I’ve been to NikeTown, Nike’s showcase superstore on Chicago’s swank Michigan Avenue. It’s an impressive place: a three-story Nike theme park, loaded with gadgets and whizbang gizmos intended to entice tourists — and it does, mobs of them — filling the subconscious with all the mellow, free-spirited sights and sounds of what it is to be Nike. Mike soars in NikeTown. The Swoosh, the most recognizable international symbol since the Nazi Swastika, is everywhere. The point of NikeTown is not, however, entertainment. It’s commerce. Big commerce. Nike’s 1996 revenue, over $6.5 billion, tells the tale. Nike sells and sells. We understand this.
Lately, it’s become difficult to say what Nike sells. Rare today is anything so crass as a blatant pitch. Nike ads these days are soft focus little vignettes — shot in grainy footage — of pristine mountain peaks or baseball diamonds, implying that Nike rode the Ark with Noah and was responsible for the existence of baseball; touching pieces, on a different plane, nothing so crass as selling a tennis shoe. The Nike monolith has transcended base commerce. Nike’s about who we are. It’s about who we want to be. It’s hard to remember, sometimes, that it’s advertising.
Now, Fortress Nike is under siege. The first guns were fired in an October 17, 1996 segment on CBS News’ 48 Hours. It exposed, for the first time, the sordid, shocking story of human degradation behind the $125 sneaker we buy at Foot Locker. 48 Hours told the human story behind the shoe.
Nike’s been involved in a long-running practice (which they deny) of moving like fire ants from country to country in Southeast Asia, in an odious quest for the cheapest human labor source. In the Eighties, Nike shifted its production from Oregon to South Korea and Taiwan. In the early Nineties, unions formed there, increasing the minimum wage to $1 per hour. Nike (which doesn’t build factories but subcontracts out large labor forces) relocated its production to Indonesia, and then Vietnam, and today China, where a shoe is made for about $1.03 per day.
At the heart of the escalating attacks on Nike are the squalid, inhumane working conditions commonplace in these factories. Independent eyewitness accounts of rampant, systematic abuse surfaced: workers’ mouths taped shut, women forced to sit in a dog cage for hours, women and children (the predominant employees) forced to run laps around the plant because they wore improper footwear to work. In Southeast Asia “to Nike” has become a verb. It means to take out your frustrations on a fellow worker.
Unable to explain their continuing silent association with their benefactor, famous Nike spokespeople are running for cover. Jerry Rice bolted from a room last week when confronted with such questions. Most athletes are ill-equipped to deal with this complex, political/economic power keg. One, however, is: His name is Jordan. Though long aware of the disgrace (a year ago he said he’d “look into it”), he’s been silent.
It’s hard to imagine one without the other. Before signing a rookie to endorse a new line of shoe (the first of the Air series), Nike was just another sleepy shoe company. They hit the mother lode, as Jordan turned out to be not only the best basketball player of his generation, but the globe’s most charismatic sports figure. Jordan, for his part, despite all his magnificent talents, would have remained just a superb basketball player, without Nike’s increasingly skillful marketing savvy, and as the Jordan-driven company grew, so did its massive profits.
You could say Jordan’s a pitchman: nothing more. He owes us nothing; a paid entertainer reading a script. I say this is wrong. Jordan is far, far more than a paid shoe shill. He’s a worldwide icon, implying good, clean, fair things. It’s an image Jordan has spent a career cultivating and molding with great care. When I think of Michael Jordan, half-starved women and children in a sweatshop, working for $1 per day, don’t come to mind. When I think of Jordan, I don’t think of virtual concentration camps toiling away on the latest $140 Air Jordans. But soon, very soon if he’s not careful, if he doesn’t speak out, it’ll be difficult to Be Like Mike without these horrific images coming to mind.
Jordan doesn’t need Nike. He should tell people this is wrong — people starving to produce shoes with his name on them. He should tell kids to support the growing international boycott of Nike products. He should say he’s ashamed. But then, there’ll always be cynics. People who’ll wonder where was Mike a year ago, before the heat became so fierce? People who might question if this belated indignation is nothing more than Jordan jumping a sinking ship, trying to save his own skin.
The same factories of human sorrow which produce Nikes, also produce most of the other athletic shoes we wear. Yes, they do it too. Nike’s not alone. To this I say, so what? Nike is to athletic wear what McDonald’s is to fast food. The shoe giant has reduced all other companies to minor players. If they changed, the industry would change. Why does Nike need to brutally exploit women and children, when it can afford perfectly well to pay its workers a living wage? Imagine the fantastic commercials, with happy, prosperous workers cheerfully making tennis shoes. Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t think of it already. I’ve bought my last Swoosh for a long time.
This article appears in April 11 • 1997 and April 11 • 1997 (Cover).