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By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
September
23,2003
Why
did Marc Kasky settle his case against Nike for a $1.5 million payment to the
Fair Labor Association, a group controlled by Nike and other major shoe
manufacturers?
Kasky,
described in various press reports as a "labor activist" and "gadfly,"
certainly deserves credit for filing a daring suit against Nike in a California
state court, alleging that the company lied about its operations overseas and how
its contractors treat workers.
In
2002, the California Supreme Court rejected claims by Nike's lawyers that the
First Amendment immunized the company from being sued under state consumer
protection laws.
Nike
appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in a victory for Kasky earlier this
year, the Court sent the case to trial in California.
But
earlier this month, Kasky settled his claims against the shoe giant.
Under
the terms of the settlement, Nike agreed to make a payment of $1.5 million to
the Fair Labor Association (FLA) in Washington, D.C.
A
joint press release issued by Kasky and Nike says that "Mr. Kasky is satisfied
that this settlement reflects Nike's commitment to positive change where
factory workers are concerned."
Sweatshop
activists last week expressed outrage at the settlement, pointing out that the
FLA is controlled by Nike and the shoe and apparel industry.
"Nike
and its corporate buddies basically run the FLA," said Andy Eisen, a
student at Lake Forest College and a member of United Students Against Sweatshops
(USAS). "It's governed by and for the corporations that it's supposed to
monitor."
Corporations
are given six of the seats on the FLA board, and the FLA charter states that
all major decisions require a super-majority of the corporations on the board
to be approved.
Students
also attacked the FLA's operations as secretive and ineffective, saying that
most important information is being kept from the public.
"This
an organization that has been around for years, and yet has virtually no
concrete accomplishments that it can point to," said Julia Plascencia, a
student at the University of California Los Angeles. "It's not like we're
asking the impossible -- a truly independent monitoring organization like the
Worker Rights Consortium regularly releases full reports about specific
factories to the public, while the FLA took years to release a single report
that didn't even include the addresses of factories." Kasky, who works at the San Diego Naval
Training Center Foundation in San Diego, California, did not return calls
seeking comment.
He
has filed similar lawsuits against other companies, including one in 1997
against Tarrant Apparel Group. That case was dismissed by a California state court.
Kasky's
lawyer, Alan Caplan, of Caplan & Fielding in San Francisco, did not return
calls seeking comment.
The
New York Times reported earlier this month that "other terms of the settlement
were not disclosed, and lawyers on both sides declined to say whether Nike had
paid Mr. Kasky's legal fees or made other payments."
Jeffrey
Ballinger, executive director of Press for Change, the group that initiated the
corporate campaign against Nike in the 1990s, said that he met with Kasky's
lawyers Alan Caplan and Phil Neumark in Italy in July of this year to discuss
discovery for the upcoming trial.
Ballinger
said that lawyers mentioned nothing about a possible settlement -- they just
spoke of the upcoming discovery and trial.
After
hearing of the settlement, Ballinger called Caplan to try and get an
explanation, but Caplan did not return his call, either.
"The
terms of the settlement were totally set by Nike," Ballinger said. "If
any money is going to come out of Nike to settle this kind of case, it should
go to workers who were cheated by Nike. End of story. Nike has
never
been forced to pay for the cheating that has taken place at their contract
factories -- cheating that has been documented at their Indonesian factories
for several years. Tens of thousands of workers being paid an illegal training
wage. Nike admitted it in 1996."
Ballinger
estimates that Nike owes Indonesian workers somewhere between $8 million and
$12 million, "just for the wage cheating."
"You
can talk about the sexual harassment," he said. "Some sort of compensation
ought to be paid there. By Nike's own admission, there was widespread sexual
harassment. There was a report in 2001 that came from a Nike-funded faux NGO --
the Global Alliance."
Ballinger
points out that Nike has spread its wealth around to various public interest
groups -- to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, to The Robert F. Kennedy Center
for Human Rights -- in a largely successful effort to buy silence on the issue
of the abuse of Nike's workers.
Discovery
in the Kasky case had the potential to open the Nike files to public scrutiny,
to document the mistreatment of workers throughout the world, and the flow of
money from Nike to public interest groups.
And
Kasky and his lawyers settle this potential historic case for a $1.5 million
donation to a group controlled by the shoe and apparel industry. And now they
won't talk about it.
End
of story?
We
don't think so.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of
the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com.
Robert
Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are
co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
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