Jakarta Post – Thousands of workers from two shoe manufacturers rallied Monday at the Jakarta Stock Exchange building to demand Nike, an American athletic apparel company, restore contracts with the companies.

The workers are from PT Naga Sakti Parama Shoes Industry (NASA) and PT Hardaya Aneka Shoes Industry (HASI), both in Tangerang, which manufacture shoes exclusively for Nike. They took to the streets around the building, causing heavy traffic congestion along Jl. Sudirman, the city's main thoroughfare.

The protesters carried banners saying "Nike is a blood-sucking vampire" and "Go to hell Nike". "We demand Nike consider that more than 14,000 workers have relied on the company's shoe orders for many years. Please, don't put our lives in jeopardy," union spokeswoman Elizabeth Sutarti said.

Nike has terminated contracts with the two factories because of the "poor quality" of their products and services.

Sutarti, however, dismissed Nike's explanation, denying the factories were producing low-quality shoes or having delivery problems. "We rarely received complaints from Nike, at least in the past two years," she said.

Workers will continue to hold rallies if Nike does not meet their demands, she said.

Nike Corporation sent a termination letter to Siti Hartati Murdaya, president director of PT Central Cipta Murdaya, the holding company for both PT NASA and HASI, on July 6. The letter said Nike intended to end the cooperation with both companies. It provided a nine-month notice, saying the cooperation would end in March 2008.

Murdaya told a press conference she had negotiated with Nike for additional time, but to no avail. "We proposed termination periods of 18 months and 30 months for HASI and NASA, respectively. We can't relocate 14,000 workers over a nine-month period."

She said the companies needed more time to relocate workers and to create a new company to employ laid-off workers.

Maretha Sambe, a Nike media consultant, quoted the company's director for corporate responsibility communications, Erin Dobson, saying the company's decision to end the contracts with both factories was final. She said Nike had already warned them of their below-standard output and other problems in March this year by decreasing shoe orders by more than 50 percent.

According to Murdaya, Nike used to order 80 percent of the companies' total capacity of 1,000,000 pairs of shoes per month. But Nike decreased its monthly order to less than 300,000 pairs of shoes since early this year.

The US athletic apparel company is not responsible for paying compensation to affected workers, Sambe said. "Nike is only a buyer and not the investor who owns the factories and employs the workers."