Watchdog Group Blasts Nike, Reebok Overseas Factories Supplying Shoes Accused Of Violations; Young’s Asia Tour Belittled
Subcontractors making shoes in China for Nike and Reebok use workers as young as 13 who earn as little as 10 cents an hour toiling up to 17 hours daily in enforced silence, independent observers charge.
The motive of the two American companies is: “Where in the world can we find the cheapest labor - even if it’s in the most repressed circumstances?” said Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange, a watchdog group that provided a study of the Chinese factories to The Associated Press.
Nike has used human rights activist Andrew Young to “whitewash” abusive working conditions not only in China, but also in Vietnam and Indonesia, said Benjamin, co-director of the private, nonprofit San Francisco-based group, which has an office in New York.
Young insists he saw no sweatshop conditions when he toured plants making Nike shoes. Nike said the watchdog group’s report was erroneous. Reebok said it monitors work records at plants making its shoes.
Nike, the world’s No. 1 athletic shoe manufacturer, has been accused by human rights groups of running overseas sweatshops.
Global Exchange is acting for two human rights organizations in Hong Kong that interviewed scores of workers from four major sports shoe subcontractors in China’s southern Pearl River Delta. The four factories, which employ at least 80,000 people, were monitored in 1995 and again in June and July 1997.
The subcontractors at all four sites are violating not only “the most basic tenets of Chinese labor law, they’re also flagrantly violating (Nike’s and Reebok’s) own codes of conduct,” which the companies created to regulate their practices overseas, Chan Ka Wai, assistant director of Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, said.
The 30-year-old private, nonprofit group wrote the report with Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Centre. The two groups are funded by churches and private donations worldwide.
At the Wellco plant in Dongguan County near Hong Kong, owned by a Korean subcontractor for Nike, people as young as 13 reportedly were doing sewing and cutting work, workers said.
Chinese labor law says no child under 16 may work in a factory, the report said.
Researchers said talking during work was not allowed, with violators fined $1.20 to $3.60, according to the report.
It said that at the nearby Taiwanese-owned Nority plant that makes Reebok shoes, workers were paid only $1.20 to $1.45 a day, in violation of the Dongguan minimum wage requirement of about $1.90 for an eight-hour day.
And Nority employees routinely worked 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, the human rights groups said. Besides the regular hours, they reportedly put in two to five hours of forced overtime, in violation of Chinese law mandating a 44-hour week. Anyone who refuses overtime could be fined, docked an entire day’s pay or even fired, the report said.
The biggest of the four plants is Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings Co. Ltd. in Dongguan, which employs about 50,000 workers, most of them women 18 to 22 years old, making both Nike and Reebok products.
The study said Yue Yuen did not provide social security benefits, medical insurance or bereavement leave, although they are mandatory by law.
Nike condemned the study as “erroneous.”
The study “incorrectly states the wages earned by workers, (and) makes irresponsible accusations about worker health and safety,” said Dusty Kidd, director of labor practices for the company.
After Nike first came under criticism last year, the company hired Young, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to help monitor its factories in Asia.
“I didn’t see sweatshops, or hostile conditions,” he said Friday, five months after a tour of factories that make Nikes in Vietnam, Indonesia and China.
“I saw crowded dorms,” he said in a telephone interview, “but the workers were eating at least two meals a day on the job, and making what I was told were subsistence wages within those cultures.”
The civil rights leader and former mayor of Atlanta said he had made “no attempt to whitewash the situation, nor did Nike.”
“I didn’t say that there were no violations, but I didn’t see systematic abuses. … Nike was trying to avoid the problems. And I helped them realize these are questions that can’t be avoided.”
Reebok said the China plants making its shoes are not “Reebok factories.”
However, Doug Cahn, director of the company’s human rights program, said “any violations are unacceptable to us and we demand that factories take corrective action if the charges are found to be true.”
xxxx THE INVESTIGATORS Global Exchange is acting for two human rights organizations in Hong Kong that interviewed scores of workers from four major sports shoe subcontractors in China’s Pearl River Delta.