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• FAQ

Aren’t those Nike sweatshop jobs better than nothing?

For a country like Indonesia, with a high unemployment and underemployment rate, any job is better than no job at all.  The common myth that Nike workers and the international solidarity movement want companies to leave developing countries like Indonesia, is absolutely false. Indonesian women and men want to work, will gladly work for Nike, and are typically proud of the work that they do. However, they do not want to be and do not have to be exploited in such work. This question, “Aren’t these jobs better than no jobs at all?” begs another question: Why must we talk about these jobs in the extreme?  Does it have to be, “You either take the job as is or have no job at all.”  Where is the middle ground between these extremes?” Team Sweat believes that any person who is willing to work hard for a successful company, well over 40 hours per week, should be able to afford three meals per day, a comfortable and clean place to sleep, housing, drinking water and basic health care at the very least.

• FAQ

Should I boycott Nike?

No. Team Sweat is not calling for a boycott, because the workers have not called for a boycott of Nike products. A boycott has the potential to threaten the jobs of workers whom we are trying to support. A key component in any solidarity campaign is listening to those persons who are affected by an injustice, rather than dictating what we believe a good answer might be from a Western perspective.

• FAQ

Why does Team Sweat focus on Nike?

Nike is the leader of the sportswear industry, controlling roughly 44% of the industry, more than Adidas and Reebok combined, which each control roughly 12%. When Nike sets a standard, the industry traditionally follows. If Nike were to set a standard, in which they systematically listen and respond to the demands of their subcontracted employees, the rest of the industry would have to follow suit both to remain competitive and because of public pressure which would follow.

• FAQ

What is a Sweatshop?

There are numerous definitions for the term “sweatshop”. Team Sweat defines sweatshops as a factory or other location where:

* Workers are paid a wage that does not allow them to meet their most basic needs and/or to take care of a small family.
* Workers face hazardous working conditions and/or verbal, physical, psychological, or sexual abuse.
* Workers face repression and intimidation when attempting to form independent unions.
* Owners/Managers of the factory refuse to engage in good-faith bargaining with workers regarding wages and working conditions.

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Professors and Teachers - Use Your 401K to Influence Nike

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• Uncategorized

A Response to Behind the Swoosh Program

Team Sweat:

Check out this blog post by a student that recently attended my Behind the Swoosh program. 

http://choubelle.wordpress.com/2008/10/18/when-you-think-of-the-face-of-fashion-is-this-what-comes-to-mind/#comment-246

My only constructive feedback for her is that American Apparel is NOT sweatshop-free. 

Enjoy!

Peace, JWK

• News

Nike Sweatshop Cartoon

• Consumers

Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat UNH

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Team Sweat - UNH

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Financially Support Team Sweat

To keep the recent campaign momentum going, I need your help in underwriting the following projects this year.

* Building out teamsweat.org website = $4500
* 2009 Research Trips to Indonesia = $12000
* Trip to Nike Shareholder Meeting = $1000
* Marketing Behind the Swoosh Lecture to campuses = $2000
* Organizing workers in Indonesia = $6000

Every penny counts and no contribution is too small. You can make your donation online at: http://www.teamsweat.org/?page_id=53 or you can mail your check, payable to Educating for Justice, to:

Educating for Justice/Team Sweat
608 Cookman Avenue, Suite B
Asbury Park, NJ 07712

Thanks for your continued support. Without your help, none of this important work is possible.

• News
• Uncategorized

Bring Team Sweat to your Campus!

CAMPUS EVENTS
The 2008-2009 school year has been awesome so  far. To  date,  I  have spoken at Wingate University, Millersville University, Elizabethtown College, Chatham HS, University of New Hampshire, the National Association of Collegiate Activities Conference-South and I am gearing  up  for  visits  to  Missouri,  New  York  and  Illinois this month. Upcoming events are listed on the homepage at teamsweat.org. If you are interested in booking an event for your campus or community or if you know of a school that might be interested in hosting me, drop me an email at info@teamsweat.org.

Peace, Jim Keady

• Consumers

Team Sweat - Consumers

• I just saw Jim’s presentation at UNH and it was amazing. I would like to do what I can to help this cause. -Elizabeth B.
• I just wanted to thank Jim for coming to UNH tonight and giving a great presentation. I’m really excited to get OXFAM UNH involved with this issue and start to plan an event based around it. Thank you for giving me the Behind the Swoosh film on good faith that I would donate…I did in fact just donate on this website….I wish I could give more but alas I am a student. Good luck with your fight and I’m excited for OXFAM UNH to join! - Kayla
• I saw the “Behind the Swoosh” presentation at the University of New Hampshire.  I had already known a lot about sweatshops, but thought this presentation was excellent. - Lindsey F.
• I was inspired by your presentation held at the University of New Hampshire. I feel I know too much and not doing a little to help would go against all the morals I was brought up with. - Amanda W.
• I wanna join because Mr. Keady came to my school and gave a presentation about the unfair conditions that these workers have to go through, if they wanna work for those companies, then that’s fine, they can, no one said that they should have to get paid money that they cant even live off of. its not fair, and i think if enough people join, and we can get something going eventually they’re going to have to listen to us, and they’re going to have to do the right thing, or we wont stop. everyone was created equally, and we should make sure that this is what happens. - Mercedes A.
• I believe the work and advocacy that Team Sweat, Jim and his partners are so dedicated to and passionate about is important and admirable. I remember the first time I watched and learned about the situation that transpired at St. Johns.  I was inspired by Jim’s stance and appalled by the fact that these types of operations and business models exist and are supported with no questions asked. I have not purchased a Nike product since that day over 8 years ago and will likely never buy another one. I always grab the opportunity to speak with folks on this topic and encourage others to be vocal and support Team Sweat in the fight against greed and for human and workers rights. - Bill K

• News

Nike sweatshop conditions cause concern

The Etownian, Elizabethtown College

Kaitlin A. McCaffrey, Staff Writer

Thursday October 02 2008

Put yourself in the shoes of a parent, then use that mentality to imagine not being able to afford to live with your children. You can’t raise them, you can’t feed them, and you can’t play with them. Why? Because you are an employee of a Nike sweatshop in Tangerang, Indonesia, and you make $1.25 a day.

Jim Keady, a former coach for the St. John’s University soccer team, recently spoke to students and faculty at Elizabethtown College in a presentation titled “Behind the Swoosh.” In the presentation, Keady delved into his experience gained after spending a month working in a Nike sweatshop in Indonesia.

A student of theology and devout Catholic, Keady seemed to be en route to living the life he dreamed. He was playing the sport he loved and was offered a coaching position at St. John’s so he could share that love with others. Knowing the reputation Nike had with their laborers in foreign countries and the injustices they incurred, it made sense that when Keady found out Nike was the chosen apparel for the team, he would take a stand. “Hypocrisy manifested” was how he succinctly explained the relationship between an institution of faith giving their endorsement to a company who cared so little about human decency. Keady was given an ultimatum to either wear Nike and drop the subject or resign from his position. In July of 1998, Keady was fired.

His termination of employment marked the time for change. Along with a college colleague, Leslie Kretzu, Keady packed his bags and was on his way to Indonesia. They had no idea of the living conditions they would endure as they spent a month living the daily lives of Indonesian workers. A barely habitable 9-foot-by-9-foot cement room was what they called home and it was shared with five to 10 families. There was no privacy, no air-conditioning and no quality of life of which to speak. In a movie shown during the presentation chronicling the month Keady and Kretzu endured, it was stated that workers had 7000 rupiah a day to spend. With that small amount, they could only afford two simple meals and barely anything else.

“It’s impossible to live on that much a day and maintain human dignity,” Kretzu said.

Living conditions for the rest of the city were just as brutal. Keady stumbled upon a massive pile of discarded Nike shoe rubber that got burned in an arena where local children play. This burning rubber was found to give off harmful toxins and carcinogens.

“How can you break a cycle of poverty if there’s a lost generation of children you can’t educate?” Keady said.

While in Indonesia, Keady traveled to Jakarta to try and gain entrance to Nike headquarters. He was repeatedly denied admittance, and an informational sheet was faxed to workers warning them they were not to speak to Keady. The workers were threatened with physical abuse or even death if they did not comply. Upon returning to the United States, Keady attempted to secure an interview with the CEO of Nike, Phil Knight, but was again denied.

“While I find his life choices respectable, Indonesia is a very extreme example of the sweatshop dilemma and thus makes it easy to portray a very slanted view,” sophomore Kyle Ashe said.

Keady now spends his time lecturing at colleges, universities and other institutions, trying to open the eyes of the public and imploring the new generation to make a difference. Not everyone is convinced he fully accomplished his goal. Junior Samantha Schneider said she “wishes he had given us more of a solution, a more proactive way to help.”

Nike isn’t the only company abusing their workers but they were pinpointed by Keady and his associates because they are the company with the highest impact. Nike is the industry leader and has an unparalleled global outreach. Keady and his team are working to be the change and are looking to students to help fill in the gaps.

• News

Nike and the University of Washington

UW has pledged to have Huskies licensed apparel made in a humane environment. How will it back up that promise?

By ADAM HYLA, Editor

When the UW Board of Regents meets Oct. 16, one item of business will be a new contract with one of the university’s largest business partners, Nike, which since 2000 has supplied the school with most athletic gear and all the athletes’ apparel.

The Regents will be looking at a 10-year contract worth $39 million — a remarkable amount of money, offered up in a fashion that’s remarkably disappointing to people on campus who have worked hard to prevent the making of Huskies gear in intolerable conditions.

Consider two datelines.

Aug. 1, 2008: an Australian television reporter breaks the news of a Nike subcontractor in Malaysia keeping indentured workers in conditions of modern-day slavery: 350 men from Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other poor nations sharing a small dormitory and a trickling faucet; working off a year’s pay to those who provided them passage and then, after they signed a contract in a language not their own, took their passports. These conditions had been extant for more than a decade.

Aug. 8: A press release from the university announcing the tentative $39 million contract, representing, said athletics director Scott Woodward ” a resounding endorsement of the future of Husky Athletics from the world’s leading sports brand.”

This announcement shocked and dismayed activists in the UW Student Labor Action Project. Some of them sat on the Licensing Advisory Committee, the student-faculty-staff body charged with upholding the university code of conduct with apparel contractors.

Formed by president Mark Emmert last year, the LAC never gained the full trust of the students, who, regarding the president as the real decisionmaker, continued to bring sweatshop issues up with him. They also looked askance at the committee’s staff members from the Athletics and Trademarks and Licensing departments — staff paid to negotiate, renew, and extend apparel makers’ contracts. Without investigative or managerial powers, or a clearer mandate from Emmert himself, the committee dissolved in September after a season of breakdown and mistrust. The Nike contract — which Athletics staffers on the committee, confirming students’ suspicions, never disclosed was being hashed out — was the last straw.

It’s a vast understatement to say that Nike workplace abuses are old news. It’s been 14 years since a Portland-based group of justice activists started the Justice Do It campaign to get their corporate neighbor to own up to labor abuses, and those years have yielded little more than empty corporate avowals of improved in-house monitoring, which does little good. A cycle of scandals and pledges ensues, each revelation, to those paying attention, producing less of a shock.

Activists and scholars know that this won’t change unless the global apparel system does.
Brands exist to recruit loyal customers; they’re not interested in owning factories or putting people to work. They buy low and sell high, issuing bids for work that factories, like the one in Malaysia, respond to. The Champion label right now may be asking those companies: Can you make 40,000 commemmorative Apple Cup t-shirts shipped out by Nov. 17? Whoever will do it cheapest, wins.

This setup gives the brands a fall guy, and it makes their buy-in vital in pressuring any factory to change its ways. This summer, in a rare case of high-level negotiation, a corporate oversight group has been instrumental in arranging compensation for wronged Guatemalan workers [“Seniors find problems with Husky apparel,” Sept. 10-16]. The UW alone could not have applied enough pressure to make the factory’s Singapore owners pay.

The Justice Do It campaign eventually gave Nike a royal case of the victim complex, with CEO Phil Knight complaining that he was being unfairly picked on. Perhaps he was; activists knew then, as they know now, that changing how one apparel giant does business could very well improve the lot of all garment workers.

The same logic applies on campus, only not so impressively. A large Pac-10 school’s instituting a fair-trade certification system is not going to alter the garment industry, which makes only 2 percent of its products for the collegiate market. What the UW can do is simply what’s right, regardless, by leading other schools forthrightly toward a real system of monitoring and sweat-free certification.

When the $39 million contract is delivered to the Regents Oct. 16, it will be worth asking what form of oversight Nike would accept after it’s signed. Probably none; Athletics Dept. officials who negotiated the deal respond defensively to critics that Nike has a long record of corporate responsibility.

Among big schools who have faced the sweatshops question, the UW is uniquely capable of setting a new course for conscientious contracting. With the former members of the LAC and the commitment of the student activists in SLAP, it has the expertise. It has already declared its intention to implement one model for this system. The next steps must proceed from president Mark Emmert’s office. The question is: Will he take them?

• News

Swoosh lecture raises awareness

The Snapper

Millersville University

By rpayne • September 24, 2008

• News

Nike announces $5 billion dollar buyback program

Associated Press 09.22.08, 9:30 AM ET

BEAVERTON, Ore. -

Nike (nyse: NKE - news - people ) said the repurchase of $5 billion in Class B common stock will begin following completion of its current $3 billion buyback program.

Nike had about 492.4 million shares of Class B common stock outstanding as of Aug. 31.

“Over the past 10 years, Nike has returned $5.5 billion to shareholders through the repurchase of more than 157 million shares,” Chief Executive Mark Parker said in a statement.

• News

Students rally behind sweatshop-free clothing

By Anna L. Mallory
  381-8627

Photos by Matt Gentry | The Roanoke Times

J.P. Mason, vice president of the Virginia Tech student group Global Student Alliance, tightens a clothesline with more than 30 Virginia Tech-related apparel items Wednesday. The student group wants the school to join the Workers’ Rights Consortium — a nonprofit aimed at “combating sweatshops” and protecting the rights of textile workers across the world.

 

Meredith Katz, president of Global Student Alliance, puts a T-shirt on the group’s clothesline. Katz says Virginia Tech officials should “make sure their apparel is made under fair labor conditions.”

BLACKSBURG — A group of students who say Virginia Tech hasn’t done enough to thwart unfair conditions for textile workers wants the university to re-examine its apparel licensing program.

On Wednesday morning, members of the Global Student Alliance, a student club formed this year, hoisted a clothesline on the Drillfield filled with orange-and-maroon Tech merchandise in a protest of sorts to raise awareness about the changes they want to see.

The alliance also submitted a letter to Tech President Charles Steger asking that the school join the Workers’ Rights Consortium — a nonprofit aimed at “combating sweatshops” and protecting the rights of textile workers across the world. The alliance also wants Tech officials to sign the WRC’s affiliated licensing code of conduct, called the Designated Suppliers Program.

That program provides a list of factories worldwide that have been deemed fair to workers and asks university licensees to ensure that clothing sold with the Virginia Tech logo is made in one of those factories and under specific conditions. Forty-five schools nationwide, including the University of Virginia, have joined the Designated Suppliers Program. Schools that join the WRC must pay annual dues of either $1,000 or 1 percent of their gross licensing revenues, whichever is greater. In 2007-08 fiscal year, Tech grossed $1.9 million in licensing revenues. It netted $1.7 million, which is designated to student scholarships, according to university spokesman Larry Hincker.

At least 180 schools are affiliated with the WRC alone.

“The university has an opportunity, and we would argue an obligation, to make sure their apparel is made under fair labor conditions,” said Meredith Katz, president of the alliance.

In 1999, Tech joined another nonprofit aimed at protecting workers’ rights, the Fair Labor Association. The university pays $5,000 annually to be a member. Hincker said he doesn’t understand the alliance’s uproar, but he met Katz and Mason on Wednesday afternoon and said he wants to hear more about the concerns.

Still, he stresses, “there is no evidence whatsoever that any Virginia Tech products are made in sweatshops.”

He said he welcomes the students desire to prevent such practices, he said.

“This just has not been on the radar screen of really anyone in higher education like it was eight or nine years ago,” he said.

The FLA has at least 200 colleges across the nation and big-name corporations, such as Nike, which has an endorsement deal with Tech, affiliated with it. Businesses that join the organization are asked to ensure their factories meet quality labor standards, and universities are to contract solely with those who comply. Members of the student group say it is a good start, but not good enough.

“The whole question comes back to what is Virginia Tech doing to enforce the standards they have in place,” said J.P. Mason, the club’s vice president.

Both nonprofits have similar aims and both claim to independently investigate factory conditions and publicly report them.

Dick Rademaker, founder of the Licensing Resource Group, a firm that works with colleges such as Tech to manage licensing marketing, royalties and compliance, said there is a difference.

The WRC is more of a watchdog organization that hunts for problems and ways to fix them. The FLA waits for issues with compliance to come to light.

“It really is a terrible thing to track,” Rademaker said. “To me, working together you’re going to accomplish more than you do the other way.”

Mason and Katz argue that the FLA is outdated and compromised by corporate conflicts of interests. Its governing board has six corporate members, including employees from Nike, Adidas and Patagonia, who sit alongside representatives from university and human rights groups. The WRC has no corporate board members but has a member from the union giant AFL-CIO, universities and other fair-rights groups, the students say.

Rademaker said he doesn’t see that as a conflict. He said he sees whole departments at those companies devoted to ensuring compliance. However, he says universities do have a duty to ensure compliance.

“In the final analysis, it really is up to the university to enforce,” he said. “The universities really do need to be more active.”

He admits the FLA has been lax in the past years with ensuring its licensees are compliant but said the nonprofit is improving. His company is helping FLA train licensees.

“We’re not saying abandon Nike or abandon Champion, but this is a chance that it can be Nike and still be good,” Katz said.

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Team Sweat - Workers