Garment Workers Say Nike Turned a ‘Blind Eye’ to Their Plight
Noah Dobin-Bernstein, lead campaign organizer of the Americas at the Global Labor Justice (GLJ), recalled an activity that the advocacy group did alongside garment workers who stitched Nike products in Sri Lanka earlier this year.
“We took a kilo of rice and looked at how the wealth is distributed across the Nike supply chain,” he said in a recent webinar organized by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance (AFWA), a global South-led consortium of garment trade unions. “One worker gets a single grain of rice, which is the equivalent of about $100 a month. A supervisor gets about three grains of rice, and an upper manager gets something like eight to 10 grains of rice. The CEO of the factory that supplies to Nike maybe gets a little more than 1,000.”
John Donahoe, the sportswear juggernaut’s president and CEO, meanwhile, earns so much that they didn’t have enough rice to illustrate it. They ended up just placing the entire rest of the bag on the designated spot on the table. Donhoe, who was appointed to the post in 2020, raked in nearly $32.8 million in 2023, according to Nike’s statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission. That’s about 24,000 times the salary of the average worker who is “generating the wealth” in its Sri Lankan supply chain, Dobin-Bernstein said.
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“To put it in another way, a worker in a Sri Lankan factory that makes Nike clothing has to work 2,000 years to make a single CEO’s compensation,” he said. “So while Nike talks a lot about equality, it’s a leader of one of the most unequal supply chain systems in the world.”
Dobin-Bernstein was referring to the Swoosh’s longstanding championship of equality—“Until we all win” is one of its oft-used taglines. Nike spends billions of dollars on advertising every year. Among its more recent campaigns is a partnership with Dove to build body confidence in girls. It’s a worthy cause, one that attracted tennis champ Venus Williams and Olympic gymnast Laurie Hernandez: According to the companies’ research, 45 percent of teenage girls globally drop out of sports—or twice the rate of boys—because of low body confidence.
But a question Nike’s supply chain workers find themselves increasingly wrestling with is equality for whom? Confidence for whom? Last year, AFWA and GLJ’s “Fight the Heist” campaign, which demanded that fashion companies remedy claims of Covid-19-induced wage theft, homed in on Nike as one of the biggest perpetrators of the problem because it initially canceled orders, then later reduced new ones due to the uncertainty of the global outlook. In March of that year, the two organizations, together with 20 garment trade unions in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka filed an international labor complaint with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Washington, D.C., to accuse the Portland-based firm of violating the inter-governmental agency’s guidelines for responsible business conduct by multinational enterprises.
Nike did not respond to a request for comment then, as it did not now, but it said at the outset of the pandemic that it would continue to pay its suppliers in full for finished products, as well as honor previously agreed-upon payment terms for orders still in production. When it came to canceled orders, the Adidas rival said that its policies and agreements with suppliers “are, and have always been, that Nike will pay the appropriate amount of the order, depending on the stage of production as communicated by our supplier to enable the supplier to recover costs associated with the canceled orders.”
For workers such as Sumi Akter from Bangladesh, Pooja Nilany from Sri Lanka, Em Borey from Cambodia and Leni Oktira Sari from Indonesia, however, Nike’s words don’t quite square with its actions. All of them continue to feel the aftereffects of missing wages stemming from Covid-19 job loss or pay cuts. Even now, with ongoing attacks on civil liberties and freedom of association in their respective countries, intimidation and threats of dismissal remain ongoing concerns. Their economic conditions have hardly improved, either: The gap between what they earn and what would constitute a living wage is still a chasm as mandated increases fail to take into account basic needs and the breakneck rate of inflation. And even then, their employers don’t always comply with gazetted increases since enforcement of labor laws is typically weak to non-existent where they live.
Nike, meanwhile, has long recovered from its pandemic-era slump, amassing $51.2 billion in revenue in 2023 alone, or up 10 percent compared with the previous year. Instead of compensating workers or funding safety or productivity programs, however, the Air Force 1 maker engages in buyback schemes to “falsely inflate” its stock price, according to the AFWA and GLJ. This summer, they intend to ramp up the pressure through an international campaign that gives voice to workers who are the “invisible force” behind Nike, said Abiramy Sivalogananthan, AFWA’s South Asia regional coordinator.
The company has intervened on behalf of workers before, most recently last March, when it worked with IndustriALL Global Union to persuade Cambodia’s T-Win Garment to reinstate eight fired union leaders, complete with back pay. Workers say they want to see more of this.
“Nike talks about equality and empowering women and girls,” Sari, who has worked at a Nike shoe supplier for more than a decade, said through a translator. “Is Nike doing that by taking our money and investing in equality? We are not even able to get equal rights within their supply chain. So how can Nike promote themselves as a champion of equality?”
Brands don’t usually own their own factories, not even multinational Goliaths like Nike. Neither do they pay workers their wages. A central tension of the fashion industry is how much responsibility lies with the buyer. Even though workers may make clothing or shoes for Nike, they’re not employed by Nike.
At the same time, the women who spoke out see no such distinction. As far as they’re concerned, they’re Nike workers. It was the Just Do It company that “turned a blind eye and deaf ears” to the plight of thousands of workers as they struggled on the knife edge of destitution during the pandemic, as Sari said. It’s Nike that isn’t compensating workers for the estimated $9.3 million that was collectively taken from them through reduced hours and pay, as Nilany said. And it was Nike that Akter was thinking about when she and her family struggled to afford food, forcing her to take out loans.
“I think I will not be able to save up even one taka till the last day of working in garment factories like a machine,” Akter, who has spent the past 14 years as a garment worker, said through a translator. “I will work for as long as I can and I will return from this industry as a burden to my family and the society.”
