As soon as a month, American labor activist Jim Keady logs into Remitly, an app for transferring cash overseas, at his New Jersey residence and sends $100 to a former Nike manufacturing facility employee in Indonesia.
Cicih Sukaesih helped convey the world’s consideration to the lives of the younger ladies in poor international locations who made sneakers within the Nineteen Nineties, first by organizing a strike and later by marching onto Nike’s bucolic company campus in Oregon to demand a gathering with co-founder Phil Knight.
Her story — at a time of police and army harassment of labor organizers overseas — caught the eye of The New York Occasions and different information organizations. It additionally helped inform a technology of employees about their rights.
“She helped to start, I might argue, the Indonesian commerce union motion inside Nike’s provider factories,” Keady mentioned.
However media consideration and accolades don’t pay the payments. Cicih had hassle discovering work following her Nineteen Nineties activism. (Cicih prefers to go by one title. It’s pronounced “Chee Chee.”)
Many years after her campaign light from the headlines, Keady and different labor organizers started sending Cicih cash to maintain her afloat.
“She took a stand and he or she was a revolutionary,” Keady mentioned. “And he or she has nothing to indicate for it.”
Now 62, Cicih welcomed a reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive into her residence final yr, a part of a reporting journey that included interviews with about 100 employees who make Nike sneakers, principally in Indonesia, which was floor zero for the last decade of sweatshop criticism that stained Nike’s repute within the Nineteen Nineties.
Cicih mentioned she’s pleased with the instance she set by standing as much as Nike. She mentioned employees “turned conscious of their rights and conscious of the regulation.”
“Many issues modified,” she mentioned.
The advocacy led to enhancements, she mentioned, together with cracking down on baby labor, putting in higher security tools and offering menstrual depart.
“Lots of my mates,” Cicih mentioned, “turned courageous sufficient to talk up.”
However she described her work as incomplete as a result of issues linger, together with chronically low wages.
Nike didn’t deal with particular questions on Cicih’s expertise or in regards to the Nike provider that employed her within the Nineteen Nineties, nor did Knight present remark. As an alternative, Nike issued a broad assertion saying, partly, “We’re appreciative of the efforts that people and organizations, together with Cicih, have made in serving to push the business ahead.”
Nike mentioned the corporate has been “deeply dedicated to advancing a accountable and resilient provide chain for greater than 30 years” and that whereas progress hasn’t been good, it has sought “systemic enhancements throughout the business.” Nike’s aim, the assertion mentioned, is that “all individuals concerned within the manufacturing of Nike’s merchandise are revered, valued, and handled pretty.”
Cicih retains tokens of her activism in her residence, together with a framed poster that depicts a manufacturing facility employee and reads, “Who made your footwear?”
Jeff Ballinger, a labor organizer who was distinguished within the Nineteen Nineties’ anti-sweatshop motion, gave it to her. In an interview, Ballinger mentioned he nonetheless considers Cicih a “hero” — albeit unsung, even in Tangerang, the economic hub the place the Indonesian manufacturing facility motion took off.
“Like in wartime, some individuals simply step up,” Ballinger mentioned. “In an ideal world, there’d be a statue of her in Tangerang.”
$1.26 a Day
Cicih sat for an interview in a yard stuffed by a hen coop and a small backyard that included pumpkins, bananas and edible bamboo. The small home she and one in all her sisters inherited from their dad and mom in Menes, her childhood village a few 90-mile drive west of Jakarta, is now residence.
After placing out snacks that included a conventional Indonesian dessert comprised of rice and grated coconut in banana leaves, Cicih usually flashed a large grin as she mirrored on a life intertwined with Nike’s emergence in her nation.
Nike, then generally known as Blue Ribbon Sports activities, purchased its first sneakers from Japanese factories within the Nineteen Sixties. However as Japan’s wages rose, it shifted manufacturing to lower-cost Asian international locations, together with Taiwan and South Korea.
In 1988, it began making sneakers in Indonesia.
The nation had a horrible human rights file, however it was keen to draw international traders. Factories in Jakarta paid wages as little as $1 a day, in contrast with $8 in South Korea, $14 in Taiwan and $33 in Tokyo, in accordance with a 1988 State Division report.
In 1989, 5 years after she graduated from highschool, Cicih joined one in all her sisters making Nike sneakers on the Sung Hwa Dunia manufacturing facility 40 miles west of Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest metropolis.
She began work every day at 7 a.m.
At first, she mentioned, she cleaned glue and chemical substances off sneakers together with her naked arms. Then she moved to a glue line, attaching soles to footwear. The manufacturing facility was poorly ventilated. Co-workers coughed from the fumes. Cicih recalled seeing one individual faint after which return to the meeting line as a result of manufacturing facility managers didn’t give her permission to go residence.
(The manufacturing facility remains to be open, however it has modified homeowners and now has a special title. The present proprietor didn’t reply to emails. The earlier proprietor couldn’t be reached.)
Employee security was “very, very dangerous,” Cicih mentioned by way of an impartial journalist The Oregonian/OregonLive employed to translate the dialog.
“There have been many, many labor legal guidelines that the corporate didn’t observe,” she added.
Like right now, the overwhelming majority of manufacturing facility employees had been younger ladies. Many of the managers had been older males, which Cicih mentioned led to a pure energy imbalance and issues with sexual harassment.
“I’ve watched and seen lots of ladies being sexually abused, or touched inappropriately,” she mentioned.
There was fixed stress to fulfill each day manufacturing quotas.
Cicih made $1.26 a day, round minimal wage. A 1989 research discovered the minimal wage was so low that many manufacturing facility employees had been malnourished.
“It was not sufficient for me to get by each day,” she mentioned. “Nonetheless, I needed to make it on the quantity I obtained.”
Cicih usually labored extra time till 9 p.m. Generally she labored on Saturday and Sunday, which she thought of pressured labor. The quantity of extra time, she mentioned, motivated her to “insurgent.”
“A Wage Enhance Was the High Precedence”
The turning level for Cicih got here when one of many firm’s buses, which employees rode to the manufacturing facility and had been all the time overcrowded, flipped and killed a co-worker.
“How can we protest this challenge to the corporate?” she requested one other co-worker.
Unbeknownst to Cicih, this co-worker had joined a company that taught employees about labor rights. Cicih faked a health care provider’s letter, acquired a sick day and took a category.
By way of the group, she met Ballinger, who had moved to Indonesia to arrange manufacturing facility employees. In 1992, Ballinger wrote a narrative for Harper’s Journal that in contrast the wages of Sadisah, one in all Cicih’s co-workers, to the earnings of Nike endorser Michael Jordan. Sadisah earned 14 cents an hour. It could have taken her greater than 44,000 years to make what Jordan earned from Nike in a single yr.
Cicih began skipping lunch and prayer breaks to arrange her co-workers.
On Sept. 28, 1992, Cicih and employees from her manufacturing facility went on strike. The New York Occasions reported 600 walked out, however Cicih and different activists have put the variety of strikers within the 1000’s. They demanded higher remedy of girls, higher union illustration, higher meals, higher transportation and, most significantly, higher pay.
“A wage improve was the highest precedence,” she mentioned, holding up the unique doc that listed protesters’ calls for.
Her activism got here with nice dangers. Round that point, Marsinah, a manufacturing facility employee who was acknowledged final yr because the nation’s first Nationwide Hero from the labor motion, was kidnapped, tortured and murdered.
“Army and police had been in every single place,” Cicih mentioned, however she mentioned her want to assist her co-workers “eclipsed all of the concern.”
The strike lasted two days.
It ended after the manufacturing facility agreed to extend wages for a lot of staff, Cicih mentioned, however she added that her seniority made her eligible for only a small elevate. The corporate accepted different calls for, together with permitting menstrual depart. Cicih mentioned she was the primary employee to take it.
That very same yr that Cicih led the strike, Nike launched a code of conduct, changing into one of many first manufacturers to take action. Codes of conduct have since turn out to be the default methodology firms like Nike use to police abroad factories. The essential system: The corporate writes guidelines and contract factories comply with observe them. Auditors monitor compliance.
A couple of months after the strike, Cicih and roughly two dozen of her co-workers acquired laid off. Leslie Milano, a distinguished American labor organizer within the early 2000s, mentioned unemployment on the time was excessive in Indonesia.
“That’s why lots of people didn’t wish to do what Cicih did,” Milano mentioned. “They didn’t wish to lose their jobs.”
Cicih mentioned that not lengthy after being laid off, she was hauled right into a police station and spent two days being pressured to admit to destruction of property and inflicting a disturbance. She was not allowed to go to the lavatory, she mentioned.
Cicih mentioned the police made her watch them beat a suspect. Then they made her sit in his blood, she mentioned, earlier than releasing her.
The Indonesian embassy in Washington, D.C., didn’t reply to questions on army repression of employee rights within the Nineteen Nineties. (The nation undertook democratic reform after the dictator Suharto stepped down in 1998, though issues stay.)
After her launch, inspired by Ballinger and others, she joined co-workers in submitting a lawsuit towards the manufacturing facility alleging wrongful termination. The lawsuit went all the way in which to Indonesia’s Supreme Court docket. In 1996, Cicih and her co-workers prevailed. She acquired about $200 in again wages. She nonetheless has the verify in a binder with different paperwork from her organizing days.
For 2 years of misplaced wages, Ballinger figures Cicih ought to have gotten greater than $2,000. That will have been sufficient to arrange a small enterprise.
“It could have been a hell of some huge cash again then,” he mentioned. The motion’s failure to ship better restitution to Cicih and others “is one thing that I’ll by no means recover from.”
Cicih Involves Oregon
Across the time the lawsuit concluded, in July 1996, Cicih walked onto Nike’s suburban campus close to Beaverton, Oregon, and demanded a gathering with the corporate’s co-founder.
“I’m right here to fulfill with Phil Knight,” she mentioned, in accordance with The Oregonian’s protection of her go to. “I wish to ask him to think about the plight of Indonesian employees.”
Cicih had stayed in contact with Ballinger. He helped convey her to the USA to place stress on Nike, one in all 4 such visits she made to the nation.
Knight refused to see her.
Every week earlier than Cicih arrived in Beaverton, Knight wrote a letter to her journey’s organizers, saying he was “sympathetic” to her case however most well-liked to fulfill with individuals “all in favour of constructive, proactive options, not those that announce their intentions by way of information conferences and mean-spirited media campaigns.”
He defended Nike’s response to issues at Cicih’s manufacturing facility, saying Nike had labored to appropriate them.
“The manufacturing facility the place Ms. Sukaesih labored has been underneath new Indonesian administration for 2 years, the grievances have been addressed and the minimal wage is in pressure,” Knight wrote. “In our view, that is an instance of the profit Nike brings in upgrading labor practices in rising market societies.”
After she made her request to fulfill with Knight, a “trio of beefy Nike safety guards” escorted Cicih off Nike’s campus and native sheriff’s deputies requested her to go away the premises, in accordance with The Oregonian’s protection.
Roughly per week later, Knight sat throughout the desk from President Invoice Clinton on the White Home to speak about labor reforms, in accordance with data obtained from the Clinton Presidential Library. Knight then stood within the Rose Backyard behind Clinton because the president introduced a sweeping effort to handle sweatshop circumstances in abroad factories.
“Whereas I feel that we’ve been good residents inside our business, I feel there’s clearly much more that we are able to do, that we are able to certainly be higher,” Knight mentioned in his temporary remarks.
The assembly with Clinton led to the creation of the Truthful Labor Affiliation, one in all a number of teams that monitor manufacturing facility working circumstances.
Knight publicly dedicated to particular sweatshop reforms in a 1998 speech on the Nationwide Press Membership. Knight introduced six adjustments, together with heightened indoor air high quality requirements, elevated manufacturing facility monitoring and elevating the minimal age in footwear factories to 18.
He didn’t say something about elevating wages.
“You Should Struggle”
Today, Nike manufacturing facility employees in Indonesia instructed The Oregonian/OregonLive, the form of pressured extra time that sparked Cicih’s want to “insurgent” is nonexistent. Additionally they mentioned Nike lived as much as Knight’s dedication to get underage employees out of Indonesian factories.
However they mentioned issues stay.
In interviews, they criticized the auditing course of, the linchpin of the manufacturing facility monitoring system that Nike helped pioneer. Staff mentioned factories know upfront when auditors will arrive. At one manufacturing facility, employees mentioned security tools had been distributed on the eve of an audit.
“The very best time to work at a Nike manufacturing facility is when it’s being audited,” a employee mentioned.
Staff mentioned extra rigorous and constant auditing would catch issues with security and sexual harassment, which they mentioned stay persistent.
Requested in regards to the employees’ description of factories prepping for deliberate audits, Nike mentioned that it conducts unannounced audits along with these which might be scheduled upfront, and that these are supplemented by “employee engagement and well-being surveys,” amongst different efforts.
“When points are delivered to our consideration, by way of any mechanism, we work with suppliers to validate, establish root causes and implement complete remediation processes,” Nike mentioned.
Nike’s most up-to-date disclosures say 87% of the 623 suppliers it audited in fiscal yr 2024 no less than met the corporate’s fundamental code of conduct necessities. The corporate additionally disclosed a manufacturing facility damage price considerably beneath its friends. Lower than 1% of code of conduct violations associated to harassment and abuse, in accordance with the disclosure.
Staff and union leaders additionally say their No. 1 concern — low wages — has not been addressed. Many mentioned they work second jobs to make ends meet.
“One job isn’t sufficient,” Keady mentioned. “They’re not getting a second job as a result of they wish to ship their child to a very good personal college or they wish to purchase a house in a terrific neighborhood. They’re getting a second job as a result of they will’t afford three meals a day for his or her household.”
Cicih additionally has struggled.
After her lawsuit towards the manufacturing facility that when employed her, she had the choice to return, however she declined. She thought the atmosphere could be uncomfortable due to her historical past as an organizer.
She did some volunteer work as a labor organizer. Another organizers inspired her to arrange a small enterprise.
These efforts by no means panned out. She moved again to her hometown of Menes in 2018.
A sister on whom Cicih depended financially died throughout the pandemic. Cicih opened a roadside meals stall and offered vegetable salad and gado gado, a sort of Indonesian dish, however it didn’t go nicely.
She will get by on donations from American do-gooders, together with Keady. She grows a few of her personal meals. She doesn’t have a pension or financial savings.
“Nothing,” she mentioned.
However she’s resolute.
“It’s a must to do that,” she mentioned, reflecting on her years as an activist. “It’s a must to battle.”
