LABOUR-ASIA: U.S. Educators Turn Up Noses At Nike Money

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

WASHINGTON, Jul 15 1996 (IPS) - Uneasy about accepting donations from corporations whose names are linked to child labour in Asia, educators in one U.S. state are considering turning down a hefty donation from a sports-shoe giant.

Authorities in the northwestern state of Oregon are in dire need of money to rehabilitate an ailing public school system, but they are debating whether to accept a half-a-million-dollar donation from Nike Corporation.

“Nike has contributed this money so my children can have a better education, but at whose expense?” said Joseph Tam, one of the members of Oregon’s School Board.

Disturbed by reports about how women and children in Indonesia and Pakistan are abused and exploited in factories run by Nike subcontractors, Tam has held his position on the donation issue despite pressure from his colleagues.

“You just cannot look the other way,” he told The Oregonian, a local newspaper. “We can’t send a message to our children that you are better than the children in Pakistan who stitch soccer balls for Nike for just six cents an hour.”

The school board, which needs an estimated 17 million dollars to improve public schooling in Oregon, will decide in the next two weeks whether or not to accept the Nike money.

In the meantime, labour activists here say that Tam’s refusal to accept “dirty money” has already intensified the nationwide campaign against Nike products.

“Struggles previously known only to a limited number of activists have now become a household word,” said Jeff Bellinger, the founder of Press for Change (PfC), a labour advocacy group that has organised a series of “Boycott Nike” campaigns.

Bellinger, who has spent several years in monitoring and researching labour conditions in Indonesia, says most of the Nike subcontractors avoid paying the official minimum wage, oppose unionisation of workers, and force employees to work overtime without benefits.

Although immense pressure from international labour rights groups forced the Indonesian government to raise the minimum wage from 1.30 to 2.25 dollars an hour in 1994, thousands of workers are still paid far less than the minimum wage, according to PFC.

Activists say young women in the production units suffer physical abuse and sexual harassment and are threatened and fired when they seek empowerment through unionising.

“When workers make mistakes or slow down due to exhaustion, they are often verbally abused. Sometimes they are physically assaulted,” says Bellinger who is equally critical of the Indonesian authorities for failing to effectively enforce existing labour laws.

“Many of the factories’ line supervisors are retired military officers,” he said. “This is one of the reasons why the system is so brutal over there.” He adds that authorities often fail to take action against the subcontractors found to be in violation of labour laws.

In Indonesia, most of the Nike subcontrators are from Taiwan and South Korea who moved to Jakarta and West Java in the 1980s in search of the cheap labour they had lost in their respective countries as a result of a growing labour rights and democratic movement.

Critics say Nike also uses subcontractors in Vietnam, where the minimum wage is 30 dollars a month.

Nike itself earned 3.5 billion dollars in sales in 1995, with a net profit soaring to 350 million dollars. By contrast, an average Nike worker in Indonesia earns less than two dollars an hour.

Indonesian activists say an adult needs at least 4.5 dollars an hour to meet his or her basic needs.

Despite an ongoing campaign by consumer, labour, and human rights groups, Nike remains unmoved on the question of independent monitoring by labour rights groups in Indonesia. The Campaign for Labour Rights, another U.S.-based group, says it recently asked Nike to negotiate an adequate system of independent human rights monitoring but failed to get any positive response.

Nike says it has its own code of conduct and a monitoring system that works well under Ernst and Young, a private accounting firm it hired in late 1994.

Critics disagree.

“Their code of conduct has been little more than a charade,” said Bellinger. “It continues to generate huge rewards for Nike but leaves workers in the unenviable position of fighting greedy contractors backed by a corrupt and authoritarian regime.”

“Corporate-contracted monitoring is not independent monitoring,” said another activist. “True human rights monitoring is done by human rights groups situated in the country where production take place.”

Some six months ago, the Canada-based Catholic organisation Peace and Development volunteered to monitor conditions to verify Nike’s “code of conduct” at the facilities run by the subcontractors. When the group was rebuffed, it collected more than 86,000 signatures for a petition urging Nike to reconsider the decision.

The only way to stop the abuses, say activists, is to have independent monitoring by Indonesian human rights groups.

“If Nike has nothing to hide, then they should be happy to accept such monitoring,” said Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, a U.S.-based, non-profit research group.