Introduction
The inseparable link between the infringement of basic human rights at the workplace in the Global South and consumer behavior in the Global North has been a mainstream issue ever since Naomi Klein's best-selling book No Logo (Reference Klein1999) was published and United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS, founded in 1997) rallied against global brand name companies and the devastating conflation of corporate greed, lack of regulation, and ever-increasing demand for branded apparel and footwear. Despite a growing body of critical scholarship and more than a decade of social movements demanding that sporting goods producers outsource their production only to factories that respect workers' rights to unionize and to be paid living wages, workers at the lowest echelons of production processes have seen little or no improvements in their welfare, as the continuous flow of tragic incidents making headlines in the news demonstrates.
More than 280 garment workers died in one factory fire in Karachi, Pakistan, in September 2012 (Rehman, Walsh, and Masood Reference Rehman, Walsh and Masood2012), and more than 700 have died in factory fires and other unsafe workplace incidents in Bangladesh since 2005 (Alpert Reference Alpert2012). But the worst accident was yet to happen: In April 2013, less than a week after I had submitted the final version of this article, a factory building collapsed in the town of Savar on the outskirts of Dhaka, burying thousands of workers dead and alive. After weeks of rescue operations, the tally of the Rana Plaza factory tragedy stood at 1,127 dead and 2,438 rescued alive (Ahmed and Lakhani Reference Ahmed and Lakhani2013). The industries' death toll is virtually breathtaking but it is only at the pinnacle of workers' rights violations, such as deplorable standards of workplace sanitation and safety, denial of the right of freedom of association, excessive working hours, wages below living rates, piecemeal work, and unstable employment. Virtually the same conditions affected the U.S. apparel industry a century ago, suggesting that entrepreneurial calculations capitalizing on workers' vulnerability are endemic across the clothing sector.
The similarity of two incidents, one in New York in 1911, the other in Ashulia, Bangladesh, more recently, indicates that the ruthless exploitation of sweatshop labor is a corollary of early industrialization. A factory fire in December 2010 caused the deaths of 29 workers and injured many others trapped on the tenth and eleventh floors of a sportswear factory by locked gates at the stairs and entrance. Firefighters rushing to the scene were slowed down as fire truck ladders reached only to the fifth floor, and some workers jumped to their deaths to avoid being killed by the fire (Romney Reference Romney2010). Details of the Ashulia tragedy strangely resonated with media reports commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 garment workers in March 1911. When the blaze started on the eighth floor of the New York City factory building, hundreds of workers, mainly Jewish or Italian immigrant women, some as young as fourteen, found that their escape from the floor above was blocked by a locked door. Fire ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Horrified passersby watched desperate workers jumping out of the windows and hitting the ground (Meyerson Reference Meyerson2011).
The Triangle fire set off widespread protests that resulted in state and federal legislation and the improvement of U.S. workers' rights and workplace conditions over time. The apparel industries, however, became infamous for moving procurement processes and production sites out of the country and constantly across borders in order to avoid such regulations and cut down production costs. The facts that Bangladesh has become the world's second-largest garment manufacturer behind China and that the workers in Ashulia and Savar were sewing clothes for brand names and retailers familiar to all consumers in North America and Europe underscore a significant difference between the spatial operations of commodity industries in the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Scholars of Asia are particularly well positioned to explain the persistence of exploitative relations across time and space. First of all, their region of professional concern has become the dominant supplier of sporting goods to the global athletic market. Second, Asia itself is a growing destination of sports-related sales and marketing. Third, Asian companies are increasingly taking the lead in organizing the production process, either on behalf of their branded clients or for the marketing of their own sporting goods. Some of these companies are virtually unknown outside of the industry, despite their huge size and market power; others are already challenging the dominance of the global brands in Asia and increasingly in global markets, too.
The following sections will show that transnational corporations from the Global North and Asian newcomers standing in their shadows are the principal agents in charge of coordinating the nexus of interconnected functions and operations that characterize sporting goods production networks. Asian governments have been more than just a helping hand behind the rising significance of Asia for the global sports industry. These processes are influencing the way the industry works, and they have lasting impacts on workers' rights, development opportunities, and the debates scholars are having about the meaning of “made in Asia” in a global political economy context.
Perils and Benefits of Global Commodity Chains
The Asian region and its particular dynamics have so far been hardly addressed in research on the production of sporting goods for global markets, even though Asia specialists could contribute much to providing a more nuanced understanding of the institutional fabrics into which these relationships are embedded. Most studies so far are found in the fields of sports studies (Andreff and Andreff Reference Andreff and Andreff2009; Harvey and Saint-Germain Reference Harvey and Saint-Germain2001), management studies (Frenkel Reference Frenkel2001; Wang Reference Hong-Zen2005; Yu Reference Xiaomin2008), economic sociology (Merk Reference Merk2011), and development studies (Hassler Reference Hassler2003; Nadvi et al. Reference Nadvi, Lund-Thomsen, Xue and Khara2011). In particular, the literature on global commodity chains (or global value chains) is concerned with power asymmetries within capitalist relations under conditions of uneven development. Studies have shown that the global expansion of commodity production is characterized by corporate strategies that integrate firms and parts of them into transnational structures that blur conventional organizational boundaries. One outcome of the “new international division of labor” is the exploitation of workers; another is the skewed distribution of profits bypassing companies at the bottom end of the production chain and largely benefiting its “lead firms,” which usually are the well-known brand name corporations and retailers from the Global North.
A different strand of scholarship has also questioned the potential of “upgrading” opportunities for individuals, companies, industrial sectors, and entire national economies that are embedded into global commodity chains (Gereffi Reference Gereffi2002; Merk Reference Merk2011). The exploitation of labor and development opportunities for the Global South accruing from the integration into cross-border production networks seems to be a contradiction at first glance. Yet they are two sides of the same coin. In markets in which power is mainly associated with system coordination rather than with a concentration of ownership of productive resources, companies may seek to maximize profit margins by constantly relocating their production sites across borders into areas that offer better opportunities and lower costs of production. But for workers in the Global South, even sweatshop conditions may represent a “social upgrading,” releasing them from extreme poverty and a feudalistic dependency upon agriculture or cultural patriarchy. Historical studies also suggest that exploitative working conditions are characteristic of the early phases of industrialization and that, in the long term, they are replaced by more humane forms of labor relations.
Bringing the state and nongovernmental institutional stakeholders back into the focus of attention, the global production network approach has hinted at the linkage between transnational corporate strategies, national development agendas, and the global political economy (Henderson et al. Reference Henderson, Dicken, Hess, Coe and Yeung2002; Hess Reference Hess2009). This is a significant shift to account for states that pursue development opportunities under the umbrella of multinational trade frameworks, or for the preferential treatment, changes in taxing, quotas, and tariffs they deploy to attract foreign investments. This has been more often than not the case in Asia.
Asia Rising in the Global Sporting Goods Industry
For more than half a century, Asia has been incorporated into the global operations of the sporting goods industry. Estimates of the worldwide spending on sports-related goods oscillate between USD 125 and 300 billion. My own calculations of Asian countries' share of trade in sports commodities, which are based on national reporting and the UN Comtrade database, provide a volume of goods worth USD 80 billion and an export share of nearly 60 percent for 2010.Footnote 1 Asia's role in the global production of sports commodities is no longer limited to the comparatively low-capital yet labor-intensive apparel and shoes sectors. Factories in Asia produce the major share of almost any type of sports equipment, from skis, surfboards, and golf clubs to tennis racquets, soccer balls, and gym equipment.
Asia has also become an increasingly important sales market for athletic apparel and footwear. The United States and Europe continue to be the lead purchase markets where 70 to 80 percent of revenues are generated (Merk Reference Merk2005, 9). These markets are largely considered to be saturated, due to demographic and lifestyle changes lessening athletic participation rates. By contrast, the growth potential for Asia's huge and younger consumer markets, which currently hold a global import share of 20 percent, is almost unlimited. Global trade in sporting goods nearly quadrupled over the past two decades, and the bulk of growth in sporting goods trade is closely associated with Asia's rise.
A more detailed look into country profiles reveals that sports manufacturing underwent a series of cross-border relocations throughout Asia along lines that characterized the previous transformation of the textile and garment sector. Japan started as the region's major producer of natural fibers in the early twentieth century (McNamara Reference McNamara1995). When the state-sponsored and export-oriented textile industry began to lose global market share in the 1950s, governmental and corporate actors banded together to restructure the sector. Japan became a net exporter of synthetic threads and fabrics, and more labor-intensive processes of textile and garment manufacturing shifted to Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong. Following the classic path of export-based growth, Japan's immediate successors proceeded to dominate global exports during the 1970s and 1980s. The production of natural fibers began in the 1950s with the heavy participation of the Taiwan government. Rising exports in the 1960s brought with them an expansion to the production of synthetic fibers and their further processing in garment factories. The apex was reached in the 1980s when, for a short time, Taiwan was the leading exporter of apparel to the American market and second only to the United States in the production of synthetics. However, after the end of the decade, rising wages, increased regulation of labor, and the introduction of environmental standards by the government, coupled with exchange rate losses, undermined Taiwan's competitive advantages in the labor-intensive areas of the sector (Singleton Reference Singleton1997).
In South Korea, the government issued a series of five-year plans in the early 1960s, in which textile exports played a central role. Import restrictions, government loans, and the coordinated allocation of raw materials boosted designated growth areas until the 1970s, when attention was shifted to the chemical industry and the production of synthetics (Amsden Reference Amsden1989, 64–68). With the decline of the textile sector in the Newly Industrialized Economies (NIE), the second generation of Southeast Asian tiger nations entered the scene. Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines later were followed by Vietnam, the People's Republic of China, and then the South Asian nations.
The migration of sports manufacturing paralleled the spread of the textile and garment industries throughout Asia, albeit with some deferral. The leading sports brands Adidas and Nike, which currently control 60 percent of the global athletic shoe market and about a fifth of the athletic apparel market, source most of their products through a vast network of subcontractors located in Asia. Shoe maker Onitsuka (today's Asics) was the first local partner of Nike's predecessor Blue Ribbon Sports. When Japan became too expensive in the 1970s, procurement was transferred to South Korea and Taiwan and later to Vietnam, China, and Indonesia, where nowadays most of Nike's shoes are manufactured. Out of 896 factories in the Nike production chain disclosed in 2011, 291 were in China, 67 in Vietnam, 40 in Indonesia, 39 in Thailand, 28 in India, and 26 each in Japan and Korea (Nike 2011). Among the 62 countries of the Adidas network in 2011, China was equally hosting the bulk of its production sites with 349 factories. The five biggest locations also included India (84 factories), Indonesia (80), Vietnam (77), and Japan (60). In 2011, Adidas sourced 97 percent of its footwear volume from Asia (China: 35 percent), as well as 83 percent (China: 35 percent) of its apparel and 98 percent (China: 64 percent) of its branded sports hardware (Adidas 2011). Nearly all global sports brands have meticulously copied the strategy of outsourcing the manufacturing process to Asia and other low-cost nations while keeping control of the most valuable parts of the chain: design, branding, and marketing.
For example, Japan's largest manufacturer of sporting goods, Asics, began outsourcing segments of its footwear production to East Asia's NIE states in the 1970s. Its first foreign production was in Taiwan; then rising production costs prompted a transfer to South Korea and finally to China. By 1988, half of all Asics products were produced abroad. Asics steadily continued to expand its foreign activities. Nowadays the Asics group comprises a total of 55 companies with 3,600 employees in Japan and 2,300 outside Japan. Its products are manufactured by 157 subcontracted factories in 20 countries around the world, and recent revenue growth can be attributed above all to sales levels in foreign markets. East Asia recently turned into a market of growing significance (2011: 6 percent), though the bulk of sales are in Japan with a share of 42 percent, followed by Europe (23 percent) and the Americas (23 percent; Asics 2012).
Asics's main domestic competitor, Mizuno, is still making about three quarters of its turnover in the domestic market, but it also increasingly targets neighboring markets. Mizuno followed an offshore strategy somewhat different from Asics, opening subsidiaries for manufacturing and selling sporting goods in low-wage nations in the Asian region and in key sales markets overseas. In 1970, Mizuno laid the cornerstone for its cross-border expansion with the foundation of Mizuno Taiwan Corporation. In 1975, it opened its first shoe factory in South Korea; in 1989 it began a joint venture with a Thai textile manufacturer. Mizuno then founded subsidiaries in Hong Kong (1992) and Shanghai (1994), as well as in the United States, Canada, and Europe. In 2004, Mizuno opened its first directly managed flagship store in Shenyang (Mizuno 2012). The decision to relocate to these regions was made with lower labor costs and the rising exchange rate of the yen in mind, among other factors.
New Patterns of the Intraregional Division of Labor in Asia
Social activists and critical scholarship have shed light on the role of global brand name companies and giant retailers in the crafting of neocolonial dependencies in global commodity chains. Considerably less attention has been paid to lesser-known sports brands and firms that are just coordinating the supply chain but not in charge of marketing. In recent years, manufacturers and distributors operating in Asia have reorganized their buying processes and production networks to correspond to shifting patterns of regional integration, as well as local and global regulatory conditions of trade and production. Companies from NIE states, such as Taiwan, Korea, and Hong Kong, and recently also China, followed the paths of their predecessors and moved upwards along the value chain by offering customers integrated, value-added services. Formerly narrowly specialized manufacturers, which gathered technological expertise when supplying global clients, built up their own supply relations and set up production plants in special export zones of the region. Or they contracted out production orders to inland China, South Asia, and other parts of the less-developed world as a response to rising production costs, tariff barriers, and the phasing-out of the Multi Fibre Agreement.Footnote 2 Most recently, Asian brands and retailers have started to enter the lucrative markets in the Global North. Behind the buyer-driven commodity chains, various new forms of production networks have emerged, leading to new sourcing strategies and relationships between producers, intermediaries, buyers, and sellers. Such developments caused the categorical borders between manufacturer, trader, and retailer to become more and more blurred, as the following case studies demonstrate.
A characteristic example of a highly vertically integrated production network encompassing all the steps between sourcing, production, distribution, and marketing is the Esquel Group in Hong Kong. The company is a leading producer of cotton clothing; its clientele includes such global brands as Nike, Lacoste, Esprit, and Tommy Hilfiger. Esquel's sourcing process starts in the province of Xingjian in northwest China, where the corporation's cotton plantations are located. A large part of subsequent processing is concentrated in Guangdong, where four of Esquel's seven Chinese spinning and weaving mills are stationed. Garments are finished not only in China but also in Vietnam, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius. In 2002, the company also founded its own fashion label, Pye, and the retail chain outlet Shirt Stop. Despite such diversification, Esquel remains first and foremost a manufacturer producing mainly for other brands and trading companies (Appelbaum Reference Appelbaum and Ho-Fung2009, 68–69).
The transformation of Yue Yuen Industrial (Holdings) Limited (also registered in Hong Kong) from manufacturer to retailer is more clearly visible. With an annual sales volume of USD seven billion (2011), Yue Yuen is the world's third largest corporation in the sporting goods sector. The 100 percent subsidiary of the Taiwanese corporation Pou Chen is involved in the production of one out of every five or six pairs of athletic shoes worn worldwide. In 2011, the company's 460,000 employees produced a total of 326.6 million shoes for all the well-known brands, including Nike, Adidas, Asics, Puma, Fila, and New Converse (Yue Yuen Reference Yuen2011). With 255 out of 537 production lines, the heavyweight of its production is concentrated in China, where Yue Yen has owned factories since 1988. There are 140 plants operating in Indonesia (since 1993) and 140 in Vietnam (since 1995). The majority of production takes place in Guangdong Province, where in its heyday Yue Yuen once employed 110,000 people. Numerous factories have sprung up in the direct proximity, delivering basic components, such as leather and adhesives (Maquila Solidarity Network 2008, 43). Business and brand clusters also structure its Nikomas Gemilang business complex near Jakarta, where approximately 43,000 workers (85 percent of whom are female) manufacture shoes for the athletic world, separated into buildings according to brand and contractor. In addition to producing for the export market, Yue Yuen has also built up a rapidly expanding distribution network of wholesalers and retail stores for brand name sporting goods and athletic apparel. This business has become especially lucrative as the buying power of local populations has increased. Direct sales income from its Greater China retail network increased from 5.6 percent of company turnover in 2006 to 20 percent in 2011, when 3,055 directly operated stores or counters and 3,357 sub-distributors were operating in China's first-, second-, and third-tier cities. Yue Yuen has also become involved in outsourced production phases, such as the supply of raw materials, the manufacturing of shoe soles, and specialized machines for production processes. Going global, Yue Yuen nowadays generates 40 percent of its annual turnover in Asia, about 30 percent in the United States, and 20 percent in Europe (Yue Yuen Reference Yuen2011).
A similar variation of production networks is clustered around clothing dealers that manage an entire service package for their clients, ranging from supply and manufacturing to distribution. Some also develop designs for their customers, carry out market surveys, and ensure quality control. A representative example of a wholesaler with a production manager function is the Hong Kong-based Fung Holdings and its subsidiary Li & Fung Group, which has become a leading supply chain managing company. Asia represents about 90 percent of Li & Fung's total sourcing activities, spanning twenty economies in the region, including China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Cambodia, Thailand, and the Philippines (Li & Fung 2011). In an interview, former CEO Victor Fung illustrated Li & Fung's interconnected operations by referring to a typical large-scale contract: fabric was ordered from Korea and colored in Taiwan, buttons and zippers were ordered from China, and everything was shipped to Thailand for assembly (Appelbaum Reference Appelbaum and Ho-Fung2009, 71). The multinational corporation relies on an extensive network of more than 300 offices and distribution centers accessing a network of 15,000 suppliers in more than 40 economies. About 4,500 of the group's own 30,000 employees are stationed in Hong Kong. From 2002 to 2011, its pre-tax profits quintupled and turnover grew to more than USD 20 billion; 81 percent of its sales come from the United States and Europe, and about 12 percent from Asia, including 6 percent in China. Trading is responsible for 70 percent of total revenues; distribution and logistics represent 28 percent and 2 percent respectively. Li & Fung has also been involved in retail sales through its subsidiary Li & Fung Retailing Ltd. The retail segment has recently been transferred to an independent group operating under Fung Holdings. In 2012, Fung Retailing operated one of the largest menswear retail networks in Greater China with 461 retail stores in Greater China (379 in mainland China) and further retail stores in South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand (Li & Fung 2011).
Chinese corporation Li Ning is to China what brand name companies like Nike and retail giants like Wal-Mart are to the world, only under one roof. Founded in 1990 by former floor gymnast Li Ning, the eponymous company soon became China's most recognized domestic athletic brand. Ten years after its founding, Li Ning had already cornered a 30 percent market share in China. Today the brand, whose products sell for 30 to 40 percent less than equivalent items by global brands Nike and Adidas, is in third place behind the latter. Although Li Ning still manufactures parts of its increasing collection, it is considerably more active in marketing and sales. Its production network is dominated by a flagship enterprise that cannot be definitively classified as a retail business or as a manufacturer. Li Ning profits above all from its dense network of franchises and retail stores, reaching deep into the provincial towns of backcountry China where its global competitors have just barely managed to gain a foothold. In 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics, alone, Li Ning opened 1,012 new franchises (one every eight to nine hours). In 2012, the distribution network consisted of 7,500 outlets. This aggressive expansion strategy is visible on the company balance sheet: no other major company in the sporting goods industry has come even close to achieving such hefty profit increases in the last ten or five years. As Li Ning is a Chinese brand—98 percent of its profits are reaped in China—the plummeting demand in European and U.S. markets after the Lehman shock had almost no effect on the company's plans for expansion (Li Ning Reference Ning2011).Footnote 3
With wages in the Pearl River Delta rising by up to 30 percent in recent times, the region is no longer the low-cost center of years past. Companies like Yue Yuen or Li & Fung are therefore moving operations offshore to Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia, as well as western and northern China. A survey by Hong Kong's Trade Development Council of 2,400 manufacturers found that a quarter would choose to set up new factories in inland China, twice that of those who would opt for cheaper alternatives in Asia, and around half would stay in China's coastal hubs in what were once special export production zones (Yew Reference Ping, Gungwu and Yongnian2012, 390). Keeping operations onshore is more efficient, as the supply chain relies on a cheap but disciplined workforce as much as on a spatially fixed production technology and transportation infrastructure.
Li Ning has also shifted its production westward and inland. The decision to move to Jingmen in Hubei Province went along with the general trend away from the increasingly expensive production sites along the coast. About USD 300 million have been invested in the construction of the Li Ning industrial park in Jingmen, which became the largest of its kind in the sporting goods industry in 2012. Through the concentration of design, research and development, finishing, and distribution all in one place, commodities manufacturing was more tightly coupled to fluctuations in demand. Tailor-made software solutions diminished the necessity of backroom storage in the Li Ning shops as point of sale data were flowing directly from sales registers to the manufacturers, who monitored the sales quantities of models, sizes, and colors to ensure split-second reactions to shifts in demand. Drawing on technological innovation, spatial consolidation, and China's apparently inexhaustible labor force, Li Ning's fully integrated network can efficiently react to the ever-shortening and volatile demand cycles of “fast retailing.” When the industrial park is in full swing, its workforce of 50,000 will manufacture half of Li Ning's total goods within a space of two square kilometers.
The Impact of Asian Chain Governance on Development in Asia and Beyond
All these developments suggest that Asian corporations are increasingly taking the lead in control and coordination of the global sports commodity chain. In reaction to the changing political economy of liberalized world trade and regional economic integration, they have initialized a new stage of spatial consolidation and technological diversification. The integration of production, distribution, and marketing within holding companies indicates processes of vertical integration that slow down the cross-border “race to the bottom” triggered by buyer-driven commodity chains and their intermediaries.
However, not all countries were able to progress from low to high value-added segments of the chain. Asian nations today are forming a multi-tiered production hierarchy with a variety of export roles in accordance with their level of economic development. While industrial upgrading has occurred in East Asia, chances have, as of yet, remained limited for the developing nations of South Asia and their workers. As a consequence of these regional shifts, the geo-strategy implemented to squeeze the last drops of added value from labor by compelling locations to compete against each other and threatening to close factories can still be observed.
Despite a plethora of liberalization rhetoric, trade deregulation failed to achieve major improvements of workers' welfare. In the case of sporting goods manufacturing, a united front of international solidarity networks, critical journalists, and trade unions raised awareness that the responsibility for working conditions in Asia is directly tied to consumer choices in the Global North. Their activities, and particularly the pressure from consumers, proved that the power of a brand is not unlimited. As one major step forward, the Fair Labor Association (FLA) was founded by brand name corporations, universities, and NGOs in 1999. About a dozen global brands, including some world market leaders in sports apparel, have been accredited by the FLA so far. Members pass on the FLA Workplace Code of Conduct, which is based on International Labour Organization standards, to all suppliers as a provision of their procurement policies. However, despite their pledge to establish monitoring systems for workplace conditions throughout their networks, the struggle continues.
On the one hand, only a minor fraction of businesses operating in the global sports apparel and textile sector have subscribed to FLA principles. Even universities that are affiliated with the FLA occasionally sign licensing deals with companies outside of the FLA framework. Ohio State University and the University of Southern California have entered business relations with Silver Star, the merchandising arm of the Dallas Cowboys (Greenhouse Reference Greenhouse2011). This company jumped into the lucrative college-logo apparel market only in 2010 and immediately came under fire by USAS activists for its bad track record in producing merchandise at “factories that have egregious sweatshop violations” (Finkelmeyer Reference Finkelmeyer2011).
On the other hand, leading companies appear to lose sight of their more and more ramified supply chains. The horrific fire that killed 112 workers at Tazreen Fashions in Ashulia in 2012 exposed a glaring disconnect among global sourcing companies, monitoring systems to protect workers, and the factories filling the orders (Yardley Reference Yardley2012). Even though production at the factory had not been authorized, it nonetheless received orders through a local buyer that acted on behalf of its global clients. The U.K.-based Guardian claimed that even those companies that are listed as FLA partners, such as Adidas, Nike, or Puma, are “routinely breaking every rule in the book when it comes to labor rights” (Bunting Reference Bunting2011). These allegations were based on a report by the International Textile Garment and Leather Workers' Federation, which surveyed eighty-three factories in three Asian countries that were producing clothing and footwear for globally renowned brands, including those that were all over the place at the Summer Olympics in 2012. While the London Olympic Games Organizing Committee proposed to deliver the most ethical games ever, it apparently lacked the power to have its most potent business partners control their supply chains.
It is possible that the burgeoning buying power of Asian middle classes will lastingly change relations of power and dependency within the global sports commodity market. The upgrading of Asian companies has the potential to strengthen their bargaining power over global brands. However, if companies that are neither capitalizing on brand name value nor vulnerable to concerted consumer protests turn up as industry leaders in global production networks, their economic weight and political clout may have a downgrading effect on the standards that govern international trade and secure workers' rights on a global scale.
That the dismantling of workers' rights and safety standards is far from being a problem restricted to the developing world became evident in media reports commemorating the 1911 Triangle fire. As Harold Meyerson (Reference Meyerson2011) mentioned in his Washington Post article, today's demand for a neoliberal economic order is echoing the early nineteenth-century complaints by the Associated Industries of New York against any governmental interference with their business—establishing the new fire code meant for them the “wiping out of industry in this state.” Writing for USA Today, Karen Matthews (Reference Matthews2011) also linked the achievements of the post-Triangle fire legislation with mass rallies in Madison against a new state law curtailing workers' collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin.
While we do not know yet what the consequences of Asian chain governance will be like in full detail, there is ample reason to assume that the concerted efforts of political actions, union mobilization, and consumer pressure are needed to determine if the tectonic changes in the industry will also lead to a balanced distribution of welfare improvements to all workers in the sporting goods industry within the Asian region and beyond.
