This is probably not the kind of shoe poem contemplated by the creators of the Nike Poetry Slam.

Global Exchange, a human rights organization in San Francisco, has developed a "Nike Chronology" based on the documentation of company labor practices in Asia. In March 1996, fifteen women were hit on the head and neck with a Nike sneaker for "poor" work at the Sam Yang factory in Vietnam. In November 1996, CBS aired a 48 Hours documentary on similar abuses in Vietnam. Nike workers were forced to kneel with their hands in the air for twenty-five minutes as punishment, another worker had her mouth taped shut for talking, and two more workers reported an attempted rape by a Nike factory supervisor at the Tae Kwang Vina factory. On March 8,1997, International Women's Day, fifty-six women were forced to run outside the Nike factory in the Dong Nai province because they did not wear regulation shoes. A dozen women collapsed due to heat exhaustion and spent the day in the hospital. This incident was reported by Bob Herbert in the New York Times.

Then there are wages. Children in Pakistan stitch Nike soccer balls for 60 cents a day, according to Sydney Schanberg in Life magazine. Bob Herbert reported a study by Thuyen Nguyen, a Vietnamese-American businessman, which revealed that Nike workers in Vietnam earn $1.60 a day, while the average cost of three meals a day is $2.10. Global Exchange has also chronicled Nike's crackdown on the strikes in their factories, a predictable consequence of the struggle over wages. In January 1993, twenty-four workers accused of organizing a strike at the Sung Hwa Dunia factory in Indonesia were fired. Likewise, workers in the Assembly Production Department at the WeIlco Factory in China struck for their full wages in March 1997 and were all dismissed.

The common response to reports that U.S. companies are operating Third World sweatshops is an acknowledgment that conditions are spartan, followed closely by the assertion that these jobs are nonetheless superior to anything found elsewhere in that particular country. The Christian Science Monitor relayed these comments by Michael Hooker, Chancellor of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, defending the university's multimillion dollar contract with Nike: "The working conditions, relative to what else is available to them, are really very good. So people are clamoring for these jobs." Nike spokesman Vada Manager told the New York Times that "Nike workers earn superior wages and manufacture the product under superior conditions."

Yet, Global Exchange maintains that Nike did not pay the local minimum wage ($2.46 a day in Jakarta) to Indonesian workers until April 1997. Business Week reported on an internal audit at Nike which showed that the company paid its workers in Vietnam 20 percent less than the minimum wage of 19 cents per hour. This may explain why the workers at Sam Yang Vina factory struck in April 1997 for a raise of one penny an hour. As for "superior conditions," Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice cited that same internal audit, which "tells of a factory near Ho Chi Minh City where the level of carcinogens exceeded Vietnamese standards by 6 to 177 times in parts of the plant...77 percent of the workers are already afflicted with respiratory problems."

Meanwhile, according to New York Times, Nike reported sales of $9.2 billion in 1996. Bob Herbert summed up the significance of Nike with bitter eloquence: "Nike is important because it epitomizes the triumph of monetary values over all others, and the corresponding devaluation of those peculiar interests and values we once thought of as human." Nike's response to all the controversy, in Herbert's words, is "an elaborate international public relations campaign to give the appearance that it cares about the workers." This goes hand-in-hand with "advertising campaigns that are so slick, so hip, and so compelling that consumers feel that, whatever the price, they must wear the product." Thus the Nike Poetry Slam.

A poetry slam is, of course, a staged competition among poets, part of the "performance poetry" or "spoken word" phenomenon which has developed an enthusiastic following in the youth market so treasured by Nike. The Nike Poetry Slam required that poets compete by writing verse for commercials in praise of certain female athlete-Nike athletes participating in the 1998 Winter Olympics. This was part of Nike's larger ad campaign built around the female athlete, which a coalition of women's groups has identified as wildly ironic, given Nike's treatment of female workers in Asia.

As articulated by Matthew Rothschild in the January 1998 issue of The Progressive magazine, "Nike, one of the kings of co-optation. . .ever vigilant on the cultural front, wants to capitalize" on the poetry slams. So who are "Nike's Poets"? Rothschild advised: "Watch for those Nike ads that run during the 1998 Winter Olympics so you can pick out the poets who change the oil for the industry of hip consumerism."