The following is reprinted with permission from The Associated Press. © Copyright 1996 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Nike Says Group Will Have Chance To Review Asian Factories
By BOB BAUM AP Sports Writer
Sept. 17, 1996BEAVERTON, Ore. (AP) - Nike shareholders rejected a plan that would have forced an examination of working conditions at the shoe company's plants in Southeast Asia amid claims that the factories are sweatshops.
Nike chairman Phil Knight, however, said the company would invite an independent group within the next year to review conditions at the factories and make its findings public.
The resolution rejected by shareholders, to require an independent review of Nike's overseas factories, had been proposed by the United Methodist Church pension fund. The vote showed that most shareholders thought any such review should be done on Nike's timetable and terms.
"The factories are clean. They're well-lit and, as we've pointed out more than once, the workers in those factories receive double the minimum wage throughout Indonesia," Knight said.
Two members of Nike's board of directors, former Smith College President Jill Conway and Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson, just returned from a trip to tour factories in Indonesia and Vietnam.
"I did not go to satisfy any critics," Thompson said. "I went to satisfy myself as an employer at Nike. ... We saw some things that were not perfect. But I did not see things that I had heard about."
Outside Monday's meeting, members of the human rights group Global Exchange, who also had visited Indonesia, disputed Nike's claims. The group says workers at the plants are mistreated and underpaid.
"Nike's remarkable financial success is due at least in part to its policy of siting production in countries with sizable pools of desperate and therefore dirt-cheap labor," Global Exchange said in its report.
Knight acknowledged that a shipment of soccer balls Nike purchased in Pakistan this year was made by a subcontractor using child labor in "horrible conditions."
Soccer balls bought by Nike in the future "will not be stitched by child labor and they will be stitched in conditions that are well lit and neat," Knight said.
Shareholders also were told that quarterly revenue had topped $2 billion for the first time in Nike's history, and that future orders for the next five months were up a record 66 percent.
Nike in the News