Nike, the sportswear apparel giant, has prided itself on the story of its reinvention since the 1990s sweatshop scandal, which led co-founder Phil Knight to acknowledge that Nike products had become synonymous with “slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.”
In the years since, the company became the first major apparel brand to disclose names and locations of its suppliers. It also requires its contract factories to enforce workplace standards, including prohibiting forced overtime. Nike’s reports on its progress include a key claim: Contract factory workers for whom it has data now earn an average of 1.9 times their local minimum wage.
Scrutinizing that figure is extraordinarily difficult, ProPublica Northwest reporter Rob Davis writes. Nike acknowledges that its analysis omits more than a third of the 1.1 million people who make its sneakers and apparel worldwide and doesn’t say which of the 37 countries where it produces clothes are represented.
But ProPublica has obtained a rare view of wages paid to the factory workers who produce Nike clothing: a highly detailed payroll list for 3,720 employees at Cambodia’s Y&W Garment. Ninety-five percent of workers there made exactly minimum wage or a small fraction above it, including workers who had been there five or even 10 years.
In a statement, Nike said its code sets clear expectations for suppliers and expects its suppliers “to continue making progress on fair compensation for a regular work week.” Representatives of Y&W Garment and its Hong-Kong-based parent company did not respond to emails, text messages or phone calls seeking comment.
Davis traveled to Cambodia to meet the people on that ledger. He spoke to more than a dozen garment workers about their experiences at Y&W, and sought to understand what the difference between minimum wage and the higher figure Nike touts means for their daily lives. They shared stories of being fearful of getting fired if they did not work through breaks, on holidays and sometimes even overnight, making wages that still left them in debt. They described fellow workers falling ill and unconscious because they were working too many hours and not eating enough.
On a separate trip, photojournalist Sarahbeth Maney, ProPublica’s Diamonstein-Spielvogel visual fellow, went to Cambodia to photograph the people who worked at Y&W. Before traveling to Phnom Penh, Maney was briefed on Davis’ findings, including the conditions people had faced in the factory.
“This helped prepare me for certain things to look out for visually, but of course, when you actually get on the ground, things always look and feel so much different than what you expect,” Maney said. “My goal was to learn about the sources’ experiences, while trying to avoid creating any expectations of my own, so that I could arrive with fresh eyes and an open mind.”
To get portraits and candid images, Maney spent time “just sitting” with the women as they cared for children, washed clothes or prepared food at their homes, she said.
With the help of a local journalist and translator, her approach “was to try to capture the essence of their daily life, and oftentimes that requires just sitting in silence and observing the seemingly mundane but telling moments.”
Below are a few portraits from the story with more details in Maney’s own words:
