found this in yesterdays paper
found this in yesterdays paper
Not slaves
To the editor:
Joe Hawk's May 29 commentary, "Fat shoe contracts built on backs of slave workers," is over the top. I lived in Indonesia in 1990 when the Nike factory outside Jakarta was built. When Nike started hiring, there were enormous lines of volunteers for the jobs. The pay of $2 per day sounds ridiculous to Americans, but it was very attractive to the Indonesians. Nike also provided bus transport to move workers to and from their surrounding villages. Lunch facilities were provided and Nike may have paid for those lunches.
When Nike expanded the plant, the enormous lines of eager workers again appeared. If the pay was raised to $4 per day in the early 1990s, that would have been higher than usual in the area, and very well received on an island with terrible unemployment. These Indonesian workers were not slaves; they were happy to be working.
Westerners have trouble accepting the fact that some countries have very low wage structures. Groups such as Global Exchange in San Francisco keep meddling in labor areas they do not understand. If Western companies paid wages greatly over the local norm, it would lead to instability in the labor marketplace. If Nike were forced to pay very high wages in Indonesia, their competitors in other low-wage countries would soon take their market share and the Indonesian workers of Nike might again be unemployed.
Low cost labor overseas is employed doing many things that would be done differently, or by machines, in industrialized nations. For example, in 1990 I hired about 50 men from an Indonesian village to do dirt work on a construction project. These men worked hard for 50 cents an hour and did a great job. The dirt work job would normally have been done, in an industrialized country, by earth-moving equipment at about the same cost. But we employed about 50 men who really welcomed the work. They were not "slave workers."
RICHARD N. FULTON
HENDERSON
