Cross-Cultural Perspectives

Vincent S. Strickland

ETH/316

March 19, 2015

Lauren Moulton-Beaudry

After researching different topics for my cross-cultural perspectives essay, I have found that Nike Inc. has a lot of information out there about this subject and decided to write on it. They have been in the front of their area of business and a top marketer. In the last thirty years they have been running in the lead of the race but faced some issues with being blamed for using unethical practices in third world countries. There were many issues which brought this up such as child labor, paying workers below minimum wage pay, and overtime laws were violated. They were a prime example of a sweatshop at the time. With this being said, there are a lot of arguments out there saying that sweat shop environments are actually beneficial to an economy due to its ability to bring training and knowledge in which those actual developing areas may not have ever seen and are able to spread the knowledge to the next person to help advance their region. The fact that Nike Inc. had taken their work global, their ethical and social responsibilities are at stake and they must deal with all of the issues that come with it. Safety is a tremendous subject when it comes to a developing company. Nike Inc. was faced with issues that sparked a large area of questions about its safety that was missing in its manufacturing facilities. Another issue that is faced is health, it is a significant issue in third world countries and raged when companies such as Nike Inc. opened its “sweat shops” in these countries. When jobs are offered in a large city, many people travel from their hometown to seek work at these companies in largely populated cities. When there are a lot of people living in a small area this starts up a whole new issue with health, such as sanitation and different sicknesses people are not immune to before moving there. There is a broad spectrum of different issues which were faced because of Nike Inc. moving into third world countries and this is just the tip of the iceberg, not to mention the issues that the actual families had to face with no options provided. When being in different cultural locations in the world there are many different factors to look at. To clear up the different perspectives across these cultures that are involved we’ll be going into some details about how they compare to each other in relation to if they were back home in the United States. The biggest factor for myself is the poverty level, which is across these cultures. The fact that there are limited resources for these people leaves them in situations where they have to take jobs that they really shouldn’t be taking to make low amounts of money. Since there are no laws for minimum wage and safety this allows wealthy companies such as Nike Inc. to come in and make a fortune without truly paying people what they actually deserve or need for their sacrifices. When Americans started to hear about this was occurring and Nike Inc. was responsible, they stopped buying products and Nike Inc. really got an understanding for what ethics truly means. Without ethics they would have sunk and lost their business but soon after this happened, Nike Inc. changed their ways and put their best foot forward to show the world just how much they can do. Looking at Nike Inc. today you could clearly see just how important it is to support everyone involved in your company. They started doing ethical business and the perspective of the cultures that are involved are a lot higher and proved to be a tremendous improvement on their part. Looking back at this issue with Nike Inc. there are a few different routes they could have taken to try to resolve this issue but in the end they took the right one. With all stakeholders wanting to be happy with this decision, they made a great one by doing things the ethical way and