You don’t see stuff like this every day:

It turns out that factory workers — not the activists labeled “preachy” by one expert, and not the Nike executives so wounded by criticism — get the last laugh. Villagers who “went out,” as Chinese say, for what critics described as dead-end manufacturing jobs are sending money back and returning with savings, building houses and starting businesses.

Workers who stitched shoes for Nike Inc. and apparel for Columbia Sportswear Co., both based near Beaverton, are fueling a wave of prosperity in rural China. The boom has a solid feel, with villagers paying cash for houses.

This flies directly in the face of the accepted wisdom of the U.S. media, which includes:

1. Foreign companies go to China because of low wages and/or poor environmental laws.
2. Foreign companies in China always adopt local standards, which include low wages and unsafe working conditions.
3. Foreign companies in China try to cover up information about their China factories because the facts are ugly.

Now, I’m the first to admit that those three statements are correct some of the time. Absolutely true. However, somewhere along the line, it became cool to write stories about these problems, which has led to a perception that this is descriptive of all foreign factories here. That of course is incorrect and highly misleading.

So when the article excerpted above, from the Portland Oregonian, takes such a different tack, it is worth notice. But why did the Oregonian dare to be different? Some sort of crusade for the truth?

Perhaps. I suspect, however, that Nike’s presence in Portland, and that company’s past PR problems with respect to China factory working conditions, motivated the piece. That being said, this is not a Nike apologia, and is in fact quite balanced:

Improved living standards don’t negate criticism by activists who castigated the outsourcing industry, especially Nike, a 1990s lightning rod for allegations of low pay and onerous working conditions. Abuses continue in some plants, especially those unconnected to international brands.

But longtime activists acknowledge that the sweatshop issue has lost steam, at least concerning China. Conditions and wages have improved, says Jeffrey Ballinger, a critic who still dismisses corporate-responsibility programs — in which Nike, Columbia and other companies set standards and inspect factories — as spin.

Kudos to the Oregonian for neither accepting conventional wisdom nor writing a puff piece on a local corporate giant.