Next time you go to put on your pair of Nike "kicks," imagine a ten year old girl, working a fourteen hour day, in harsh conditions, who will be paid one percent of the 120 dollars you paid for your shoes. In contrast, 95 percent of that 120 dollars will essentially be turned over to the wealthiest American Nike corporate executives. .
In 1907, Upton Sinclair wrote the novel, The Jungle, this book brought attention to deplorable conditions of what are now known as sweatshops. A sweatshop is a hidden factory where the clothes we wear, and the shoes we put on our feet are created. These shops are hot, unsafe, filthy, and deafening. If it wasn't for Upton Sinclair's world-renowned novel, who knows when we would have become aware of this exploitation of corporate abuse. Since time immortal, the powerful have taken advantage of the weak and vulnerable. The reason sweatshops even exist today is all because of the profitable situation of low paid, third world workers, and corporations that turn around and sell their products for hundred times more than it costs to produce them.
Nike has been known to state that they do not know about the reprehensible conditions where their shoes and apparel are manufactured. In China workers are sometimes forced, even though it's illegal, to pay sweatshop owners their first month's wages, which they would lose if they were to quit within a year. The chemicals used in the processing of Nike products in Chinese sweatshops, are at 177 times the legal limit. 77 percent of workers in these shops are subject to respiratory, liver, kidney, and brain damage.
Nike's sweatshops employ mostly young women and girls; in fact they are 90% of the work force. These women endure physical, sexual, and mental abuse. They suffer beatings, are subject to body searches, and are made to work overtime. In addition, they have few or no holidays, they cannot use the bathroom at will, and if they try to stand up for themselves, they"re often thrown in jail, fired, or sometimes even physically beaten.
