Nike Exploits Workers And Consumers

Think of it as a pyramid of exploitation.

In the comfort zone at the very top is a stable of uncaring multimillionaire celebrities - Michael Jordan, Andre Agassi, Spike Lee, et al. - and their guru, the fabulously successful founder and chief executive of Nike Inc., Philip Knight.

At the bottom, shouldering the crushing weight of Knight’s multinational enterprise, are the legions of young Asians, mostly women, who work like slaves to turn out Nike’s products, plus the media-mesmerized young people in the United States and elsewhere who somehow have been persuaded to shell out up to $140 for a pair of sneakers.

More than a third of Nike’s products are manufactured in Indonesia, a human-rights backwater where the minimum wage deliberately was set below the subsistence level to attract foreign investment. Workers at sweatshops with Nike contracts grudgingly are paid $2.20 a day. It took four years of sometimes violent struggle to get the minimum wage that high.

Now consider Knight.

I asked Nike on Friday what he is worth. After hemming and hawing about such incidentals as his $864,583 salary and $787,500 bonus in fiscal 1995, a spokesman got to the real deal - his Nike stock. Hold onto your sneakers. Knight’s stock is valued at a breathtaking $4.5 billion.

And, of course, he wants more.

With labor costs skyrocketing in Indonesia, Nike is moving into Vietnam. I asked a Nike spokesman if he knows what the minimum wage is there. He said it is 331,000 Vietnamese dollars per month, adding that he doesn’t know how much that is in American dollars.

I do. It’s $30 a month.

What’s next? Employees who’ll work for a bowl of gruel?

Philip Knight has an extraordinary racket going for him. There is absolutely no better way to get rich than to exploit both the worker and the consumer. If you can get your product made for next to nothing and you can get people to buy it at exorbitant prices, you get to live at the top of the pyramid.

Nike pays Michael Jordan $20 million a year to help create the demand for its products. Andre Agassi reportedly has a $100 million, 10-year deal to do the same. Spike Lee is paid big bucks to star in and direct Nike commercials.

If these stars or any of Nike’s other highly paid pitch people are concerned about the wretched origins of the company’s products, they haven’t let on.

Jordan said, in essence, that it isn’t his problem. It is up to Nike, he said last week, “to do what they can to make sure everything is correctly done.”

He added: “I don’t know the complete situation. Why should I? I’m trying to do my job. Hopefully, Nike will do the right thing.”

That is the attitude that prevails throughout the Nike enterprise. Everyone is cloaked in layer upon layer of denial. Everybody wants to partake of the riches, but no one is willing to take responsibility for the fundamental fact that so many of Nike’s products are made by workers who are not being paid a living wage and who often have to endure the humiliating abuses of brutal bosses and repressive governments.

Nike’s subcontractors actually hire the workers who make the products. But the subcontractors are agents of Nike’s will, and Nike is ever on the alert for a new situation, a new country, in which workers can be paid even less. That is why it has established a foothold in Vietnam.

When I asked Nike spokesman Keith Peters if the company plans to expand its Vietnam operations, he said yes.

With a wage scale of $30 a month, who could resist?

Nike also has goods being made in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. The company’s pattern of operations follows a very simple theme: As wages and living standards increase, Nike looks elsewhere. Every time the company has moved its operations from one country to another, it has gone to a place with a lower wage scale.

While the fabulous wealth of men such as Philip Knight and Michael Jordan continues to soar, the pathetic wages of the workers who make Nike products are being suppressed ruthlessly.

Human-rights workers already are calling the hike in Indonesia’s minimum wage to $2.20 a day a Pyrrhic victory. They fear that companies such as Nike, rather than doing the right thing by workers, soon will be off to more hideous pastures.

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