The Oregonian
March 7, 2002
By Boaz Herzog

Many workers in Indonesia who produce shoes for Nike and Adidas-Salomon don't earn enough to support their children, fear backlash if they join an independent union and face humiliation and dangerous working conditions despite some improvements in the past year and a half, according to a new report.

The report, scheduled for release today by a coalition of labor rights organizations, is based on interviews in July and January with about three dozen workers from four factories in West Java, Indonesia. It reignites the long-standing tension between the world's largest athletic footwear-makers and organizations that advocate on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of overseas workers who stitch their sneakers.

Officials from Beaverton-based Nike and from Adidas, the German sporting goods maker whose U.S. subsidiary is headquartered in Portland, said Wednesday that the companies have spent millions of dollars during the past few years addressing the issues raised in the report and that conditions are gradually improving.

Gregg Nebel, Adidas' head of social and environmental affairs for the Americas region, said "there's nothing we disagree with" in the report, whose sponsors include Global Exchange, Oxfam Community Aid Abroad and the Clean Clothes Campaign.

However, Nebel said the issues raised in the report, titled "We are not machines," cannot broadly be applied to the 800 or so factories Adidas contracts with globally, which employ about half a million.

"The issues are going to vary from country to country," he said, adding that the company has spent millions of dollars since 1998 addressing conditions for overseas workers in affiliated factories.

Vada Manager, a Nike spokesman, said the report's sponsors didn't offer any new information and that "we have been remediating or are certainly aware of the issues they raised."

Nike partners with about 750 factories that employ about half a million workers globally. About 105,000 of them work in Indonesian factories, second only to China with about 176,000 workers.

Working conditions may be even worse there, said Jason Mark, a spokesman for San Francisco-based Global Exchange.

"We know from previous findings that it's even more difficult to enforce labor standards in China," he said.

In Indonesia, many shoe-factory workers with children go into debt or send them to distant villages to be cared for by relatives because they can't afford to care for their basic needs, the report said.

In addition, many of the workers whose livelihoods depend on extra income from overtime have been hurt by declining shoe orders associated with deteriorating economic conditions after Sept. 11.

Some reforms have improved conditions, the report said. For instance, workers can obtain sick leave and the frequency of sexual harassment has greatly diminished. Still, the report said, ongoing problems include workers being compared to monkeys or dogs, and women who want to claim legally mandated menstrual leave being required to physically prove their condition to doctors.