Activists disrupt Nike’s Olympic advertising extravaganza with unpaid workers’ demands

Spending its largest marketing budget in Olympic history, sportswear giant Nike has taken over Paris with advertising, including a screen spanning the Centre Pompidou museum. Activists yesterday evening raised the hypocrisy of Nike’s billion dollar marketing spend while refusing workers in its supply chain the $2.2 million in outstanding wages and compensation they are legally owed, through an action at the heart of Nike’s advertising.

Activists disrupt Nike's marketing messaging at the Centre Pompidou in Paris

Yesterday a dozen activists displayed a message exposing Nike’s debt to workers in giant letters in front of Centre Pompidou. While Nike’s advertising flashed in the background, activists held up the message that the world should be seeing instead and Nike doesn't want people to know: “Nike robbed workers of $2.2 million”. While Nike continues to get away with wage theft, the activists were stopped, held, and checked by police repeatedly during and after the action just for peacefully standing in solidarity with Nike's unpaid workers.

The $2.2 million consists of money owed to garment workers in two factories supplying Nike. More than a thousand Violet Apparel factory workers in Cambodia suddenly lost their jobs when their factory closed in July 2020 after they had sewed Nike's apparel for years. But they were denied the mandatory compensation under Cambodian law. The majority Burmese migrant workers at the Hong Seng Knitting factory in Thailand were also denied their legally owed payments through a wage theft scheme by the factory management. Nike has refused to settle these cases despite worker protests and four years of international activism on their behalf, including an international petition signed by over 125,000 people.

Mom, a former worker at Violet Apparel said: "Nike, we are not begging for charity, we just want what we were owed."

Former Hong Seng Knitting worker Kyaw San Oo, who fled the country after being faced with intimidation by the management, said: "I want justice."

Christie Miedema, campaign and outreach coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, said: “Nike shows that it has money to spend, but just refuses to spend it on the workers who make its clothes. Nike’s extravagant advertising spending during the Olympics is a slap in the face of the workers in Thailand and Cambodia who have been struggling for years to get by. It is high time that the company listens to the increasing pressure around the world and finally pays these workers.”

More info:

Christie Miedema, Clean Clothes Campaign, christie@cleanclothes.org, +31 6 42060638

Mathilde Pousseo, Collectif Éthique sur l’étiquette, mpousseo@ethique-sur-etiquette.org, +33 6 09 81 95 86

published 2024-08-02