In 2005, Jim Keady and Leslie Kretzu lived with Nike factory workers in Indonesia…these are their words….
We slept on thin mats on an uneven cement floor covered in shelf paper, which had a constant layer of ash and grit from the burning garbage, factory pollution, and car exhaust fumes. The toilets drained into open sewers on both sides of every street. Because of the sewers, the village was infested with fist-sized cockroaches and the biggest rats we’d ever seen.
Try on these shoes. You are a 20-something adult working 8am to 8pm, Monday through Saturday and sometimes Sunday. That doesn’t include travel time or preparing yourself for work. You don’t have the money to celebrate a friend’s birthday. You can’t afford a radio or even think about a television. You haven’t bought yourself something new to wear in over 2 years. When you get home at the end of the day, you have to spend 30-45 minutes doing your laundry by hand. You don’t have many clothes, and whatever you wear is visibly dirty at the end of the day. You’re exhausted. You can feel the tired in your bones. You’re afraid that if you speak up, you’ll lose your job. And the multinational company that you work for is telling the world that they’ve made serious changes, and consumers need not worry….unfortunately, it wasn’t just Nike workers who lived in these conditions and on these wages. We spoke to people producing for Adidas, Reebok, The Gap, Old Navy, Tommy Hilfiger, Polo/Ralph Lauren, Lotto, Fila, and Levi’s. All earned the same poverty wages, lived in the same types of slums, and had the same requests of their corporate buyers: give us higher wages and the freedom to organize independent unions.
…If Nike were to double all of their workers’ wages in Indonesia, it would cost them approximately 7% of their $1.63 billion advertising budget. If Nike redirected a portion of their advertising budget to paying the factory more money per good, we could see most of these sweatshop labor conditions vanish.”
