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PrintNike and the Par Garment company - evading responsibility
December 2000
Tim Connor
When it becomes publicly known that a particular factory is operating under sweatshop conditions, big corporations like Nike often "cut and run" - cancelling orders and moving production to other factories which are out of the media spotlight. This is the worst possible scenario for workers. It puts their jobs at risk and sends a clear message to other workers that they should keep quiet about labour abuses in their factory or they may lose their jobs as well. NikeWatch and other organisations involved in the Nike campaign have repeatedly urged Nike to only leave a factory as a last resort. Rather we have called on the company to work with its suppliers to ensure that workers' rights are respected. Unfortunately Nike ignored this advice in the Par Garment case.
The Par Garment company is notorious for underpaying workers, requiring extended shifts of up to 12 hours a day, failing to put in place welfare provisions required under Thai labour law and laying off regular workers in order to sub-contract production to smaller sweatshops.
The Par Garment workers remaining in the factory have no job security since they are working under constant fear of uncertainty, not knowing when they will be laid off. They also work under deteriorated conditions in a poor working environment with cracked walls, no fire alarm system, no emergency lights, locked emergency exits, an electricity controller that occasionally explodes, dirty toilets, and the constant stench of animals near the factory area that permeates into the work area. Being confined inside a solid block building with poor ventilation makes the work environment unbearably hot, dusty and stuffy. The factory does not even provide clean and cold drinking water to the workers.
Nike was a customer at the Par Garment factory at Rangsit up until 1997 when Par Garment attempted to crush the factory union by closing down the factory and moving the production to some of their other factories. This lead to an extended sit-in protest by workers at the factory to prevent it from being sold. In April 1998 the Thai government stepped in and mediated a settlement and the factory reopened, but shortly afterwards the five union officials who organised the protest were fired and a number were blacklisted and were unable to get jobs in other factories.
The dispute at the Par Garment factory received extensive media coverage and when the factory re-opened in 1998 Nike did not resume its orders. According to Young Christian Workers (a local Thai NGO) management repeatedly told the workers that Nike did this because the union members tainted the image of Par Garment to the press. This reasoning was then used to hold the union members responsible for workers losing their jobs following the loss of the Nike contract. Nike did continue to order from Par Garment subsidiaries, including the Par Monthinee factory in Nakorn Rachasima (Korat). Conditions in those factories are also extremely poor, but they were not unionised and had received no media attention.
In March 2000 a number of labour rights groups wrote to Nike alleging that the company had failed to live up to its code of conduct in the Par Garment case and urging the company to restore its ordering relationship with the factory at Rangsit and to work to ensure that all workers in the factory were freely allowed to engage in union activities. Nike ignored this letter.
In May 2000 Junya Yimprasert interviewed workers from the Par Garment factory at Rangsit and learned that an order for Nike apparel had arrived that week, subcontracted from another factory. Par Garment, like many clothing manufacturers in Thailand, both subcontracts extensively and takes orders from other factories in order to give it greater flexibility. Although Nike claims to monitor the production of all its goods, the company has failed to put in place a monitoring system which could keep up with this web of sub-contracting.
Yimprasert reported that at the time the sub-contracted Nike order was received conditions at the factory at Rangsit continued to be extremely poor:
It was difficult; when we met, there were cameras watching us. They prevented us from communicating with each other, they didn't let us talk together, they put us in different groups at work, they forbade us to talk.
Also in 2000 a film crew from RTBF, the Belgian National Broadcaster, recorded a documentary on codes of conduct in Thailand. They interviewed one of the workers from the Par Garment factory at Rangsit who had been dismissed for union activity. The worker told them that:
A local NGO assisted the fired workers to take their case through the Thai court system. Finally in December 2000, after two and a half years of court battles, the five Par Garment Union Committee members won their case at the Supreme Court. The judge ordered the company to reinstate all the five union committee members and pay their unpaid salaries. The workers are now pressing the company to act on the judgement.