ESPN Exposes NIKE
April 12, 1998On April 2nd and April 11, ESPN's "Outside the Lines" ran an hour-long show on Nike and Reebok sweatshop abuses in Vietnam. This program offers powerful documentation that Nike has not cleaned up its act.
Nike gave ESPN access to only one of its factories in Vietnam. At the company's Tae Kwang Vina plant outside Ho Chi Minh City, 8,800 workers make 20,000 pairs of shoes a day.
The entire workforce, including managers, was alerted the day before that ESPN would be filming in the factory. Even so, in the presence of ESPN crews, managers twice physically abused workers. Just before the end of the day's shift, a female supervisor was observed slapping an employee sharply across the forearm for not spreading glue slowly enough. Earlier, in the stitching department, a supervisor was seen angrily throwing a stitched upper portion of a sneaker at a worker from a distance of 10 feet.
If Nike's contractors abuse workers this way when they know they are being watched, what can their behavior be when no film crews are present?
The crew also interviewed a 25-year-old female worker who - just a week prior - was grabbed around the collar and hit on the head by a male Korean guard as she departed a Nike factory during a shift change.
When asked to account for these instances of abuse, Nike executive Tom Clarke kept talking about these events being taken out of context. He failed to explain what sort of context might justify physically abusing workers.
The program also included information on wages and conditions at Reebok factories in Vietnam. According to one Reebok worker who was interviewed, the Taiwanese-owned company she works for has made her and others show up early for work without getting paid for it. Reebok concedes that it once asked workers to punch in early but contends that it has since discontinued the practice. Besides being cheated out of salary, the worker stated that the company also paid only her $45 a month, despite a contract that calls for to be paid $47. "We want to protest but we're afraid of being fired (because) if we get fired, then what?"
While the average annual salary of workers in foreign-owned shoe factories is only $564 U.S - $10.85 per week, $1.81 per day, 23 cents an hour - it complies with the minimum wage in a country desperate for foreign investment. However, the average worker in Ho Chi Minh City makes $800 a year. Pepsi built a bottling plant in Vietnam six years ago and pays its entry-level workers, such as bottle cleaners, about $960. Although many Vietnamese earn no more than $300, the cost of living in rural areas is far below that in the cities. Shoe factories are located in expensive urban settings. Nike disingenuously compares its wages to the annual income of rural agricultural workers.
"The compensation for workers is not adequate and fair compared to the profit that this company can make on a pair of shoes," said Madame Khanh, a labor leader in Vietnam who has sought support in the U.S. for her cause.
Workers in the Nike and Reebok factories breath a toxic mix of chemicals with only useless cotton masks for "protection." Dara O'Rourke, an environmental consultant for the United Nations and human rights activist who has visited several Vietnamese shoe factories, says: "Wearing a cotton mask to protect yourself against hazardous solvents is like wearing flip-flops in the NBA," she said. "It just doesn't work."
Nike says that it is working with its subcontractors to offer an environment that protects the workers' health and safety. Health concerns were raised, however, when an inspection report that was prepared for Nike was leaked in November to the New York Times. Ernst & Young found that workers at one factory were exposed to a chemical that exceeded legal standards by 177 times in parts of the plant and that 77 percent of the employees suffered from respiratory problems. Although Nike says those readings are impossible, it was Nike's own accounting firm, Ernst & Young, which documented the readings.
Toluene, the chemical cited in the report, is known to cause damage to the liver, kidneys and central nervous system. Female workers, most of whom are between the ages of 16 and 28, told "Outside the Lines" that they worry about not being able to have babies. "We don't know that toluene causes infertility, which is what they're worried about," said Dr. Howard Frumpkin of Emory University. "But toluene certainly causes a host of other reproductive problems, like birth defects, low birth-weight babies, and developmental disabilities in the children."
The Ernst & Young report also found that workers in one Nike factory with skin or breathing problems had not been transferred to departments free of chemicals and that more than half the workers who dealt with dangerous chemicals did not wear protective masks or gloves. "Outside the Lines" had ample footage of workers coming into direct skin contact with highly toxic chemicals.
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