John Binder
Breitbart
September 6, 2018
Despite having a long, documented history of allegedly employing workers at slave wages, the multinational Nike corporation has become the face of the social justice wing of the political left with its newest ad featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.
As Breitbart News reported, the Nike corporation laid off 1,400 Americans just last year in the state of Oregon, cutting out workers who were older and likely sending their jobs overseas as the sports brand has done in the past.
In 2015, a screen printing factory in Clarence, New York used by Nike to make T-shirts that once employed nearly 170 Americans announced it was closing up shop and sending the jobs to low wage Honduras. The average minimum wage worker in Honduras earns less than $8,000 a year.
Nike’s history of alleged employment of slave labor in countries like Vietnam, China, Indonesia, and Honduras dates back so far that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blasted the corporation’s business practices in 1997, as Breitbart News noted:
Now, Nike has a habit of going to wherever in the world, wages are at rock bottom. Mexico is much too high wage for Nike. They’re now in Vietnam. They have determined that wages in Vietnam are the lowest in the world. [Emphasis added]
Let me quote this, ‘In demonstrations on Friday, workers burned cars and ransacked the factory’s office, saying the company, Nike, wasn’t paying them a $2.50 a day minimum wage.’ That’s our competition. That is what much of what the global economy is about. American workers, you really want to compete? You really want to go below $2.50 an hour? Nike might come back to America and hire you if you’re ready to go for $2 a day. You ready to do that? [Emphasis added]
Despite these decades-long outsourcing and cheap labor accusations against Nike, the brand has recently become the face of the social…