Pressured, Nike to Help Workers In Honduras

[Judi Lynn]

Pressured, Nike to Help Workers In Honduras
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: July 26, 2010

Facing pressure from universities and student groups, the apparel maker Nike announced on Monday that it would pay $1.54 million to help 1,800 workers in Honduras who lost their jobs when two subcontractors closed their factories. Nike agreed to the payment after several universities and a nationwide group, United Students Against Sweatshops, pressed it to pay some $2 million in severance that the two subcontractors had failed to pay.

The University of Wisconsin, Madison terminated its licensing agreement with Nike over the Honduran dispute, and Cornell warned that it would do the same unless Nike resolved the matter.

A Nike spokeswoman, Kate Meyers, said on Monday that the $1.54 million was for “a worker relief fund” and was not for severance. Nike also agreed to provide vocational training and finance health coverage for workers laid off by the two subcontractors.

“This may be a watershed moment,” Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a group of 186 universities that monitors factories that make college-logo apparel, said. “Up until now, major apparel brands have steadfastly refused to take any direct financial responsibility for the obligations to the workers in their contractors’ factories. Now the most high-profile sports apparel firm has done just that.”

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/business/global/27nike.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Nike & brethren, along with assorted war profiteers, stand to make billions from the U.S.

installation of a rightwing government in Honduras, following the rightwing coup d'etat in June 2009. One of the "benefits"--worth lots of money all by itself--is the rightwing death squads now unleashed in Honduras, who murder union leaders and other advocates of the poor. One of President Zelaya's "crimes" was to raise the minimum wage (which was the lowest in Latin America, in one of the poorest countries). Nike & pals can now dictate terms in their other contract factories and can--if they want--hire death squads, as Chiquita did in Colombia, to take care of any other "labor problems" that arise. They own the government.

This $1.54 million for a "worker relief fund" is a trifle to Nike. I applaud the students here whose anti-sweatshop campaign is awesome and bodes well for the future restoration of our own democracy. But the problem is enormous, and is, in fact, comparable to the problem faced by enlightened people in the Middle Ages, with the "global" rule of the Catholic Church based in Rome. The problem is so big that it is difficult to see. The problem is Multinational Corporate Rule itself--with the super-rich and their allied war profiteers dictating policy here and everywhere else that they can bribe, bully or murder their way into controlling.

The plane carrying the kidnapped president of Honduras out of the country at gunpoint stopped at the U.S. airbase in Honduras for refueling! The coup d'etat was abetted by the Pentagon, and later developments revealed the State Department to be in collusion as well. Some one hundred union leaders and other advocates of the poor have been murdered in Honduras. Thousands have been beaten, imprisoned, raped and subjected to every kind of intimidation. This kind of nefarious use of power by the U.S . government, on behalf of corporations like Nike, and on behalf of the war profiteer 'contractors' at U.S. military facilities in Honduras (and around the world) needs a political revolution HERE. We can do what it is possible to do, as citizens, to fight a corporation like Nike, but our government is not with us. Our government is against us, as well as against all those who are being exploited and grievously harmed in other countries. Maybe the U.S. student anti-sweatshop campaign will be the spark. It very well could be. Or maybe it will be something else, or a combination of things, that wakes the American people up and re-empowers them. I tend to think we have to start with the corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, now endemic in the U.S. But whatever it is, or however it happens, we need to address the fundamental problem, Corporate Rule.