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Nike's Foot Soldiers; $500 Million Profit, 20-Cents-An-Hour Wages
April 6, 1997; Sunday
EditorialIt's getting to be a tired refrain. First comes an expose of conditions at Nike's manufacturing operations in Vietnam, then a promise from the American athletic-shoe giant that it is addressing the problem.
When is Nike going to clean up its act?
The latest outcry comes from Thuyen Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American businessman who runs a financial-services company in Hoboken. He recently completed a two-week inspection of Vietnamese factories that make products for Nike and was disgusted by the conditions he found, ranging from physical abuse and pathetically low wages to inadequate health and safety practices.
Mr. Nguyen says he saw girls as young as 15 being worked to exhaustion, and getting paid 20 cents an hour to make $ 180 sneakers. At one Nike contractor's plant, workers could go to the bathroom only once and take two drinks of water during an eight-hour shift. At another, a supervisor forced 56 women to run laps around the plant in the hot sun as punishment for wearing non-regulation shoes. Twelve fainted and were taken to a hospital. Mr. Nguyen's conclusion:"Nike is clearly not controlling its contractors, and the company has known about this for a long time."
Nike sees things differently. The company says it has been working hard to eliminate such abuses. After reports of sweatshop conditions at its Asian contractors factories last year, Nike hired Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson and former Smith College President Jill Conway to inspect the facilities. They reported that conditions weren't perfect but said they didn't see any serious problems. And in the wake of a scathing expose by CBS "60 Minutes" in October, Nike announced that it hired former U.N. ambassador Andrew Young to review its code of conduct and to work with human-rights groups and labor groups to make sure that contractors comply with it.
As for Mr. Nguyen's charges, a Nike spokeswoman says that workers get paid the minimum wage and that Nike is doing what it can to root out bad supervisors. She says Nike's own monitors had notified the company immediately about the incident in which the supervisor forced the employees to run laps in the hot sun, and he was promptly suspended. She says the company wants to hear about problems, no matter how isolated, so it can correct them, and points out that Mr. Nguyen was inspecting the factories at Nike's invitation.
That's true, but the company also tried to keep him on a short leash. Nike provided him with scheduled tours to several factories, when managers were on their best behavior. It was only after Mr. Nguyen, a former vice president at Bankers Trust, talked to employees off-site and made follow-up surprise inspections that he found the violations.
Most significant, Mr. Nguyen also visited non-Nike shoe factories in Vietnam and found that they offered workers a living wage and decent conditions. He says Nike should do the same. Is that asking too much from a company that made $ 553 million in profits last year?
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