Nike was GoodWorks's first big client, its first chance to send corporate America evidence that GoodWorks did, from the businessman's point of view, good work. And when, four months after Knight's announcement, Young's firm published its seventy-five-page, full-color report on Nike's Asian operations, the client certainly had reason to feel it had gotten its money's worth. There was, Young had concluded, "no evidence or pattern of widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers" in the twelve operations he examined. To hammer home the point, GoodWorks packed the report with photographs--many taken by Young himself--of smiling workers playing a guitar on their break and relaxing around a television in their dorm.
The New York Times and other major newspapers, touting the GoodWorks report. And the good news was hailed in the unpaid media, too. "In several ways," gushed The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Young's hometown paper, "the job is classic Andy Young--a man who ... has spent his life bridging the gaps between rich and poor, black and white, business, government and the international community."
The report lists consultants who were never consulted and includes photos of union representatives who, it turns out, were not union officials. Young deliberately avoided the most obvious and controversial question--whether Nike paid its employees fair wages.
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Wondering what became of the National Summit on Africa after its successful conference in Washington, D.C. last year, and the drafting of a "national plan of action" for Africa? The National Summit is now "The Africa Society", a permanent organization chaired by former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young.
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March 9, 2001
Web posted at: 6:18 PM EST (2318 GMT)
ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Former President Bill Clinton on Friday referred questions about President Bush's proposed tax cuts to his wife, the U.S. senator from New York.
Clinton was in Atlanta, Georgia, for a U.S. foreign policy symposium sponsored by Andrew Young, the city's former mayor and ex-U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Following a meeting with Young, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and members of the family of the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.