21-03-2025
Nike's Supply Chain Workers Continue to ‘Fight the Heist'
More than two years after a group of 20 garment-sector unions representing workers in Nike's supply chains in South and Southeast Asia filed an international labor complaint accusing the sportswear juggernaut of running afoul of guidelines for responsible conduct by multinational businesses, the hundreds of thousands of mostly women who lost wages during the Covid-19 pandemic are still 'fighting the heist,' as the Asia Floor Wage Alliance and Global Labor Justice have put it.
And despite what appears like complete disinterest from Nike in engaging with the issue—the Just Do It firm has yet to respond to multiple requests for comment from this publication—the labor-rights nonprofits better known by their acronyms AFWA and GLJ say they're not giving up. Their campaign, in fact, will only escalate. That includes taking the fight to Nike's hometown of Oregon.
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'I really think that this campaign has a chance to be transformative and to change the calculus for Nike about how it will need to treat its workers to continue to have the reputation that it wants, which is to be a champion of equality,' said Noah Dobin-Bernstein, GLJ's lead campaign organizer for the Americas, said in a virtual press conference kicking off an online day of action on Friday.
To be sure, there seems to be a disconnect between Nike's championship of women's sports and what Dobin-Bernstein described as its 'history of, unfortunately, ignoring the workers in its supply chain and the unions that represent them.'
The Air Jordan purveyor's recent Super Bowl ad—its first in nearly three decades—showcased the likes of WNBA stars Caitlin Clark and Sabrina Ionescu and Olympic sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson, along with a voiceover by Grammy Award-winning rapper Doechii, in a minute-long spot that would have cost at least $15 million simply to air. Meanwhile, 4,500 garment workers in Cambodia and Thailand are still waiting for the $2.2 million they say they've been legally owed since 2020 from their respective Nike suppliers, one of which has since shuttered due to a pandemic-induced reduction in orders, and the other of the opinion that workers gave up their mandatory leave pay voluntarily. Even a letter from 70 investors urging Nike to, in a phrase, 'just pay it' held little sway.
But it isn't only a repayment of arrears that workers in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are calling for. With 1,000 of them risking retaliation by going public with their faces in a first-of-its-kind photo petition to Nike, they're also asking the company to raise wages, partner with workers and their unions to protect human rights in its supply chains, and establish some kind of mechanism to expediently address wage theft and other labor violations. Overlaid on the mosaic of faces in large type are the words, 'Do you see us now, Nike?'
'We know that brands like Nike have the power to change the conditions in the industry,' said Ratna Tigga, an activist from the Garment Workers Unity League in Bangladesh who has been stitching Swooshes onto garments for the past 11 years. 'I have a six-year-old daughter. I want to make sure that by the time my daughter is old enough to work, companies like Nike will offer better working environments and better wages.'
Siti Nursyafitri, a Serikat Pekerja Nasional union member who makes Nike clothing in Indonesia, has seen the Super Bowl ad. She was recovering from a C-section delivery during the pandemic when she saw her payments disappear, leading her to feed her baby water instead of formula. Hearing that Nike would bounce back from its lockdown slump to rake in $44.5 billion in revenue in 2021, a 19 percent increase from the year before, made her and her fellow workers angry, she said.
'And then I saw an advertisement that Nike made, and it involved strong women athletes,' Nursyafitri said. 'I think even Nike workers like me deserve to be in those advertisements because the Nike workers show the Nike quality. Nike should present their workers instead of other women.'
The day of online action came just as unionized retail employees at nine Nike stores in Turkey were set to strike over a failure to come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. This would have followed a wider suspension of online sales in the country through Nike's website and mobile app after the Turkish government increased customs taxes on goods from abroad in August.
But Eyüp Alemdar, chairman of Koop-İş Sendikası, a UNI Global Union affiliate, appeared via a recorded message to say that the strike had been averted because Nike met its demands for better wages and working conditions through a renewed deal.
'While we grow our union strength in Nike stores, we support your fight for justice in the factories,' he said. 'Across Nike's supply chain, we are raising our voices together. Today we stand with you, the factory workers, in calling on Nike [to] recognize Nike workers' labor across the globe. Give them what they deserve.'
Collin Heatley, a fifth-year PhD student and member of the Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation at the University of Oregon, described co-founder Phil Knight—not to mention Nike itself—as a 'common enemy' who has 'undermined the mission of public education' in the Beaver State, where Nike is headquartered and universities are facing a budget crisis from low state funding. Knight, he said, has turned the University of Oregon into a business that's 'fueled by stolen wages and tax avoidance.'
'Nike and Phil Knight are key to understanding why Oregon's failing in education,' Heatley said. 'Phil Knight has put over half a billion dollars into the University of Oregon in the last few years alone, through donations, which are earmarked for specific purposes: Hundreds of millions went into a new mega track and field stadium; $500 million went into the Nike campus, which is focused on producing profitable scientific patents. The key part is that Phil Knight and Nike have lobbied extensively against increased public education funding at the state level and against any type of state tax reform that would generate those funds for Oregon to pay for education. And we know that Nike gets away with paying next to nothing in federal taxes.'
As far as David versus Goliath face-offs go, the stakes have never been higher. Abiramy Sivalogananthan, AFWA's regional coordinator for South Asia, said that 'Fight the Heist' is the yearslong realization of a vision of unions organizing and campaigning across borders to bring powerful companies like Nike to the bargaining table. The campaign is encouraging supporters to use its social media tools to broadcast its message and bring it to Nike's board of directors. But it's the workers' photos, she said, that will lend an 'emotional weight' to the campaign, 'making a bold statement that they will no longer remain invisible or silent.'
'It is true that we have less resources to fight powerful giants, and we have also figured out that individual countries alone can't take them on because they do have more resources,' said Swasthika Arulingam, president of the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union in Sri Lanka. 'But despite that, we as unions and civil society have found a way to fight even powerful brands like Nike, and that is exactly this campaign. We know that we can't do it as one union or one country, so we have come together regionally to fight this.'
