Nike Narratives

The Sweatshop Story⁶

Jurgis talked lightly about work, because he was young.
They told him stories about the breaking down of men, there in the stockyards of Chicago, and of what had happened to them afterwards—stories to make your flesh creep.

-- Upton Sinclair, The Jungle⁷

Lap worked in the Samyang shoe factory in 1996. She was twenty-eight years old. Similar to 25,000 other workers in five Vietnam shoe factories, she worked six days a week for about $40 a month. Like her co-workers, mostly women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight, she was part of a workforce hired by Korean subcontractors to produce shoes for Nike, a million shoes a month. Overtime work, well beyond the legal limit, was part of her world. “You have to meet the quota before you go home,” she lamented.

The noise levels were high and the concentrations of toluene, a chemical that wreaks havoc on reproductive organs, were higher still. Some women fainted from exhaustion, heat, or just poor nutrition as they struggled through an eight-hour shift on the “boot camp assembly line[s].”⁸ The factories operated twenty hours a day and were staffed with one doctor and two nurses for every 6,000 employees. Workers were permitted to go to the bathroom only once, though they were allowed two drinks of water during that period. Drinking water and using the toilet were controlled by a card or hat system in which a supervisor had to first assign a card or hat to a worker. Only those women who wore the prescribed hat or carried the required card could avail themselves of such privileges. While women could not bring their lunch, they could buy lunch at company prices high enough to deprive them of much of their daily wage. “I have lost my strength,” said Lap, “and some weight, 17 pounds.” She weighed eighty-five pounds.

Behind the factory walls and closed doors, there was abuse— physical, psychological, and sexual. On one occasion, forty-five women were made to kneel on the ground with their hands in the air for twenty-five minutes. “They treat us like animals,” one woman complained. Once, on International Women’s Day, fifty-six women workers were punished; they were forced to run around the factory in the hot sun. Some suffered shock and fainted, while twelve others were carried off by their co-workers to the hospital emergency room. Ironically, on that day most companies in Vietnam gave flowers to female workers. On yet another occasion, punishment for worker lapses took on a different form: women were lined up by their supervisors and hit in the face and the head. “The physical pain didn’t last long,” recalled Lap’s co-worker Twi, “but the pain I feel in my heart will never disappear.”

Before Lap’s experiences in 1996, workers in Djakarta endured a similar fate. After CBS News exposed their plight in 1993, Nike moved its operations to Vietnam. Things had not improved much by the time CBS’s Roberta Baskin interviewed Lap and her co-workers in 1996. Nor had they improved much by the time that Vietnam Labor Watch issued its incriminating 1997 report about life in Nike factories. True, Nike had relatively good codes of conduct. But they were honored more in the breach. It was also true that Phil Knight, Nike’s CEO, had said in January, 1996, that Nike takes “full responsibility for working conditions wherever its products are produced.”⁹ But here, too, the promise was never actually realized, at least not in the eyes of Nike’s critics. One of those critics was a syndicated columnist determined to expose Nike’s practices to public examination.

Nike executives “are not bothered by the cries of the oppressed.”¹⁰ So wrote New York Times columnist Bob Herbert in one of three 1996 columns he authored blasting Nike.¹¹ Reports of inhumane labor practices abroad drew his editorial ire. The American side of this story begins there, with a newspaper man exercising his First Amendment rights by holding a multi-national company’s feet to the editorial fire. Before the flames could cool, and in much the same spirit, CBS’ 48 Hours followed suit with its own documented news report filed by Roberta Baskin. Herbert’s columns and Baskin’s exposé set things in motion for more international attention, more bad press. The news stories fired up human-rights activists like Vietnam Labor Watch, which in March, 1997, issued a report highly critical of Nike’s labor practices in Vietnam.¹² The report, based on a six-month investigation of Vietnam shoes factories and interviews with Vietnamese workers, further described and documented “appalling” conditions at Nike plants. Among other things, the report called on President Clinton to intervene. By April, 1998, the situation had become so bad that Footwear News declared: “Like a mutant zombie from an old B-movie, the controversy surrounding Nike’s overseas factory workers refuses to die.”¹³

Nike denied the charges, vigorously. It launched major campaigns to counter the allegations; it launched others to remedy any existing problems.¹⁴ At least, so it said. Meanwhile, the world’s news media rushed to find yet more incriminating evidence of sweatshop practices.¹⁵ Reporters from the Oregonian¹⁶ to Mother Jones¹⁷ jumped on the sweatshop-news bandwagon. One of those reporters, Steven Greenhouse of the New York Times, later filed a long story about Nike’s labor practices in Vietnam. In that article, a Nike spokesperson was quoted as saying, “Nike workers earn superior wages and manufacture product under superior conditions.”¹⁸ That story caught Marc Kasky’s eye. First, it angered him, and then it inspired him to go after Nike.