I am talking about Nike workers and Nike workers wages.

I am talking about how much their Human Resource Management is responsible for the rights of Nikes labors. I am talking about the maltreatment of employees and sweatshop conditions in Nike's Asian factories. In many Asian countries, Nike violated local labor laws. For more than 15 years, Nike has been confronted with the truth that they are exploiting workers and paying them poverty wages. Nikes response during this time has been fairly consistent. You have denied, deflected, and then dealt begrudgingly with some peripheral labor rights issues. Only in the past year has Nike become moderately responsive on some egregious cases, and to date, you have absolutely refused to engage in any real way on the issue of workers wages. According to the Vietnam labor watch, Nike did not pay the minimum wages, did not provide proper working conditions, and did not take adequate health and safety measures. In addition, Nike turned a blind eye to child labor and sexual harassment in its factories. Though the company has taken some measures to improve the situation, it has failed to improve the working conditions and put an end to the ill treatment of its employees. Ok! Nike must define fair in a dollar amount. I believe that Nike workers, the people who are the foundation of the Nike success story, should be paid a living wage that is fair. In Indonesia, where the workers actually work, a living wage would be roughly 3X the government minimum wage. This comes out to about $425 a month. Pay it.

But the answer is no! The people who had actually been the reason of Nikes success story, they are not even paid the living wage. People have also asked Nike to disclose wage rates at your factories around the world. You have claimed, in your letter to me in April 2009, that Nike does not have this data to disclose. How can you be sure that your factories are paying at least the minimum wage if you do not have any data on wages? I will tell you how. You are lying. Nike has the data. You just do not want to disclose it, because then consumers would see how pitiful Nikes poverty wages are. Here again, you are trying to deflect and make this an industry issue. It is not. I am talking about Nike. That is all. I want Nike to pay your workers a living wage. Now when (Hannah Jones/THE NIKE REPRESENTATIVE) said:There continues to be an active debate about how to best ensure that workers basic needs are met. Nike believes that local wage-setting is best done by negotiations between workers, labor representatives, the employer and the government. Because the success of this process varies by country, Nike increasingly sees the need for further regional and global discussions about the degree to which wages across the industry are meeting workers needs. I firmly believe NO! There is not an active debate, well, unless you are Nike. Hannah, when you negotiated your salary, did you feel the need to include the government and to have regional and global discussions to determine what was fair? I doubt it. My guess is that you knew what you wanted and you asked Nike for it. This is what Nikes factory workers want. They want to negotiate directly with Nike. So you are responsible to negotiate. You said above that the responsibility lies with workers, labor representatives, EMPLOYERS and government. Nike is the employer of these workers. Nike is on the record saying that those workers, we should consider them Nike employees, so that is our responsibility. (Former Nike VP, Dusty Kidd) If Nike factory workers are, as Nike claims, Nike employees, then Nike needs to start acting like it and bargain with them in good faith and pay them a living wage I want to give a statement to Nike that Stop trying to deflect attention from the wage issue. It is actually fairly simple. Pay your workers in Indonesia 3X the government minimum wage

Nike Workers Still Waiting for Back Pay

Transparency is the first step towards open-source approaches to problem solving. However the Nike did not bother to respond to activists and tell what their wages are. Wage cheating and forced overtime at a Nike shoe factory; Severance pay issues at a Nike apparel factory; Dumping and burning of scrap shoe rubber from two separate Nike shoe factories; Verbal and physical abuse at a Nike shoe factory. These are the common maltreatment behaviors with Nike workers in factories. So who is responsible? Who is answerable to these issues? Does the HR deportment have even wondered what exactly is going on with their workers? No their Human Resource department have no concern and they are least bothered. Nike is only concerned about their market share and thats all. So why would theyll be concerned about what their workers are getting? The real problem actually lies that Nikes primary defense to charges of abuse of workers is that they do not own the Asian factories. They are run by subcontractors and they say they don't have control over them, even though Nike has control over each and every stitch that goes on in each product line. When we look at their demographics most of the shoe workers in Asia are teenagers and unmarried young women from ages 17 to 30. The average worker produces 4.3 pairs of shoes a day (Brookes and Madden, Internet.), and only gets the minimum wage of $2.50 a day in Indonesia. The daily livable

wage in Indonesia is between $4.00 to 4.50, (Tanaka, "Protesters lace Nike labor practices.") yet Nike still pays minimum wage to the workers who make the shoes that sell for over $100. Certain conditions in Vietnam are even worse. Workers only make an average of 20 cents per hour, or $1.60 a day, when the cost of eating three simple meals is $2.10 (Nguyen, e-mail) plus other expenses such as shelter. Women workers have complained about frequent sexual harassment from foreign supervisors. Even in broad daylight, in front of many other workers. Workers have also reported that the prettiest girls in each section are chosen by the managers as administrative assistants. The decision only has to do with looks, not how well the person works. The administrative assistants are sometimes sexually harassed and even molested by the managers and supervisors (Connor and Atkinson, "Labor conditions in the sport shoe industry") However what Nike shows in front of the world and media is quite different. In America, Nike's owners see the abuse much differently. In front of hundreds of shareholders, after announcing record earnings and another stock split, Nike's president and CEO, Phil Knight minimized the problems in Asia as simply an incident in which a single worker was hit over the head by a supervisor. Nike spokesperson Jim Small, while knowing that the conditions in the sixteen Indonesian plants are not ideal, said, "The bottom line is: Do we abuse our workers? Absolutely not." (Levy, "Working conditions protested at the opening of a new store). Roberta Baskin of CBS News commented that, "It turns out Nike has a great deal to learn about what goes on inside these factories." ( The Nike Story in Vietnam, Internet). There are laws that protect the workers in Indonesia from on-the-job injuries with compensation money. However, there was a woman who lost some fingers, which had been crushed in a machine at a Nike factory. The total compensation that the worker was paid was only $25 because she had an injury, which made her no longer employable (Interview with Max White, Internet). It is not that Nike can't afford to pay its workers more, they just don't choose to. It is just recently that the public found out and began to pressure Nike to raise wages. Wages have gone up a little bit, but not good enough for the leading sports shoe manufacturer. Nike can still do a lot better. That simply shows the way they their labor is treated and what are the options they have and what they opt for. In the end I would conclude my reaction paper with an extreme disappointment that how cheap is the Human Resource for NIKE, and how less valuable the life, the dignity and the rate of a worker is in front of them.