Hacker News Reader

Comment by CarelessExpert | Hacker News Reader

> Economics are immune to guilt ... Regardless of the solution, moralizing is ineffective.

I'm just gonna quickly point out: This is simply not true and I'm surprised you'd make the claim.

PR is a huge deal for most companies, and public shaming through press coverage is a very effective way to raise awareness of issues and push for change. Nike, for example, didn't address issues of sweatshop labour out of the goodness of their hearts, nor was it technology or government action that caused them to reform their practices. It was pure, simple public pressure that did the job.

View on HN

Those are exceptions, not the rule. PR's importance is very variable. Nike, as a luxury brand, has to care what people think about it. People seeing it as a 'good' brand is the core of their business. This is simply not true for 99% of companies. Most companies on the planet could get all the bad PR in the world, and even if, by some miracle, you remembered their name, you wouldn't even know when you buying their products.

Even when you only consider public brands, doing bad things, more often than not, is just ignored, especially if they aren't a luxury brand trying to sell based on perception (Nestle).

Quite.

Case in point: Budget Airlines.

Ryanair does everything short of punch you in the face. O'Leary literally laughs at his own customers.

And he can. Because what they going to do?

well the thing is, I flew with ryanair multiple times and never had problems. well I had, but basically I was too stupid and made a small mistake inside my name and it costed me like 10€ for the call! (yeah they take like 2€ per minute for support calls) but well you get what you ask a cheap flight with exactly the details you booked. but you can fly tons of locations, even once that bigger airlines have cancelled long time ago because they aren't worth it.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm somehow paying Nestlé for the air I breathe. They are impossible to avoid.

Did Nike address anything? I assumed everyone was still manufacturing in poorer countries due to more lax labor and environmental laws.

They might run some ads how they changed suppliers or something, but people are not going to pay double or triple for clothing so a factory worker in Bangladesh can get a better quality of life at work. People will not even pay more so their neighbors and countryman can have a better quality of life.

No, but they will pay 2% more to fix something if it means 5% of customers don't write them off as "awful, unethical, big corp" and not buy stuff from them.

There are plenty of examples of companies that did or did not react to negative PR, but the effect is in the statistics, not the individual anecdata.

What are the statistics? All of these companies are still contracting out their labor to factories in countries with lower labor and environmental standards.

Nike chooses not employ any laborers for a reason. I do not see them advertising that the people making the clothes badged with the Nike symbol are working maximum 8 hour days, or maximum 40 hours per week, or getting vacation days.

It is all prose. The sweatshop conditions and disparities in quality of life at work between developed and developing countries have been known for 30+ years. The only thing causing improvements for the laborers in developing countries is increased demand for their labor, not some unverifiable PR response by Nike.

They are still manufacturing in those poorer countries. But I believe they do take some effort now to inspect and vet places where their shoes are made and make sure that children aren't working there.

From what I've seen, bad PR forces a company to make some bullshit changes that rarely, if ever, address the actual issue.

"Due to the allegations of sexual misconduct, we have forced everyone in the company to go through mandatory training"

"Sorry for polluting the river, we've donated a fraction of our annual profits to a non-profit and we'll do a half-assed job of cleaning up the mess even though the damage has already been done"

"In response to the recent report of terrible worker conditions, we are making changes at these locations to offer mental health services and an additional day off each year, we will continue to evaluate the needs of the employees and make changes where necessary"

People get outraged, they see an apology and some half-assed attempt to put the issue to rest and then people forget about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com