This week a very special guest speaker came to the fifth grade class. Greg, a vice president of the company Adidas, came and talked to us about what he does as a vice president of such a large company. As a vice president of a large company like Adidas, there are many responsibilities he has to take on. Keeping factories clean and safe is hard, especially when there are almost two thousand factories to take care of in China, India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Turkey. 80% of all Adidas’s products are made in those six countries. He and his team make sure the workers are happy and get the money they earned, that the factory is safe, and that there are no children under the age of sixteen working. If he finds any of theses things he may send them a letter saying that the owner of the factory has to fix the problem in a certain amount of time. If the owner doesn’t do what he was told, they get another letter saying that they have to do it. If they still don’t do it by the third time, Adidas will tell them they will not give them anymore work after a certain amount of time, so any raw materials already there can be produced into the product and so the workers will know that they won’t be employed in some time. If what he and his team find is very bad, then they will just stop production immediately and never work with the factory again. This is only a fraction of all that we learned from Greg about his job.
