Labor Activist Finds Abuse At Nike Plants In Vietnam Sneaker Manufacturer Launches Investigation Of Allegations

Teen-age girls paid 20 cents an hour to make $180 Nike sneakers are worked to exhaustion and fondled by their supervisors at Vietnam factories, a labor activist said Thursday.

“Supervisors humiliate women, force them to kneel, to stand in the hot sun, treating them like recruits in boot camp,” said Thuyen Nguyen, founder of Vietnam Labor Watch.

After a two-week inspection of plants in Vietnam that have contracts with the world’s most successful athletic apparel company, Nguyen issued a 12-page report detailing Third-World labor conditions.

A Nike spokeswoman said that, if true, such conditions are “appalling.” The company is investigating.

Nguyen said about 35,000 workers at five Vietnamese plants - more than 90 percent of them young women - put in 12-hour days making Nike shoes. Though labor costs amount to less than $2 a pair, the shoes retail for up to $180 in the United States.

The Vietnamese workers earn $1.60 a day - less than the $2 or so it costs to buy three meals a day, said Nguyen, a 33-year-old investment banker.

“Nike clearly is not controlling its contractors, and the company has known about this for a long time,” he said.

The Vietnamese-born Nguyen returned to his homeland after hearing of the alleged abuses last year. He found supervisors at the plants sexually harassed the women, some as young as 15.

“Even in broad daylight, in front of other workers, these supervisors try to touch, rub or grab their buttocks or chests,” the report said.

In one plant, workers were allowed to go to the bathroom only once and to take two drinks of water during an eight-hour period.

At another Nike contractor, the Taiwanese firm Pou Chen Vietnam Enterprise, a floor manager forced 56 women to run around the plant in the hot sun as punishment for wearing non-regulation shoes, Nguyen said. Twelve had to be hospitalized.

Nike spokeswoman McLain Ramsey said that the manager accused of making women run laps has been suspended, and that an accounting firm has been hired to inspect the factories for workplace abuse.

“What is Nike’s responsibility? These are not our factories,” she said. “But we have put in the time and energy and effort to make what are in many cases good factories into better factories.”

“It’s a slow process,” she added.