I am not pro or against as i don't have all the info but there are two sides to every story. My basic understanding was that people working in Nike factories almost always got more than the average wage in the country the factory is located in. As pointed out below, if the conditions weren't better than those that the workers had before the factory came, why would they go and work for them. Obviously compared to 1st world countries they aren't as good but you can't blame Tiger Woods for that.

Anyway, below is a snippet of the pro side of the debate if anyone wants to waste time reading.

As of 1997, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs said, "My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops, but that there are too few."[4] Sachs and other proponents of sweatshops cite the economic theory of comparative advantage, which states that international trade will, in the long run, make some parties better off. The theory holds that developing countries improve their condition by doing something that they do "better" than industrialized nations (in this case, they charge less but do the same work). Developed countries will also be better off because their workers can shift to jobs that they do better. These are jobs that some economists say usually entail a level of education and training that is exceptionally difficult to obtain in the developing world. Thus, economists like Sachs say, developing countries get factories and jobs that they would not otherwise . The catch with this occurs when developing countries try to increase wages because sweatshops tend to just get moved on to a new state that is welcoming. This leads to a situation where states often will not try and get increased wages for sweatshop workers for fear of losing investment and boosted GDP.

When asked about the working condition in sweatshops, proponents say that although wages and working conditions may appear inferior by the standards of developed nations, they are actually improvements over what the people in developing countries had before. It is said that if jobs in such factories did not improve their workers' standard of living, those workers would not have taken the jobs when they appeared. It is also often pointed out that, unlike in the industrialized world, the sweatshops are not replacing high-paying jobs. Rather, sweatshops offer an improvement over subsistence farming and other back-breaking tasks, or even prostitution, trash picking, or starvation by unemployment.[4][5] This is the case since most under-developed countries have weak labor markets and little (if any) economic growth.

The absence of the work opportunities provided by sweatshops can quickly lead to malnourishment or starvation. After the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Asia, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution." UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children study found these alternative jobs "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production."[6]

Critics point out that sweatshop workers don't earn enough money to buy the products that they make, even though such items are often commonplace goods such as t-shirts, shoes, and toys. However, defenders of such practices respond that critics of sweatshops are comparing wages paid in one country to prices set in another. In 2003, Honduran garment factory workers were paid US$0.24 for each $50 Sean John sweatshirt, $0.15 for each long-sleeved t-shirt, and only five cents for each short-sleeved shirt – less than one-half of one percent of the retail price.[7] Although the wages paid to workers in Honduras would hardly be enough to live in the United States, it could very well be enough to live in Honduras, where prices are much lower. The $0.15 that a Honduran worker earned for the long-sleeved t-shirt was equal in purchasing power to $3.00 in the United States.

Writer Johan Norberg, a proponent of market economics, points out an irony:[8]

“ (sweatshop critics) say that we shouldn't buy from countries like Vietnam because of its labor standards, they've got it all wrong. They're saying: "Look, you are too poor to trade with us. And that means that we won't trade with you. We won't buy your goods until you're as rich as we are." That's totally backwards. These countries won't get rich without being able to export goods. ”

Penn & Teller in their Wal-Mart episode interview Benajmin Powell, a Professor of Economics from San Jose State University, who argues out that sweatshop-type jobs in a developing country are often a significant improvement over other employment options (e.g. subsistence farming) and points out that the United States went through its own period of sweatshop labor during its development.[9]

In an article about a Nike sweatshop in Vietnam, Johan Norberg wrote, "But when I talk to a young Vietnamese woman, Tsi-Chi, at the factory, it is not the wages she is most happy about. Sure, she makes five times more than she did, she earns more than her husband, and she can now afford to build an extension to her house. But the most important thing, she says, is that she doesn't have to work outdoors on a farm any more... Farming means 10 to 14 hours a day in the burning sun or the intensive rain... The most persistent demand Nike hears from the workers is for an expansion of the factories so that their relatives can be offered a job as well."[10]

According to a November 2001 BBC article, in the previous two months, 100,000 sweatshop workers in Bangladesh had lost their sweatshop jobs. The sweatshop workers wanted their jobs back, and the Bangladeshi government was planning to lobby the U.S. government to repeal its trade barriers so the sweatshop workers could have their jobs back.[11]

A 2005 article in the Christian Science Monitor states, "For example, in Honduras, the site of the infamous Kathy Lee Gifford sweatshop scandal, the average apparel worker earns $13.10 per day, yet 44 percent of the country's population lives on less than $2 per day... In Cambodia, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Honduras, the average wage paid by a firm accused of being a sweatshop is more than double the average income in that country's economy."[12]

On three do*****ented occasions, there were increases in childhood prostitution. In the early 1990s, there was a closure of several sweatshops in Vietnam, and as a result, several thousand Vietnamese children who had been working in those sweatshops ended up working as prostitutes, turning to crime, or starving to death. In the mid-1990s, an Nepalese carpet manufacturing sweatshops to close, which resulted in thousands of Nepalese girls turning to prostitution. A anti-sweatshop protest in the 1990s also resulted in the closure of several Pakistani sweatshops, which caused those Pakistani children to turn to prostitution.[13]

Defenders of sweatshops argue that every country starts out poor, and that the emergence of sweatshops in a country is a sign that the country has started to climb up the ladder of economic growth. These defenders of sweatshops cite Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan as recent examples of countries that benefited from having sweatshops.