PRESS RELEASE Contacts: Jeff Ballinger, 201.768.8120, 768.0715

Oct 18, 1997

 This week 6,000 shoe factory workers, mostly women, at a Nike producer in Indonesia struck for three days over severance pay dispute. The strike turned violence when workers chased down and beat the personnel managers at the Nike-contracted factory, P.T. Garuda Indawa. Within the same week, a Canadian reporter who just returned from Jakarta released a first hand report of Indonesian workers criticizing Andrew Young's Nike whitewash. Another embarrassing moment for Nike occurred when local Vietnamese police started an investigation on its largest shoe factory there for making pornographic objects.

 At the same time, the International Nike Awareness day has been gathering momentum with protests in 12 countries and 50 U.S cities on October 18 1997.

 Facing these pressures, Nike once again tried to provide misinformation to the public about its labor practices and released preliminary findings of a study commissioned by the company indicating that Nike factory workers are getting more than adequate pay. The details of this study were sketchy at best. Its methodology and data backing such claims were not released for public examination. Without providing the details, Nike makes it impossible to verify and to duplicate the results or to determine whether the research methodology was biased.

 Vietnam Labor Watch also interviewed Vietnamese Nike workers in March 97 and found that workers could not live on the basic wage without the forced overtime wage. Similar conclusion was reached by another comprehensive study done by the International Labor Organization carried out by Mary C. White (now with CDC). The ILO study found that 88 percent of Indonesian Nike factory workers who were earning only the minimum wage were malnourished. This study was done using 10 Indonesian physicians who tracked the health of two hundred women workers for two years.

 Given that Asian Nike factory workers work on average 70-100 hours of forced overtime per month including Sundays, it is then possible to earn enough money to live with this many debilitating overtime hours. And just as expected, the Nike-commissioned wage study includes overtime wages. This inclusion demonstrates that the Nike wage study does not address the real issue of a living wage for its factory workers. The Nike protest has been asking that Nike pay its factory workers a living wage on a 60 hour work week as defined by President Clinton's Apparel Industry Partnership Code of Conducts. Nike is a member of this partnership and therefore Nike should at least try to conform to a Code of Conduct the company has undersigned.

 Nike Protest/Press Conference at NikeTown NYC, October 18, 12:30 - 1:15 PM Featuring: Jim Hightower