The Feminist Majority, along with National Organization for Women, the Ms. Foundation, and other women's groups, sent a letter to NIKE president Philip Knight deploring NIKE's use of sweatshops in Vietnam, Indonesia and China. Hypocritically the sports shoe company has spend hundreds of millions of dollars on empowering advertising about women and girls in sports. Over a dozen women's groups and individual women, including the Coalition of Labor Union Women and author Alice Walker, signed the letter asking NIKE to improve working conditions for factory workers, 90% of whom are women.

"The message in NIKE's women's empowerment ads is strong," said Feminist Majority president Eleanor Smeal at a press conference to release the letter, "but there's a disconnect between that message and the way NIKE pays and treats it workers. Sweatshops, which all of us thought were a thing of the past, are back again. And just like feminists at the turn of the century fought sweatshops, it's incumbent on us to do the same."

The campaign against NIKE, organized by Global Exchange, reveals that sweatshop workers are often paid less than a liveable wage, are forced to work as much as twelve hours a day, six days a week as well as frequent overtime, and are subject to verbal and physical abuse, unsafe working conditions, and sexual harassment.

According to Vietnam Labor Watch, the following conditions apply in many Vietnamese sweatshops: workers are paid $1.60 per day, when three basic Vietnamese meals cost $2.10 a day; the workers often live six to a small, cramped room and receive food from their relatives in the countryside in order to survive; many of the workers are teenagers; workers are often prohibited from talking and are allowed only one bathroom break per eight-hour shift, and only two drinks of water; workers who break rules or make mistakes are punished by fines and/or by corporal punishment such as being made to stand or run in the sun, being made to kneel down with hands in the air.

In China, according to Global Exchange, workers have lost fingers and hands in unsafe machinery, and are regularly exposed to the carcinogenic chemical benzene, which has been banned in the U.S.

"These girls can't even eat three square meals or go to school, let alone wear NIKE shoes and play sports," said Smeal.

The letter to NIKE signed by the women's groups calls for workers to be paid at least $3.00 per day, and for independent monitors to be allowed to meet regularly with workers to make sure the factory is obeying safety and overtime laws. For more information or to sign on to the letter, contact Christine Onyango at the Feminist Majority: 703-522-2214. Or see the Global Exchange Web site.€