By James M. Cook
Arizona Daily Wildcat
December 8, 1997

Nike abuses reflect 'premeditated scheme'

Editor:

I read with interest President Likins' and Athletics Director Livengood's recent comments in the Wildcat regarding the U of A's impending contract with Nike. "If I didn't in my own mind think that Nike was doing its very best effort to get better with regards to its activities, I wouldn't do it just for the money," says Livengood. Likins concurs: "There's no reason to assume malevolence on the part of Nike's board of directors. (Nike CEO) Phillip Knight is doing his best."

Come now, gentlemen. Even if reports by CBS, the New York Times, The Washington Post and independent investigators which describe beatings, torture, sexual harassment, child labor, 14-hour days, and exposure to carcinogens are just silly media fabrications, the fact remains that Nike pays its Indonesian workers $2.46 a day, its Chinese workers $1.75 a day and its Vietnamese workers $1.60 a day. The fact remains that Nike openly acknowledges paying its workers these wages and openly refuses to increase their pay.

If Nike has been trying to improve, then it must have been trying for a long, long time. Since 1962, to be precise. That's the year when Nike chief-to-be Phillip Knight wrote a paper as a Stanford MBA student on how to increase profits by moving factories to Asia and paying workers there pennies an hour. The Nike wage is not a goof. It is not a mistake. It is not an accident. It is a premeditated scheme. This is what Nike stands for. This is what the swoosh celebrates.

Perhaps Phillip Knight was actually surprised at the reports of torture in Nike plants. After all, Knight studied business, not history. If he had studied history, he would have known better. The record has shown time and again, from South Africa to Stalinist Russia to the American slave trade, that when the lives of others are assigned the price of pennies, further abuse always follows.

If Nike is "doing its very best", its very best must not be very good. Peter Likins and Jim Livengood think the best we at the University of Arizona can do is to sell our standards for Nike's surplus cash. If you think we can do better, and if you think we can help push Nike to do better, please write them and tell them so.

James M. Cook
Sociology graduate student