The Word That Nike Wouldn't Wear

The Word that Nike wouldn’t wear

1. Please introduce the medium “The Irish Times” briefly:

The Irish Times is an Irish daily broadsheet newspaper launched on March 29th  1859. The newspaper has delivered top quality news since it was published and has always been Ireland’s paper of preference. The Irish Times is based, first, on reporting the news that provides insight, context, explanation, clarity and a unique take on Ireland and on the world. Politically they are liberal and progressive and aspire to being a trusted source of information.

2. Please introduce the contents of the article briefly.

This article refers to the story about David Versus Goliath. The Phrase “David vs Goliath” is generally used to state a situation in which a small person or organization defeats a larger one in a surprising way. In this case, it will have been the postgraduate student vs Nike. Jonah Peritti wants to challenge Nike and make them more concern about the human rights that they are taking advantage of.

3. Why did Jonah Peretti ask Nike to stich the word “sweatshop” on his shoes? Please support your claim with quotes from the text.

People have become more aware of the working conditions for workers in developing countries. The word “Sweatshop” is a word used to describe a workplace with unacceptable working conditions. Things such as very long workdays with very few breaks, often in dangerous and unhealthy environments. The employees are forced to work an unreasonable amount of hours each week. The low salary they receive are only enough to get through the day.

Customers are able to design their own variations on some of the selected shoes, on the Nike’s website. This service provides people to stitch a personal nametag on the shoe. Jonah Peretti went in there to check it out and decided to cause some drama with Nike. He said, “I was visiting the Nike’s site because I’m interested in new Web technologies. It was all about personal freedom and your right to express yourself. You can make you own shoes. I tried to challenge Nike”. In addition, you can tell that he created a big discussion about Nike’s policy. However, this controversial story has reached millions of internet users in no time. He also pointed out that the sweatshop issue is much bigger, than Nike is.  

4. What reasons did Nike give for refusing to stitch “sweatshop” on the shoes?

Jonah Peretti wanted the word “Sweatshop” stitched onto the shoe, so he filled out the form and sent those 50 US dollars to personalize the shoes. Peretti sent a various of e-mails back and forth to Nike, where they refused to make the shoe, because of the word “Sweatshop”. He found the exchange very amusing, and sent copies of the chat to some of his friends to let them into it. They passed the e-mail onto some of their friends, which continued. This escalated and eventually the e-mail became known by millions of people. This led to a bad reputation about Nike through the entire social media. More than 500 emails from people who supported his claim were filling his inbox.

5. Account for some of the things Nike does to ensure the workers’ conditions.

“Nobody has yet come up with a perfect monitoring system but we’re trying”, says the author of Nike Yvonne Waniuk. This sentence could understand as an approach from Nike trying to convince people, that there is no connection between them and their sweatshop issues. Nike do have guidelines that they have to follow, to maintain the company. Nikes website contains lots of information about “Transparency 101”, which is designed to ensure that the public is aware of everything the company is doing. It could for example be: “the typical wage is between 15 and 40 per cent more than the minimum wage” and “ No contract-worker making Nike footwear product can be under the age of 18”.