posted February 21, 2001 12:06 PM            

Nike now lets you personalize your shoes by submitting a word or phrase
which they will stitch onto your shoes, under the swoosh. So Jonah
Peretti filled out the form and sent them $50 to stitch "sweatshop" onto
his shoes.

Here's the responses he got.. fun and games with nike...

From: "Personalize, NIKE iD"

> >>To: "'Jonah H. Peretti'"

Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000

Your NIKE iD order was cancelled for one or more of the following
reasons.

> >>

1) Your Personal iD contains another party's trademark or other
intellectual property.

2) Your Personal iD contains the name of an athlete or team we do not
have the legal right to use.

3) Your Personal iD was left blank. Did you not want any
personalization?

4) Your Personal iD contains profanity or inappropriate slang, and
besides, your mother would slap us.

If you wish to reorder your NIKE iD product with a new personalization
please visit us again at www.nike.com

Thank you, NIKE iD

**

From: "Jonah H. Peretti"

To: "Personalize, NIKE iD"

Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000

Greetings,

My order was canceled but my personal NIKE iD does not violate any of
the criteria outlined in your message. The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM
XC USA running shoes was the word "sweatshop."

Sweatshop is not:

> >>1) another's party's trademark,

> >>2) the name of an athlete,

> >>3) blank, or

> >>4) profanity.

I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the
children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me
immediately.

Thanks and Happy New Year, Jonah Peretti

**

From: "Personalize, NIKE iD" > To: "'Jonah H. Peretti'" Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000

Dear NIKE iD Customer,

Your NIKE iD order was cancelled because the iD you have chosen
contains, as stated in the previous e-mail correspondence,
"inappropriate slang".

If you wish to reorder your NIKE iD product with a new personalization
please visit us again at www.nike.com

Thank you, NIKE iD

**

From: "Jonah H. Peretti" To: "Personalize, NIKE iD" Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000

Dear NIKE iD,

Thank you for your quick response to my inquiry about my custom ZOOM XC
USA running shoes. Although I commend you for your prompt customer
service, I disagree with the claim that my personal iD was inappropriate
slang.

After consulting Webster's Dictionary, I discovered that "sweatshop" is
in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: "a shop
or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and
under unhealthy conditions" and its origin dates from 1892. So my
personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email.

Your web site advertises that the NIKE iD program is "about freedom to
choose and freedom to express who you are." I share Nike's love of
freedom and personal expression. The site also says that "If you want it
done right... build it yourself." I was thrilled to be able to build my
own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of
appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my
vision. I hope that you will value my freedom of expression and
reconsider your decision to reject my order.

Thank you, Jonah Peretti

**

From: "Personalize, NIKE iD"

To: "'Jonah H. Peretti'"

Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000

Dear NIKE iD Customer,

Regarding the rules for personalization it also states on the NIKE iD
web site that "Nike reserves the right to cancel any Personal iD up to
24 hours after it has been submitted".

In addition it further explains: "While we honor most personal iDs, we
cannot honor every one. Some may be (or contain) others trademarks, or
the names of certain professional sports teams, athletes or celebrities
that Nike does not have the right to use. Others may contain material
that we consider inappropriate or simply do not want to place on our
products.

Unfortunately, at times this obliges us to decline personal iDs that may
otherwise seem unobjectionable. In any event, we will let you know if we
decline your personal iD, and we will offer you the chance to submit
another."

With these rules in mind we cannot accept your order as submitted. If
you wish to reorder your NIKE iD product with a new personalization
please visit us again at www.nike.com

Thank you, NIKE iD

**

From: "Jonah H. Peretti"

To: "Personalize, NIKE iD"

Subject: RE: Your NIKE iD order o16468000

Dear NIKE iD,

Thank you for the time and energy you have spent on my request. I have
decided to order the shoes with a different iD, but I would like to make
one small request. Could you please send me a color snapshot of the ten-
year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes?

Thanks, Jonah Peretti

no response

posted February 21, 2001 02:51 PM            

The standard of living in regions where Nike shoes are made is not as high as it is in the Western world. And the cost of living is lower. One US dollar there could probably feed you well for an entire day or more. Nike employees in those regions make somthing like 5 times the amount of the average income. And when people there can make that kind of money, they want to work long hours.

posted February 21, 2001 03:13 PM            

There were a lot of stories of sexual and phyiscial abuse in these sweatshops.

And even if one dollar is a lot of money to them... then why not help their economy by paying them what a normal american would get paid working in their shop? Nike can friggin' afford it.

[edited because good is an adjective and get is a verb]

posted February 21, 2001 04:32 PM            

I got a laugh from reading this...

posted February 21, 2001 04:44 PM            

OK okay... I hear everyone going WHAT THE HELL IS Moisie TALKING ABOUT?

Alright, envision this, aliens land and say they will pay the equivelant of $500 an hour to anyone who will assemble wadzafiddlies. This is an easy easy easy task that anyone can do. At $500 dollars an hour just about everyone will try to get a job, since the alien merchants demand for wadzafiddlies (which sell for upwards of $20,000 each) else where in the galaxy is very high they have plenty of job openings, so many in fact that very few other jobs are left staffed. This in turn causes the prices of everything else to go up, plus, those people who didn't get jobs in the wadzafiddly shops are now universally poor.

I hope that made some sort of sense, without stretching your imagination too far.

------------------
Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys at the door who want to talk to us about this script for hamlet they've worked out.

posted February 22, 2001 06:43 AM            

Two questions: are those people making that money? And, if Nike's getting its shoes made that much cheaper, why haven't their prices gone down ?

Back when the Seattle WTO talks/ riots/ oppression was happening, I heard a guy on NPR talking, a guy from one of the unions, and he was discussing the idea of a "living wage": the amount of money that it takes to support yourself.

If the person isn't making a living wage, then generally it's a company town and they're going deeper and deeper into debt; this is where the phrase "wage slavery" originally came from.

I don't remember which corporations they were discussing, but one corp provided housing and food. . . as in, "the dorms and the factory are next to each other, surrounded by a barbed wire fence with armed guards. " Malaysia, I think that was.

From five minutes with the search engines:
http://www.nikewages.com

Someone who tried to LIVE on the $2.00 a day Nike pays. In a month he lost 20 lbs. For starters.

posted February 22, 2001 09:33 AM            

------------------
Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys at the door who want to talk to us about this script for hamlet they've worked out.

posted February 22, 2001 12:17 PM            

------------------
Ford, there's an infinite number of monkeys at the door who want to talk to us about this script for hamlet they've worked out.

posted February 22, 2001 12:59 PM            

Part of the reason Nike shoes are still upwards of $50 a pair is that we continue to pay upwards of $50 a pair. If nobody did that, the price would soon drop due to the laws of supply and demand. This is basic economic theory people.

As for the barracks being surrounded by armed guards, etc. Do you think those guards are there to keep people in? That is insane. People are literally killing each other to get these types of jobs. "This guys dead! Nike's hiring again!" More likely the guards are there to protect the employees, equipment, and property of Nike.

Think about it. These folks are making more than most of the nation, why would they want to leave? And if they did, why would Nike care. The ratio of labor supply to Nike's demand is probaly something like 5:1.

Do you understand what would happen if the people employed by Nike started to make 15 or 16 thousand dollars a year? Chaos! Prices would go all wonky and the only people who could afford anything would be the Nike employees.

And my final rant: America is good. Hell, America is a wonderful great kickass nation. But we are not the end all be all. We cannot go around imposing our ethics and lifestyles on other people. Which is exactly what the nikewages.org people are trying to do.

posted February 22, 2001 02:21 PM            

Yes, there's a free market in labor.

This is what one of the WTO protesters called "the race to the bottom." You can get cheaper labor in places where the govt shoots unionists, for instance. Nike, specifically, has unions [I don't know if they're any good, but they exist] so that's not really an issue.

I read through the whole damn article at
http://www.nikebiz.com/labor/nike_gla_report.pdf

I think that there are some things I trust Nike on: for instance, it does not improve productivity to have supervisors verbally abusing their workers, nor to have urban legends [perceived stories/beliefs that person X "just dropped dead on the factory floor"- I've seen a couple death stories grow in the telling] spreading around.

Also, given a basically unsophisticated workforce, it is easy for them to believe that things are harmful that are not, or to misunderstand how harmful various things are. [cellphones causing gas station explosions is another great urban legend.]

So basically the problems I believe in are worker underpayment and horrible living conditions [8 inch rats, open sewage, pollution, headaches, cramped miserable living conditions, etc etc] as reported on www.nikewages.org . The guys were there, they ate that food and lived on those floors for two months, I'm not going to call them liars.

As far as the numbers, the nike document points out [section 1.9] that the minimum wage is insufficient in 17 out of 27 regions to support one adult male, so paying "slightly more than minimum wage" is not such a great acheivement. Here's the cost of life:

All numbers taken from http://www.nikewages.org/journal_jim.html

4. How much do you spend on food each day?
On average they spend 7000-10000Rp, if they have it available.

8. How much do you spend on housing?
On average they spend 80000Rp per month for rent. The one married couple in the group has not been able to pay their rent for two months.

Compensation
1. How much money do you make each month?
Each said that they average 300,000Rp for basic monthly wage. This would not include transportation allowances or attendance bonuses.

7000 x 30 = 210,000 Rp/month food [LOWEST NUMBER]
+80000 Rp/month housing
= 290,000 Rp/month expenses.

Leaving 10,000 Rp/month for luxuries like clothing.

And that's working overtime. And not getting sick.

There has been a significant increase in the minimum wage as of Sept. 1 [just after the end of the nikewages report] and another in January. However, the 8,000 Rp to the dollar is now [according to Yahoo, close of business today] 9,610 Rp to the dollar. So they're probably breaking even.

In section 3.2, there is a really questionable bit where they figure the hourly salary based on a "standard working day of about 7 hours" [top, p. 31] after throwing in all the overtime. Of course, this is based on workers' perceived salaries [which you would think they knew, but one should never overestimate human intelligence.]

In section 3.6, it does mention that the workers in some factories get fed lunch for free, a point not particularly emphasized in www.nikewages.org .

One last thing:

More than 97% did not want their children to become factory workers [p.57]. . . which leads me to think it's not such a good job.

A sweatshop job may be better than starving; it doesn't mean it's a fair wage for fair work. And, in a number from the WTO protests that I have no source for, Nike could double the factory workers' wages and raise the price of the shoes by. . .fifty cents.

Eighty dollars, people.
Two things stopped the exploitation of American workers: unions and the Henry Ford idea that if the workers didn't have any money, they couldn't buy his cars.

Here endeth the rant. Let's head to WI.

De-dysfractionation arguments:

Companies exist to make things for people at a profit. Not to make money. To think otherwise is to say that any specific corporation- say, the one you work for- would have no philosophical problem making landmines or sarin gas if the profit margin was good. Saying "companies exist to make money" is obsolete Marxian propaganda.

And, yes, it is better to be underfed than unfed. That doesn't mean it is good to be underfed.

And, nobody's suggesting these people should be paid $15,000 a year; just that they should be making enough that they can eat. And have a little left over for luxuries like soap and clothes. As suggested by that commie anarchist bomb thrower, Pope John Paul II.