VI. SUBJECT OF THE RESEARCH 

The subject of the research is to explore and where possible confirm or disconfirm four research areas that are developed in the research questions listed below. 

1. How has the Athletic Apparel Industry enacted their espoused Code of Conduct over time? This study group will focus on monitoring studies by PWC, FLA, and Global Alliance, as well as studies that support and question their methods and findings. 

2. Does the Athletic Apparel Industry pay a living wage? This study group will sample subcontract factory workers, review factory payroll records, and collect data that will measure and validate various living wage formula. In addition we are proposing action research experiments that would implement and test various wage-payment schemes in a sample of factories across nations identified in Table Two.

3. Does the Athletic Apparel Industry subcontract with "sweatshops"? This study group will look at definitions of sweatshops and measure said variables in a sample of subcontract factories. In addition, they will propose and conduct action research experiments that test what we described in our review as forms of French Taylorism. This way a sample of existing subcontract firms can be compared with the experimental options.

4. What is the relationship between Fair Labor Association (FLA) and Workers Rights Consortium (WRC)? This study group will focus on the monitoring efforts of FLA and WRC by sampling colleges and universities with and without FLA and/or WRC agreements. 

The main study group had already divided into sub-groups to pursue each research question.  The first three questions involve travel to factories and specific experiments to be decided by each team. The fourth question does not involve travel to third world factories. 

Experts - Each study group will work with country experts that will serve as advisors in issues of sampling, experiment, translation, and other research design issues. Professor Anita Chan is an internationally recognized expert in China and the athletic apparel industry. We are also inviting Professor Pun Ngai, a Hong Kong Chinese sociologist who knows a lot about factories to join, and she is interested.  There are also other experts  like Tim Connor and Peter Hancock (Indonesia), Junya Yimprasert (Thailand) and we are seeking a Vietnam expert.. 

• Dr. Anita Chan
  Senior Research Fellow
  Australian Research Council
  Contemporary China Centre
  9 Liversidge Street
  Australian National University
  Canberra 0200 Australia
  Tel. (61) 2 62494260
  Fax (61) 2 62573642  Anita Chan is an expert in the athletic apparel industry in China.  Her work is cited  in Appendix A and Appendix B. 
  

• Dr Peter Hancock
  Registrar & Director
  West Coast Institute of Management and Technology
  251 Adelaide Terrace - Level One
  Perth WA 6000
  mobile 0412 148 575
  Ph 61 08 9225 4121
  Fax 61 08 9225 4120
  email phancock66@hotmail.com 
  email registrar@westcoastinstitute.com.au
  His work is cited  in Appendix B

 

• Tim Connor, BA, LLB
  Doctoral Candidate, 
  School of Geosciences,
  University of Newcastle,
  Australia.
  Address: 55 Wells Street, Redfern NSW 2016 Australia
  Phone: 61 2 9698 2394
  email: tconnor@nlc.net.au  His statement and work is listed in Appendix A. 

 

• Dr. Pun Ngai" npun@hkucc.hku.hk  I would be very happy to work with you all, and thank you for listing me as a country expert.
  
  Thanks,
  Pun Ngai

 

• Junya Yimprasert "Lek"  jyimprasert@access.inet.co.th 
  Phone: + 66 1 617 5491, +66 2 692 7963 Fax: +66 2 692 7963
  Her experiences and publications concern codes of conduct practices are:

  • Human Rights Coordinator for Reebok Company, Thailand officer, January - May 1998

  • "Can Corporate Codes of Conduct Promote Labour Standards? Evidence from Thai Footwear and Apparel Industries." with co-author Christopher Candland ccandlan@wellesley.edu .

  • "Lian Thai workers and the Global Alliance," produced for Clean Clothes Campaign (8 September 2000)

  • "Taiwan shoe's makers - Thai workers," produced for Jeff Ballinger, this is the Pou Chen factory

  • Web Address: http://www.thailabour.org/

Sampling - There are several alternative we now present for  feedback.  The ideal situation is for the Athletic Apparel Industry is to provide a complete list of subcontractors and we do the picking using a stratified random sampling design. A second choice would be for us to provide the sampling criteria and the logo corporations to draw the sample.  A third choice is to contact local NGOs in the countries identified in Table Two and grant us access to a set of factories we propose. 

Next is the issue of which countries to sample factories from. At a minimum, we assume that China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan will likely be selected for study. They are the main Nike subcontractors. The reason why we suggest Taiwan is that Anita Chan visited both the Pouchen and Fengtai factories two years ago. Athletic Apparel still has a few production lines in Taiwan to make special sneakers and to try out new models; R and D is done in Taiwan, not in Oregon. We will need to seek out an expert for Thailand and South Korea. Thailand production lines have OSHA labels and warning at each work station. It will be interesting to do a comparative time study and organization study between the parent factories and their factories in other countries. Each study group will make sampling recommendations and may well want to expand the sample to include Central America and Mexico. 

Carty (1999) and Korzeniewicz (1992, 1994) have suggested that athletic apparel operates a complex and stratified, three-tier system of global subcontracting for its athletic footwear based upon the technology in use. We have extended the idea by including garment manufacturing subcontractors along with the athletic footwear factories (refer to Table Two).

In Tier one is the most advanced subcontractor production technology, tier operates volume production. Taiwan and South Korea, for example, represent the "developed partners" of logo -corporations  use flexible manufacturing processes and are designated as producers of the industry's most expensive and sophisticated styles; they in turn subcontract to tiers two and three (Carty, 1999: 187). Tier two includes China and Indonesia who use less flexible manufacturing with large volume production runs of standardized products.  Tier three are subcontract factories that are the "developing" sources, such as Vietnam and Thailand and consisted of more recently formed partnerships where the cheapest labor is utilized. Our hypothesis is that factory conditions vary significantly across the three tiers.

Table Two: Three-Tier System of  Subcontractors and their Technology

TIERS	NATIONS
Tier One (semi-periphery -- most expensive shoes, high level of  technology, very flexible)	South Korea* Taiwan* Italy Canada Portugal
Tier Two (semi-periphery/periphery -- volume production)	Indonesia* China* Mexico Brazil
Tier Three (periphery -- the developing sources that produce for the industry)	Vietnam* Thailand* Bangladesh India Malaysia El Salvador Guatemala Honduras Dominican Republic Philippines Sri Lanka Bulgaria
KEY   * is country we intend to randomly sample subcontract factories for research and experimentation.

The sample design for the fourth study subgroup looking at universities will include U.S., Canadian, European, and Australian universities that are members of (a) Fair Labor Association, (b) Workers Rights Consortium, (c) both, and for control (d) neither. The exact number and name of each university to be included will be worked out in the subgroup meetings just identified.

The specification of the exact number of factories and universities will depend on which proposed sampling option the study group members elects to follow.  We intend to finalize the design for the sampling and the action research experiments by convening the four study groups and invited stakeholders to the meeting of the International Academy of Business Disciplines in April, 2001 and the Academy of Management professional workshop meetings that meets in August, 2001 in Washington D.C. We have been approved for both actions. We are also organizing subgroup meetings in Europe, Australia and Asia (and are waiting on responses from various associations that are granting us spaces and times to meet and present). In short, since the team comes form all areas of the world, we want to provide venues that allow affordable travel. This is important since each study group member is seeking university and foundation funds for this project.

In the next section four basic research questions are presented. Code of conduct, living wage, what is and is not a sweatshop, and the choice among FLA and WRC for universities is assumed to constitute the core issues of the question of monitoring. 

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