By Malik Miah
SAN FRANCISCO — Hundreds of demonstrators chanted "Just don't do it!" at the opening of a Nike super-store in the main shopping area here on February 22. Nineteen protesters were arrested for blocking the door to the three-story complex.
Homemade signs and placards condemned Nike's use of contractors that pay below poverty wages and put workers in sweatshops in countries such as Indonesia.
The protest was organised by Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights group that recently sent a delegation to Indonesia to meet with Nike workers. It is planning a return trip May 20-31.
Nike is well known around the world for its sports shoes and other products as worn by superstars such as basketball's Michael Jordan. Less well known is the fact that Nike pays its 120,000 Indonesian workers $2.20 a day. Indonesian labour groups say $4.25 a day is a livable wage.
The promotion of Nike products by sports celebrities is the main reason young people buy them. Jordan, for example, is paid $20 million a year to promote Nike's Air Jordan shoes — more than the annual income of 20,000 workers who make the Nike shoes.
Jordan and other stars claim ignorance or indifference to the abuse and exploitation of workers in Indonesia. Jordan says, "It's not my problem".
Yet if Jordan, tennis star Andre Agassi and golf pro Tiger Woods did take a stand against Nike's policies, it would put pressure on Nike and other shoe giants to treat their workers better.
Kevin Danaher, a co-founder of Global Exchange, noted in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle before the protest action, "Nike could take just 1% of its advertising budget of $280 million per year and use the money to raise the income of all the workers in its six Indonesian factories above the poverty line".
"Opinion polls show", he continued, "that a broad majority of Americans believe that businesses have a responsibility to treat their workers well, even if it means making less profit. It is up to us, the citizens of the country in which Nike is incorporated, to bring pressure for fundamental change."
In the 1970s and 1980s, Nike set up shops in South Korea and Taiwan. As the workers there began to organise and campaign for higher wages, Nike moved, in 1986, to "greener pastures" in Indonesia. Indonesia, with its 30-year old military regime, seemed more "stable".
The mass protests for democracy in Indonesia last July, however, indicate some cracks in that stability and enable more pressure to be applied on the US government and those corporations operating in Indonesia.
According to an Associated Press dispatch just four days after the protest in San Francisco, "Nike has hired former UN ambassador Andrew Young as part of an effort to counter criticism that working conditions at some of the company's Asian factories are inhumane ... Nike said Young will evaluate the [company's new] code of conduct and determine if subcontractors are complying."