aggrieved unionized workers who've found their wage increases not keeping pace with inflation went on strike when an incident escalated into violence, then the cops were brought in to crack heads, the workers overwhelmed the cops. Sounds like USA circa 1920. Honor labor!

NIKE issued a statement, but who cares, it is none of their business. As the above article makes clear, and you already knew from me and no where else, NIKE owns no factories in Vietnam. NIKE hires a company in Taiwan, Pou Chen, that sources manufacturing for NIKE, and some is done in Vietnam. NIKE is so far removed from what is going on in the Vietnam factory they should have no opinion. The Vietnam factory is a mere step in an international, management-intensive web that brings parts and materials to Vietnam for assembly into shoes, which are then distributed world-wide. In this scenario, Vietnam's role is accidental in the production of shoes. All of the world-wide factors that concatenate in this factory making NIKES really has nothing at all to do with NIKE. It is like a water bottling company issuing a statement expressing its opinion on the weather. Rather desultory.

Here is an accomplished fellow, pro-free market, who has written a review of the NIKE factories in Vietnam, which he has visited, and I have not. even he implicited makes the error that NIKE manufactures in Vietnam, although later he implicitly makes clear in his article, NIKE owns no factories in Vietnam. Read this review of factories producing for NIKE in Vietnam.

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