January 2000, Nike and the Olympics in Australia in 2000

Written by Tim Connor of Community Aid Abroad on the NIKE-INTERNATIONAL mailing list

In 1998 the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG) agreed, after negotiations with the Australian Council of Trade Unions, to adopt a code of labour practice for the production of goods carrying the Sydney Olympics logo (basically as a result of trade union pressure on the Labor government here in New South Wales). This year the ACTU and the TCFUA (Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia) have been running a media campaign trying to pressure SOCOG to implement that code (release the addresses of relevant factories and allow Australian union officials to work with local union groups to monitor conditions in the factories- in particular to check whether workers can form unions). They have had some success in this, earlier this year, BONDS (one of the suppliers of Olympic uniforms) agreed to allow unions in their factories and to allow Fijian union officials to visit the factories. I met an academic who acts as an advisor to the new Fijian Labor Government (Satendra Prasad) at a conference a week or so ago. He was very positive about this - 6,000 workers are affected and they have already managed to negotiate a 30% wage increase for those workers.

With Nike recently having become a sponsor, and now providing the outfits for the Australian Olympic Team and (several thousand) Olympic Volunteers, there is considerable scope (based on the likely media interest) for the ACTU and TCFUA to push SOCOG to get the addresses of factories which will be producing this gear and to then create pressure for SOCOG's code to be implemented there. The TCFUA had an initial meeting with Nike two weeks ago, in which it emerged that a lot of the Nike officials didn't know about SOCOG's code and SOCOG had probably neglected to tell them. On an overall scale the number of factories affected is small - it will be something like an Australian version of the campaign on US colleges - looking for victories in terms of a smaller percentage of factories which will hopefully move the issue forward in terms of the factories as a whole. It should also provide scope to put a lot of media pressure on Nike in Australia regarding their overall factory conditions. It's more a task for Australian groups than the movement as a whole though.

Tim Conner wrote a paper on SOCOG's code in September 1999. Please let him know if you'd like a copy at : tconnor@one.net.au