Every day, I slip on my worn out Asics shoes, and I go for a quick run. During my run, I think about AS class. The subject of cheap labor came up a couple days ago. I look down a my shoes, and I wonder who made my shoes, and how much they get paid to make such fine running sheos. I decided to find out.
Asics outsources all of their production, so they do not specifically handle the making of their shoes. My shoes were made by someone would could be in one of the numerous sweatshops Asics, use. I have found that these sweat shops often produce competing brand's shoes. For instance, Puma and Nike shoes are often made in the same place. As my source says: "Workers for brands such as...Asics... are still earning poverty wages". There fore I can conclude that the person that made my shoe got an average sweatshop salary for it. Since the Asics Company is based in China, I will turn my search there. I see from a website that the average pay for a sweatshop worker in China is 23 US cents per hour. The living cost is 87 US cents per hour. I can therefore conclude that my shoes were made by a woman (90% of all sweatshop workers are female) and that it cost roughly a few cents to make my shoes. I bought them for 70 dollars. WHERE IS THE MONEY GOING?
2 comments:
I know! These corporations are making a ton of money! That's why Phil Knight and numerous other CEO's are so rich! They make a profit every time a shoe is sold. I actually wrote a similar blog poast about Walmart Sweatshops and found that some sweatshops pay as little as 9 cents an hour. That's flat out rediculous! I'd be willing to pay another $5.00 to know that the workers are at least getting some money. But I agree that this is completely rediculous.
Wow! This was very surprising. I always knew that companies made a lot of profit from each sale, but almost 100% profit seems to be way too much. I suppose that some of the money goes to the materials to make the shoes, but even those costs are minimal compared to the amount of profit these companies are making. This makes it almost hard to believe that so many of these companies are struggling after they receive such a large amount of profit. I guess that this further illustrates the seriousness of the financial crisis that the country is currently in because when companies such as this fail, it can be understood that people truly cannot afford to buy things like nice shoes.
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