(Note: Written after the May, 1998 Phil Knight Speech - Reprinted on Academics Studying Nike Labor and Environmental Practices Web Site http://business.nmsu.edu/~dboje/nike.html by permission granted 7 November 1999).

When Phil Knight, Nike's chairman and CEO, addressed the National Press Club in Washington in last month, he had summoned six Taiwanese, Korean, and Thai owners and managers of factories that make shoes for Nike to sit among the audience. In a wry display of self-pity, Knight pictured himself as a wrongly abused "Satan," and repeatedly called his audience's attention to his six "Satanettes." He spoke of bonding, of his "emotional partnership" with them. Hitherto, the Satanettes were only phantoms in the background. Now he tries to launch them into the Western media. But neither the media nor Nike's critics picked up on Knight's odd new ploy.

There was a time when Knight tried to distance himself from his subcontractors. The media was exposing the factories that produce Nike sneakers for physically abusing workers, paying them less than a minimum wage, forcing them to work marathon overtimes and letting them breaths toxic chemicals. No, protested Knight’s staff, Nike has nothing to do with these practices; Nike does not own or manage these factories. Nike critics, for their part, have always held Nike solely responsible. They call them "Nike factories", a misnomer, as if they are owned and directly managed by Knight.

Yet whichever way the arguments go, these Asian managers have been allowed to get away with murder. The Western world does not usually hold them responsible for the mistreatment they have meted out to the half million workers who manufacture Nike shoes, be it in China, Indonesia, Thailand or Vietnam.

One consequence is that the subcontractors have become brazen, letting themselves be caught in the act. Last year, on the very day an investigator into labor abuses was visiting a Nike subcontractor factory in Ho Chi Minh City at Nike’s invitation to see for himself the conditions there, Taiwanese managers made fifty-six workers run around the factory grounds as a punishment until fifteen of them collapsed in the heat. Just a couple of months ago, when ESPN was in Ho Chi Minh City doing a documentary on the production of Nike shoes by its subcontractors, in a Korean-owned factory, the film crew witnessed a supervisor slapping a worker for not spreading glue properly and another supervisor hurling part of a shoe at a worker. The Korean factory subsequently fired a worker for allowing herself to be interviewed by ESPN, generating more bad publicity.

How are we to explain this corporate bungling? While Knight and staff deny workers are being mistreated in Asia, their Satanettes are doing just that, and worse, at the most inappropriate times. It appears that Nike had not been serious about stopping worker abuse, and so never seriously transmitted the message to its Asian subcontractors. The shoe giant had made empty promises in order to weather the storm of bad publicity back home, while the subcontractors continue to mistreat and abuse workers in an effort to ensure heftier profits for both themselves and for Nike.

In his speech, Knight painted a picture of a symbiotic partnership with his subcontractors. He said, "if we were going to make it work, we would again have to take our Taiwan and Korean managers with us" when Nike moved into Vietnam. These managers are "tigers" and "dragons" of the so-called Asian economic miracle. They have the technological skill, the organizational capacity, the capital, and above all the management skill to run their factories with militaristic discipline. In their own rights they are big players in the game of global shoe-making. Their shoe empires reap enormous profits.

They also have support from their own governments. An official Vietnamese source that did not want to be identified advised me in Vietnam recently that the South Korean ambassador to Vietnam warned the Vietnamese government to stop complaining about Korean investors violating workers’ rights, or else Korean firms would pull out. The ambassador also told government officials that they had better rein in the Vietnamese trade union federation which had supported mistreated workers on several occasions and covered the incidents extensively in the popular trade union newspaper.

In contrast to Vietnam, in China and Hong Kong, local Chinese-language newspapers black out news about the Nike controversy. Similarly, the anti-sweatshop Apparel Industry Partnership that was established by the White House with much fanfare in April last year was only reported in one Chinese-language newspaper in Hong Kong--and with a negative spin. The international debates over corporate codes of conduct and independent monitoring now raging in the West is non-existent in the Chinese press. Workers who toil ten, twelve or more hours a day have no idea that so much has been made of their working conditions on the other side of the globe.

Knight tries to explain away the on-going conflicts between workers and

the Korean and Taiwanese managers as a clash between cultures that can be

solved by "cultural sensitivity training". But the truth is that both Nike and the factory managers thrive on the exploitation. According to Knight, when Nike started from ground zero in 1964 it bought shoes from the Japanese who paid workers US $4 a day. Today, its Korean and Taiwanese subcontractors pay workers $2 a day. Satan relies on Satanettes to do the dirty work.

#END

875 words