Hands Across the Sea

Nike, the shoe and sneaker giant has been giving workers on two continents the boot. And workers in Asia and Oregon are now kicking back.

During the pandemic a few years ago, the sportswear company decided to reduce or cancel orders and lay· off thousands of workers – mostly women – across its supply chains in  India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. It ignored warnings from labor rights organizations that the move, accompanied by wage theft, left the workers, who had barely been making a living, now unable to afford food or rent. The company also ignored requests to discuss some compensation for the workers who went without pay for several months.

Now, five or six years later, the women are still feeling the fallout of the companies’ actions. Meanwhile, Nike engaged in stock buyback schemes that inflated its stock price and netted its executives juicy bonuses. Swasthika Arulingam, president of the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union in Sri Lanka, pointed out that Phil Knight, Nike founder and CEO, saw his “fortune increase by $28 billion while workers struggled to survive.”

At the same time, across the sea in the state of Oregon the same company is giving the boot to public school workers. The Portland Association of Teachers says that after Oregonians voted for a wealth tax in 2012, Nike “bullied” the Oregon legislature into calling a special session that granted the company a $2 billion tax holiday over 30 years. Losing out on $66 million a year, it said, has sparked a “funding crisis” in the public school system, undermining education statewide while dividends paid to Knight’s family, an estimated $460 million a year, could fill the budget gap nine times over.

“Our schools have been struggling for years to get adequate funding,” said one teacher. “There is no shortage of money in Oregon to adequately fund our schools. We can easily and fairly raise the revenue needed by raising taxes on the ultra-rich like Phil Knight and the corporations that are hoarding it, like Nike.”

Now the Portland Association of Teachers and the Asian Floor Workers Alliance have launched a joint campaign to get Nike to agree to a binding pact that funds Oregon’s schools and pays a living wage to its workers in Asia.

Stay tuned.

Labor Start, 5/2