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The Nike Issue… How It All Began
Jeff Ballinger, founder and director of Press for Change, spent nearly four years in Indonesia, assisting workers in organizing unions. After departing Jakarta in 1992, he immediately began to raise awareness about Nike's abusive labor practices in Indonesia. Since the contrast between dollar-a-day wages and the company's free spending image was so shocking, the story interested many journalists and editors. Ballinger's annotation of a worker's wage stub headlined Harper's magazine during the 1992 Summer Olympics. He humanized the worker experience by pointing out that at the current wage and work schedule, Sadisah, an Indonesian Nike factory worker, would have to make Nike shoes for over 44,000 years in order to earn Michael Jordan's Nike salary for endorsements in the year 1991.
In 1993, CBS flew Ballinger back to Indonesia to narrate the story of the workers' struggle with Nike's contractors for a decent wage. The CBS report emphasized how the miserable minimum wage of Indonesia is deliberately set below the poverty line to attract foreign investors. Many workers who have attempted to organize free trade unions have suffered retaliation such as physical and verbal harassment, illegal docking of pay, and termination.
In 1994, harsh criticism of the company's practices appeared in The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Affairs, The Economist (London), and BBC Worldwide Magazine. On ABC's Prime Time Live, Ballinger told viewers that merely one percent of Nike's annual advertising budget would raise the 12,000 young Indonesian women making Nike shoes above the poverty line. When the interviewer asked Nike CEO Phil Knight the reason he does not make shoes in America, he replied, "What it really comes down to is that the average American really doesn't want to be a shoemaker."
In 1995, Ms. Magazine featured a detailed report on Nike's labor practices, making it clear to readers that the company is making record profits exploiting young women in Indonesia.
Five years after the CBS story, when it became clear to him that the company had chosen to ignore the bad publicity and make only cosmetic changes in its operations in Indonesia, Ballinger formed Press for Change.
Learn more about Press for Change www.nikeworkers.org.
Go to Why a living wage?
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