Corporal punishment. Nike negates the dignity of the worker in repeated and widely reported acts of corporal punishment. Punishment for poor work includes cleaning toilets, being slapped, getting locked in a cage in the company compound, having your mouth taped shut, being forced to kneel for long periods with their arms in the air, or baking in the sun (Campaign for Labor Rights, 1996a). Some punishments are senseless, such as apologizing to every worker in the section or running around the factory compound yelling the boss is good (
http://www.caa.org.au/campaigns/nike/ sweating.html, July 1995). Here is a short list of some of the more widely reported stories:
In 1996, a supervisor at the Korean Sam Yang Co. factory, a Nike sub-contractor, was convicted for hitting 15 Vietnamese women team leaders over the head with the upper sole of a Nike shoe (Nguyen, VLW Report, 1997b). On September 16, 1996, Phil Knight in his stockholder's speech rewrote the incident by saying one woman was struck on the arm by her supervisor (Nike Web documents, 1998).
�In 1996 CBS News filmed a 48 Hours segment on the 15 workers who were beaten with a Nike upper sole. The women also accused their factory bosses of sexual harassment (CBS News 48 Hours, 1996).
�A supervisor at the Taiwanese factory Pou Chen Corp. found himself before a Vietnamese tribunal at the end of March for forcing 56 women workers to run 4km around the factory for not wearing regulation work shoes. Twelve of the women workers had to be taken to hospital (ICFTU, 1997).
�On International Day, March 8, 1997, 56 women at the Nike factory, Pouchen, were forced to run around the factory grounds: 12 of them fainted and were taken to the hospital by their friends. This was particularly painful to the Vietnamese because it occurred on International Women�s Day, an important holiday when Vietnam honors women (
http://www.boycottnike.com).
�Forty-five women were forced by their supervisors to kneel down with their hands up in the air for 25 minutes (
http://www.boycottnike.com).
�In the case of Ms Taska, her supervisor gave her nine cuts with a knife because she planned to participate in a strike for better safety conditions.
�On November 26, 1996, 100 workers at the Pouchen factory, a Nike site in Dong Nai, were forced to stand in the sun for half an hour for spilling a tray of fruit on an altar which three Taiwanese supervisors were using. One employee (Nguyen Minh Tri) walked out after 18 minutes, and was then formally fired. Mr Nguyen Minh Tri was reinstated after intervention by local labor federation officials. Mr Tri, however, has declined to work for Pouchen (
http://www. boycottnike. com).
�In Vietnamese, phoi nang means sun-drying. Employees deemed in need of a bit of discipline are forced to stand in the tropical sun, which packs a wallop unfamiliar to those from more temperate climates (Manning, 1997).
Bathrooms. In one Nike Indonesia factory, there are seven toilets for 10,000 workers. In Vietnam, workers must ask their supervisor for a special hat to wear to signal they are going to the bathroom. And there are only a hat or two for every 200 workers.
Workers cannot go to the bathroom more than once per eight-hour shift and they cannot drink water more than twice per shift (
http://www. boycottnike.com).
Sexual abuse. One thing about Nike�s public relations machine is that it is able to write its own stories to reinterpret stories told by Asian women. One approach to reinterpretation by Nike is to downplay sexual assault to a simple misunderstanding:
By September 1996, Vietnamese newspapers had published many articles about abuses at Nike factories in Vietnam. But at a shareholders� meeting at Nike�s headquarters, Mr Knight tried to play down a sexual abuse incident involving a supervisor and two women workers. Mr Knight said that the incident was just a misunderstanding when a night watchman was trying to wake up these two workers. He ignored the fact that the two women told a horrifying story to the Vietnamese press of an attempted rape by the factory supervisor. This supervisor skipped town before local authorities could put him on trial (Nguyen, 1997a).
Several workers told me that a Korean manager allegedly attempted to rape two women workers last year, and then fled the country. This was widely reported in the Vietnamese press (O�Rourke, 1997; also reported in The Worker Newspaper, 1996; and by Hung and Lam, 1997).
When the perpetrator is sent out of the country and the woman is bribed to keep silent, only the rebel voices are left to tell the story:
In the sexual molestation case, according to the news reports, factory managers tried to buy the young women�s silence, and the Korean manager fled to Seoul after charges were filed against him (
http://www.boycottnike.com).
We have to ask, is sexual abuse the rule or the exception when it occurs in broad daylight?
Even in broad daylight, in front of other workers, these supervisors try to touch, rub or grab their buttocks or chests. One supervisor told a female factory worker that it is a common custom for men in his country to greet women they like by grabbing their behinds (
http://www.boycottnike.com).
Verbal abuse. Reports abound that Asian workers are verbally abused and sexually harassed by supervisors. The language is both racist and abusive, with the �F... you and move,� �hurry up you stupid B....� or �dog,� along with hitting workers. This has been documented in Fengtay, Nikomas and Narity factories (
http://www.oneworld.org/christianaid/global_shoe.html):
Wages below the legal minimum for the first three months, strictly controlled access to toilet facilities, a maximum of two glasses of water per working day, verbal abuse, sexual harassment and corporal punishment are all practices denounced in these factories (ICFTU, 1997).
The female workers report that the Korean managers often yell at them, call them �dog,� etc. There have also been instances of Koreans slapping the female workers on the behind with an outsole if they have made a mistake. They said they hated the Korean managers, but no one was willing to protest the treatment because they were afraid of being fired (Athreya, 1995).
How does Nike respond to these repeated accusations? The story Nike tells has a rather simple plot. Phil Knight sets up his story by pointing out that Nike employs over 500,000:
...That�s a community slightly smaller than the city of Portland. And you do not see the Portland mayor being charged with abusing the citizenry whenever there is a crime...I would suggest that you hold us to the same standards (Knight, 1997).
This is a plot we can easily deny. Phil Knight is a CEO, not a Mayor. Nike is global enterprise, not a city. A city prosecutes crimes while Phil Knight assumes away responsibility for crimes of Nike male managers against Asian women. Nike supplements the Mayor�s story with stories depicting Nike to be the victim of well-financed fringe activists led by Global Exchange that re-circulate exaggerated tales to victimize Nike (Knight, 1998; Nike Web documents).
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