HONG KONG - Factory workers as young as 13, wages below the legal minimum, and forced overtime are among the labor violations revealed in a report released September 21 on Chinese sweatshops that produce shoes for Nike and Reebok. Nike shareholders are meeting for their annual meeting in Portland, Oregon on Monday, September 22.

"Not only are Nike and Reebok violating the most basic tenets of Chinese labor law, they're also flagrantly violating their own codes of conduct," said Chan Ka Wai, assistant director of Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, which authored the report with Hong Kong-based Asia Monitor Resource Centre.

The two Hong Kong human rights groups have been monitoring factories in China since 1995. Their current report is based on extensive interviews with workers at four major sports shoe subcontractors in China in June and July, 1997. The Hong Kong groups have repeatedly presented evidence of labor violations to Nike and Reebok. Since 1995, conditions have gotten worse, and the lack of a constructive response by representative from the companies prompted the groups to go public this year with their latest findings, according to Wai.

Among the violations documented:

• Children age 13-15 are employed in the sewing, handwork, and cutting departments of one factory despite laws prohibiting underage labor.
• Factories consistently violate minimum wage laws.
• Workers routinely work 72 hours a week with compulsory overtime, in violation of company codes for a 40-hour week, and China's labor law calling for a 44-hour week. Those who refuse overtime can be fined, docked an entire day's pay, or even fired.
• Workers who become pregnant are often fired in violation of China's labor law granting workers maternity leave.
• Due to poor safety conditions, workers lose fingers and even hands in machinery and are exposed daily to dust and noise pollution and benzyne, a glue known to cause anemia and leukemia that is so toxic it has been banned in the U.S. and Europe.
• Talking during work and refusal to perform mandatory morning calisthenics are punishable by fines, although deducting disciplinary fines from wages is illegal in China.
• Workers reported being beaten by security guards and routinely subjected to verbal attacks by supervisors.

"The human and labor rights violations documented in this report are even more egregious than working conditions found in Nike factories in Vietnam and Indonesia," said Medea Benjamin, executive director of San Francisco's Global Exchange, a U.S. human rights group. "Reebok and Nike should immediately meet with the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee and the Asia Monitor Resource Centre to set up mechanisms to monitor their factories."

China, now the biggest shoe producing country in the world, makes more than one-third of the top brand name sports shoes sold internationally. Massive unemployment, low wages, repression of independent unions, and poor enforcement of labor laws make the country an "ideal setting" for sports shoe multinationals like Nike and Reebok to set up shop, the report said.