Trond Andresen
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NIKE:
STATE-OF-THE-ART COMPANY RUNS ON SWEATSHOP ECONOMICS
Bob Herbert, New York Times
Think of it as a pyramid of exploitation. In the
comfort zone at the very top is a stable of uncaring
multimillionaire celebrities -- Michael Jordan, Andre
Agassi, Spike Lee -- and their guru, the fabulously
successful founder and chief executive of Nike, Inc.,
Philip Knight.
At the bottom, shouldering the crushing weight of
Knight's multinational enterprise, are the legions of
young Asians, mostly women, who work like slaves to
turn out Nike's products, and the media-mesmerized
young people in the West who somehow have been
persuaded to shell out up to $140 for a pair of
sneakers.
More than a third of Nike's products are
manufactured in Indonesia, a human rights backwater
where the minimum wage was deliberately set below the
subsistence level to attract foreign investment.
Workers at sweatshops with Nike contracts are
grudgingly paid $2.20 a day. It took four years of
sometimes violent struggle to get the minimum wage
that high.
Now consider Knight. I asked Nike what he was
worth. After hemming and hawing about such
incidentals as his $864,583 salary and $787,500 bonus
in fiscal 1995, a representative got to the real deal
-- his Nike stock. Hold onto your sneakers.
Knight's stock is valued at a breathtaking $4.5
billion.
And, of course, he wants more. With labor costs
skyrocketing in Indonesia, Nike is moving into
Vietnam. I asked a Nike spokesman if he knew what
the minimum wage was there. He said it was 331,000
Vietnamese dollars per month. He said he didn't know
how much that was in American dollars.
I do. It's $30 a month.
What's next? Employees who'll work for a bowl of
gruel?
Philip Knight has an extraordinary racket going
for him. There is absolutely no better way to get
rich than to exploit both the worker and the
consumer. If you can get your product made for next
to nothing, and get people to buy it at exorbitant
prices, you get to live at the top of the pyramid.
Nike pays Michael Jordan $20 million a year to
help create the demand for its products. Agassi
reportedly has a $100 million, 10-year deal to do the
same. Spike Lee is paid big bucks to star in and
direct Nike commercials. If these stars, or any of
Nike's other highly paid pitch people, are concerned
about the wretched origins of the company's products,
they haven't let on.
Jordan said, in essence, that it wasn't his
problem. It is up to Nike, he said last week, "to do
what they can to make sure everything is correctly
done."
He added: "I don't know the complete situation.
Why should I? I'm trying to do my job. Hopefully,
Nike will do the right thing."
That is the attitude that prevails throughout the
Nike enterprise. Everyone is cloaked in layer upon
layer of deniability. Everybody wants to partake of
the riches, but no one is willing to take
responsibility for the fundamental fact that so many
of Nike's products are made by workers who are not
paid a living wage, and who often have to endure the
humiliating abuses of brutal bosses and repressive
governments.
Nike's subcontractors actually hire the workers
who make the product. But the subcontractors are
agents of Nike's will, and Nike is ever on the alert
for a new situation, a new country, in which workers
can be paid even less. That is why it has
established a foothold in Vietnam.
When I asked Nike spokesman Keith Peters if the
company planned to expand its Vietnam operations, he
said yes.
With a wage scale of $30 dollars a month, who
could resist?
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