Naomi Klein – I'm sitting in a downtown Vancouver coffee shop with Cicih Sukaesih, an Indonesian woman who used to work for Nike. She is telling me, with the help of a translator, about the conditions under which she glued together the soles of big white running shoes.
From 1989 to 1993, Sukaesih worked in a factory of 6,500 workers, most of them teenaged girls. She was exposed to heavy fumes, with little protection and frequent accidents. "I didn't know it was dangerous. It was very common to be nauseated and fatigued."
She said workers stood all day, with no time for breaks. They were paid around a dollar a day, below the minimum wage of $1.25. "We were demanded to do overtime, it was not voluntary." After workers tried to unionize to combat these conditions, Sukaesih and 23 others were fired.
Since then, minimum wage has been raised to slightly more than two dollars a day - despite the fact that a sustenance income in the region is widely recognized to be twice that. Many Nike workers still live without running water, suffer malnutrition, and reports abound of sadistic management practices, as well as desperate wildcat strikes.
Vancouver was the first stop in Sukaesih's cross-Canada speaking tour, sponsored by the Canadian Auto Workers Union. She met with labor leaders - including Canadian Labor Congress head Bob White - and led a protest outside of the shiny downtown Nike Store, where she spoke with the manager about sneaker makers in Indonesia.
"I want people to think about what they buy and who made it and under what conditions it was made," Sukaesih told me. "I dream about a time when we network - the workers in the Third World and in Canada and the U.S., so that we all know what is happening. This is the first step and I'm very happy."
Today, she was to be in Toronto, accompanied by U.S. labor activists Trim Bissell and Jeff Ballinger. It is the fastidious research and education work of Ballinger and Bissell that is largely responsible for bringing the conditions in Nike's overseas factories to the world's attention.
Despite this growing awareness, however, many still react to news of Nike's labor practices as if they just found out about a shoddily made electrical appliance. "So don't buy Nikes," they say, casting the issue as a personal matter of conscience which we are all free to quietly act upon but, for god's sake, not in public.
Others immediately want to know what brands are okay to buy. When they find out that there are few big namebrands made without sweatshop labor, they throw up their hands and pronounce the entire exercise futile.
It seems we have become so self-identified as consumers that we expect everything to be solved through our shopping habits. The situation of workers like Sukaesih is not a matter between an individual and their mall, it's a human rights issue and a public policy matter for us to address not just as shoppers, but as citizens.
The limits of the narrow consumer activist model revealed themselves last month when U.S. President Bill Clinton's task force on sweatshops - of which Nike was a member - made its camera-friendly announcements. It turns out that all corporations will need to do to earn a "No Sweat" label on their garments is abide by each country's legal minimum wage - even when it is well below poverty levels. In other words, slap a feel-good tag on it and send it to the mall.
The desire for guilt-free shopping is far easier for the spin doctors at Nike to handle than a politicized public's demands for real justice. Which is why, if we truly object to corporations scouring the globe for the most exploitable work force, we shouldn't just switch brands. We should devote ourselves to opposing the further deregulation of world markets and attacking the Chretien government for abandoning human rights as a basis for foreign policy.
We should also bombard Nike CEO Philip Knight with postcards and petitions telling him that when minimum wage isn't enough to stave off malnutrition, paying minimum wage is a cause for shame – not pride.
Most of all, we should do all of this so publicly that thinking people everywhere begin to push their Nike-logo-festooned T-shirts and caps to the backs of their closets like last year's bad idea.
Sukaesih is hopeful that the Nike PR department is underestimating the true depth of public concern. "I really believe that this tour will give Nike a lesson," she told the crowd in Vancouver, "and one of the lessons is that it's not only me looking for justice, it's all of you people all over the world who are still looking for justice."