I would like to deal with Mr. Kittridge’s claim (“Claims won’t keep Adidas off my feet,” April 10) that “as much as we would like to moralize the situation, there is no feasible reason to abandon a company like Adidas for labor violations.” At the root of Mr. Kittridge’s article is the argument that the public is powerless against the forces of big business.

It is a deeply flawed belief in my opinion — nonetheless one that is widely appealed to — that one is justified in committing an action solely on the basis that if they do not do it, someone else will. Why is this wrong? This position assumes Adidas or large corporations are static entities “out there,” separate from the actions of the people. However, the belief that the consumer is left powerless in the wake of large corporations such as Adidas or Nike, who fail to address their glaring human rights violations “because they don’t have to,” is true only insofar as one succumbs to the role of a petty and insignificant consumer.

I grant that in the modern age the power structures of big business are daunting to say the least. Twenty-two of the 30 Supreme Court business cases last term were “decided unanimously, or with only one or two dissenting votes” in favor of big business; lawyers for Public Citizen, a consumer rights litigation group founded by Ralph Nader, have quit simply because they were “tired of losing”; and the Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business group, has “spent more than $21 million lobbying the White House, Congress and regulatory agencies on legal matters,” according to the New York Times magazine. It is no wonder an individual or a university can seem insignificant.

However, it is only through people’s movements against these power structures that change occurs, as they are fundamentally dependent on the consent of the people for their perpetuation. For it is certainly not in the interests of corporations to do things they “don’t have to” unless there is market incentive to do so. With 70 percent of the U.S. GDP accounted for by consumer spending, the people do have a voice. Therefore, to capitulate in the face of Adidas’ great power is a misunderstanding of the relationship between large producers and the consuming masses.

The ideal that change must come from some God-given public interest group with great enough lobbying capabilities to overcome those of big business, and not “a licensing committee at a state university” does not apply. Instead, it must come from the bottom up, as the saying goes; just as a house cannot stand on an unstable foundation, neither can businesses endure the loss of their patrons.

And so, the belief that “abandoning Adidas will only result in acquiring a new contract with an equally shady company … like rearranging the seat assignments on a prison bus,” despite the witty simile, is flawed. If UW demands — that is, if the students force the demand — for our contract with Adidas to be cut and the future contract with whomever to meet our human rights standards, reality may be so. The power structures are not static, distant entities. They are dynamic and close and change only when the people who support their continuation demand change.�

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Gregory Reed

UW sophomore, physics

[email protected]