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The Story of The Shoe by John C. Ryan and Alan Thein Durning, excerpted from Stuff: The Secret Lives
of Everyday Things
Editor’s Introduction: Since the days when Nike Corporation co-founder Phil Knight sold shoes out of the trunk
of his car at track meets, his high-flying sports-shoe company has developed a reputation as one of the United
States’ more progressive corporations. But this reputation—based on the company’s strong leadership in
supporting equal participation for women in sports, for example, or on the wooded running trails it provides for
its U.S. employees—contrasts sharply with reports of its operations in Asia, where growing scrutiny has revealed
wide-spread labor abuses.
By employing subcontractors in Asia to assemble shoes, Nike has made big profits—$800 million on sales of
$9.2 billion in 1996. But the company’s success, and the disparity between its profits and the wages it pays its
subcontracted labor force has made it a target for critics who say the company has a double standard. Last
spring, thousands of Indonesian workers who were complaining that they were not receiving the required
minimum wage of $2.50-a-day “ransacked” their factory. In Vietnam, where workers churn out a million pairs of
shoes every month for a minimum monthly wage of $42, 800 workers recently walked off the job to protest poor
working conditions. Wages are nearly as low in China and Indonesia, where 70 percent of all Nike shoes are
made.
Last year, in response to growing criticism Nike hired noted civil rights activist Andrew Young to draft a report
on the state of Nike’s labor practices—though Young admittedly has no labor expertise. Based on a two-week,
whirlwind tour through 12 different factories in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam, Young concluded that there was
no “widespread or systematic abuse or mistreatment of workers” at these operations. But the leak of one of
Nike’s internal human rights and labor assessments—documenting many unsafe conditions at a plant in
Vietnam—has seriously called Young’s findings into question. In a sobering refutation of Young’s report in the
New Republic, Stephen Glass avers that in order to soothe labor critics, “The world’s largest sneaker company
did what it did best: It purchased a celebrity endorsement.”
Nike’s ability to reconfigure its public image through advertising and celebrity endorsements points to another
troubling aspect of the company’s success. Perhaps as much a matter of concern as Nike’s exploitation of its
factory workers, is the shoe company’s ability to manipulate its consumers, the people who purchase and wear
its shoes. The human rights organization, Christian Aid, estimates that the labor component of athletic shoes
manufactured in Asia is roughly equivalent to 6 percent of the price Nike pays for them, or about 3 percent of
the price they fetch in stores. Since Nike spent $978 million on advertising in 1997—more than 10 percent of its
earnings—it appears that the company spends significantly more marketing its shoes than it does paying its
labor force to make them. Along with countless other businesses and advertising companies, Nike is working
to create needs, rather than meet existing ones—the satisfaction of which exacts unnecessary social and
environmental costs.
As John Ryan and Alan Thein Durning have documented in their book Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday
Things, consuming goods has come to play a different role in our lives than anyone, even economists, ever
imagined it would. For many, the consumer culture has become an ideology “where buying things is believed
to provide the sort of existential satisfaction that, say, going to church once did,” as Thomas Frank puts it in an
essay in the book “Commodify Your Dissent”. Businesses now spend staggering amounts of money on
advertising to influence cultural trends toward greater demand for their products. Rather than lauding the utility
of products, with an aim of attracting consumers who need what those products offer, companies now attempt
to promote entire lifestyles that require the purchase of their products. Athletes aren’t buying the vast majority
of shoe companies’ athletic shoes; people who want to look and feel like athletes are.
Using ersatz product “innovations,” “celebrity” promotions, or refurbished concepts of “cool,” companies have
engineered an endless consumer’s quest for new products. Nike CEO Phil Knight explains: “There is no value
in making things anymore. The value is added by careful research, by innovation, and by marketing.” In other
words, there’s no reward for those who make shoes in Vietnam or Indonesia. The reward goes to those who
can think of clever ways to make people think those shoes are worth a lot more than they really are.
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In a world where forests, oceans, freshwater, and other basic resources are being degraded, consumption for
the sake of consumption is an obsolescent goal. In the following excerpt, John Ryan and Alan Thein Durning
uncover what it is that we really buy in each shoebox—the costs that we don’t see each time we examine a new
pair of shoes. Their thoughtful investigation is the perfect antidote to the corporate hype of the consumer society.
– Curtis Ryan
I put on my sneakers—“cross-trainers,” I guess they’re called—and got ready to go to work. I don’t “cross-train”;
I’m not sure I even know what it is. But I do wear the shoes a lot.
Eighty percent of athletic shoes in the United States are not used for their designed purpose. As an executive
for L.A. Gear put it, “If you’re talking performance shoes, you need only one or two pairs. If you’re talking fashion,
you’re talking endless pairs of shoes.” According to surveys, U.S. women own between 15 and 25 pairs of
shoes, men 6 to 10 pairs. Americans spend twice as much on children’s athletic shoes as they do on children’s
books.
My two shoes weighed about a pound and were composed of dozens of different, mostly synthetic, materials.
Like almost all athletic shoes sold in the United States, they were manufactured overseas by an obscure firm
contracting to the company whose name and logo actually appeared on the shoes. Mine was assembled in a
Korean-owned factory in Tangerang, an industrial district outside of Jakarta, Indonesia. But almost all the
component parts were made elsewhere.
The shoe company in Oregon specified the shoes’ high-tech design and materials and relayed the plans by
satellite to a computer-aided-design firm in Taiwan. This firm taxed plans to engineers in South Korea.
In the 1980s, South Korea was a leading exporter of athletic shoes, but democratic reforms, labor unrest, and
economic development resulted in shoe workers’ wages more than doubling in the four years before 1990. Shoe
companies moved to cheaper pastures in China and Southeast Asia. Over the next three years, employment in
South Korea’s shoe industry fell by three-fourths; nearly 400,000 Koreans lost their jobs.
Leather My shoes had three main parts: the logo-covered upper, the shock-absorbing midsole, and the waffle-
treaded outsole. The upper had about 20 different parts. It was mostly cow leather. The cow was raised,
slaughtered, and skinned in Texas. Most of the carcass became human and pet food. The hide was cured with
salt and stacked with 750 others in a 20-foot container and carried by freight train from Amarillo to Los Angeles.
From there it was shipped to Pusan, South Korea. Most U.S. hides are exported for tanning: labor costs and
environmental standards are lower overseas.
Tanning makes leather soft and keeps it from decaying. For centuries, tanning meant soaking animal hides in
tannins from bark and vegetable extracts; today it usually entails a 20-step process with large spinning drums
and solutions of chrome, calcium hydroxide, and other strong chemicals. Chrome tanning (including unhairing,
deliming, pickling, tanning, retanning, dyeing, and lubricating) can be done in a day; vegetable tanning can take
weeks.
Workers in Pusan loaded the tanned leather onto an airplane headed to Jakarta, while the tanning plant
discharged hair, epidermis, leather scraps, and processing chemicals into the Naktong River. Much of South
Korea’s tap water is not fit for human consumption because it is tainted with metals and other pollutants from
heavy industry.
Synthetics Except for the leather, my shoes were made from petroleum-based chemicals. The midsole was a
custom-designed EVA
(ethylene vinyl acetate)
foam: a composite of several substances, each with its own valued properties. Ethylene made the mix easy to
mold, vinyl made it resilient, and acetate made it strong and stiff. One of the most important building blocks for
making synthetic chemicals, ethylene is a colorless, slightly sweet-smelling, yet toxic gas. It was distilled and
“cracked” from Saudi petroleum shipped in a tanker to a Korean refinery.
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More ethylene was heated with acetic acid (the main ingredient of vinegar) and a palladium catalyst to form
vinyl acetate. The acetic acid didn’t come from vinegar: it was synthesized from natural gas and carbon
monoxide.
The ethylene and vinyl acetate were mixed with pigments, antioxidants, and catalysts; poured into a mold; and
baked. During the ensuing reaction, millions of tiny gas bubbles arose to make a foam. The foam gives my
shoes that cushy feel and protects my foot from the impact (two to three times my body weight) each time my
heels hits the ground when I run.
Below the heel was my shoe’s only component manufactured in the United States: a small amber-colored
polyurethane bag filled with (marketing notwithstanding) a pressurized gas of secret composition, not air. (I
guess “Pressurized-Gas Jordans” just wouldn’t sell like “Air Jordans.”)
Rubber My shoes outer soles were made of styrene-butadiene rubber. The rubber was synthesized from Saudi
petroleum and local benzene (made from coal) in a factory in Taiwan. The Taiwanese factory got its electricity
from one of the island’s three nuclear power plants. Though tree farmers in the tropics still grow natural rubber,
about two-thirds of the world’s rubber is synthetic. The rubber was formed into large sheets and flown to Jakarta.
In the shoe factory, machines cut up the sheets and molded the grooved tread that I see on the bottom of my
shoe. Like too much batter in a waffle iron, some of the rubber oozed out the edges. According to Nike, this
excess rubber made up the largest volume of solid waste generated by its shoe factories; it used to be sent to
landfills. Now it is ground into a powder and put back into the rubber “batter” for the next batch of shoes. Nike
reports cutting its rubber waste by 40 percent with this “Regrind” system, saving 5 million pounds of rubber
annually.
Assembly The factory in Tangerang manufactured shoes for Adidas, Nike, and Reebok. Mine happened to be
Nikes—not terribly different from the others except for the logo and which athlete was paid to endorse them.
Powerful machines used pressure and sharp blades to precisely cut the leather and other tough materials into
shoe parts. A Japanese-made embroidery machine speed-sewed the corporate logo on the sides of my shoes.
Though high-tech equipment helps, putting shoes together remains the domain of hand labor. On the assembly
line, several hundred young Javanese women with names like Suraya, Tri, and Yuli cut, sewed, and glued my
uppers and soles together to make shoes. The air smelled of paint and glue, and the temperature neared 100°F.
Like most of the workers, Suraya wore cheap rubber flip-flops. She would have to pay more than a month’s
salary to buy the $75 pair of shoes she helped make for me. She earned the Indonesian minimum wage - 650
rupiahs (about 23 cents) an hour.
Under the discotheque-like glow of black lights, Suraya brushed a sparkling, solvent-based glue across the
bottom of my midsole to attach it to my rubber outsole. The glue contained luminous dyes: under the black
lights, Suraya could easily see if she had spread it evenly across the entire surface for a tight seal. Other workers
glued the sole to the upper (using non-toxic water-based glues as well as toxic solvent-based ones), trimmed
and polished my shoe, and inserted the laces and insole.
Discipline was strict, sometimes abusive, in the factory, which was run by ex-military men from Korea. But
Suraya knew not to complain about the pay or the illegal, compulsory overtime she sometimes worked. She
was replaceable—Indonesia has a huge surplus of cheap labor—and speaking out could mean getting fired, or
worse. The Indonesian military routinely intervenes in the country’s labor disputes through interrogations,
threats, and even murder. The Indonesian government believes that even at $2 a day, workers’ wages are too
high for the country to compete with lower-wage nations like India and Vietnam.
Though solvent fumes caused health problems for some workers, the shoe factory generated little pollution and
required little energy compared with the refineries, chemical plants, and tanneries that produced its raw
materials.
Shoe Box My shoes were hand stuffed with lightweight tissue paper (made from Sumatran rainforest trees) and
put in a shoe box. The box had been made in a “closed-loop” paper mill in New Mexico that recycled all its
sludge. Waste steam from a nearby power plant powered the mill. All Nike shoe boxes are made at this mill.
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The box was corrugated cardboard that was 100 percent recycled and unbleached. The corrugated box used
10 percent less pulp than one made of solid cardboard. The box was much improved over old designs: tabs and
slots, not toxic petrochemical glues, held it together; its outside was printed with inks that contained no heavy
metals.
Folded stacks of empty boxes were shipped west across the Pacific from Los Angeles; boxed shoes were
shipped east in a super container ship carrying 5,000 20-foot containers. Each journey took three weeks. Shoes
were the third largest cargo shipped to the United States from eastern Asia in 1995, after toys and auto parts.
As I laced up my shoes, I noticed a small tear over my big toe. At this rate, the pair wouldn’t last a year. That’s
much longer than throwaway items like my newspaper, but still, maybe I could find my old needle and stitch up
the hole before it grew. Maybe I could make my shoes last longer, walk more softly on the earth, and save 75
bucks, too.
Reference:
Ryan, J.C., Durning, A.T. (1998). Stuff: The secret lives of everyday things. Northwest Environment Watch
Report No. 4, January 1997. Retrieved from http://www.worldwatch.org/system/files/EP112C.pdf on
February 28, 2018.
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