The story of a shoe.

• Author: Ryan, John C.
• Position: Materials used in manufacturing athletic shoes

Editor's Introduction: Since the days when Nike Corporation co-founder Phil Knight sold shoes out of the trunk of his car at track meets, his high-flying sports-shoe company has developed a reputation as one of the United States' more progressive corporations. But this reputation - based on the company's strong leadership in supporting equal participation for women in sports, for example, or on the wooded running trails it provides for its U.S. employees - contrasts sharply with reports of its operations in Asia, where growing scrutiny has revealed widespread labor abuses.

By employing subcontractors in Asia to assemble shoes, Nike has made big profits - $800 million on sales of $9.2 billion in 1996. But the company's success, and the disparity between its profits and the wages it pays its subcontracted labor force, has made it a target for critics who say the company has a double standard. Last spring thousands of Indonesian workers, complaining that they were not receiving the required minimum wage of $2.50-a-day, "ransacked" their factory. In Vietnam, where workers churn out a million pairs of shoes every month for a minimum monthly wage of $42, 800 workers recently walked off the job to protest poor working conditions. Wages are nearly as low in China and Indonesia, where 70 percent of all Nike shoes are made.

Last year, in response to growing criticism Nike hired noted civil rights activist Andrew Young to draft a report on the state of Nike's labor practices - though Young admittedly has no labor expertise. Based on a two-week, whirlwind tour through 12 different factories in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam, Young concluded that there was no "widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers" at these operations. But the leak of one of Nike's internal human rights and labor assessments - documenting many unsafe conditions at a plant in Vietnam - has seriously called Young's findings into question. In a sobering refutation of Young's report in the New Republic, Stephen Glass avers that in order to soothe labor critics, "the world's largest sneaker company did what it did best: it purchased a celebrity endorsement."

Nike's ability to reconfigure its public image through advertising and celebrity endorsements points to another troubling aspect of the company's success. Perhaps as much a matter of concern as Nike's exploitation of its factory workers, is the shoe company's ability to manipulate its consumers, the people who purchase and wear its shoes. The human rights organization Christian Aid estimates that the labor component of athletic shoes manufactured in Asia is roughly equivalent to 6 percent of the price Nike pays for them, or about 3 percent of the price they fetch in stores. Since Nike spent $978 million on advertising in 1997 - more than 10 percent of its earnings - it appears that the company spends significantly more marketing its shoes than it does paying its labor force to make them. Along with countless other businesses and advertising companies, Nike is working to create needs, rather than meet existing ones - the satisfaction of which exacts unnecessary social and environmental costs.

As John Ryan and Alan Thein Durning have documented in their book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, consuming goods has come to play...