How much responsibility do American companies who manufacture their products overseas have to the workers making those products? The Student Labor Action Committee’s request that the university terminate its relationship with Adidas over $1.8 million in severance pay owed to workers in PT Kizone Indonesia throws this question into the spotlight. 

Adidas released a statement in response to the allegations that it owed Indonesian workers severance pay in two ways. The first is a general statement of its existing goals of providing “fair labour practices, fair wages and safe working conditions in factories throughout our global supply chain.” To ensure these practices are implemented, Adidas says in 2010 it “conducted 1,350 factory audits worldwide, 506 of which were carried out by various external monitoring groups.”

The specific response to the issues being raised, according to Adidas, is that the corporation had no working relationship with the factory at the time of the closure. According to the statement, “The central fact remains that the PT Kizone factory was illegally closed and abandoned by its owner, not by the Adidas Group, and this occurred more than six months after we placed our last order with them.”  

Adidas also said it has no obligation to pay when its contract suppliers fail to do so. 

It is true that the owner, who has since fled Indonesia, is the primary actor at fault. But the Adidas line that it was not involved in the factory at the time of the shut down, and therefore not liable, does not add up.  In Adidas’ 2011 mandatory collegiate disclosure, it listed PT Kizone as a supplier factory; the severance pay stopped in September 2010.  

Yesterday, Interim Chancellor David Ward released a letter in which he said he felt Adidas’ response to concerns raised by the Labor Licensing Policy Committee “failed to address the concerns … regarding the failure to contribute financially to severance payments to displaced workers.” Ward went on to promise to “pursue my serious concerns … directly to the senior management of Adidas.” 

Blaming the lack of severance pay on the ownership of the factory did not satisfy Ward, nor should it have. According to the Worker Rights Consortium’s report on the incident “under university codes of conduct, it is the duty of the licensees to correct code violations, including non-compliance with domestic legal mandates.” 

The continued efforts of SLAC and WRC and cooperation from the university administration will hopefully force Adidas into complying with its contract and providing severance pay to the factory workers. But as production becomes more and more a globalized phenomenon, I think it is important to take a step back and look at the big picture. 

Our university commissioned Adidas to make apparel for us. We had the company agree to a code of conduct based on our ideas of fair labor practices. Adidas then took that contract and outsourced it another country, where a factory owner would eventually leave his factory high and dry. 

Without the response of the university and the various workers’ rights groups, Adidas would never have acted. With the principal owner of the factory out of reach and a large group of creditors picking apart the assets, thousands of workers would have been assured no legal compensation for their work. Because of the pressure, hopefully things will work out differently, but I wonder what we as individual consumers should do about transgressions like these abroad.

The only reason this story has a chance at a just ending is because the university obviously doesn’t want to be associated with illegal labor practices. But in these countries like Indonesia and China and others, there are many and worse practices happening every day that contribute to products we buy everyday. I applaud the efforts made on campus to make Adidas accountable for the actions in its outsourced factories, but as the overall trend toward cheap labor abroad continues, consumers will face an ever-increasing need to ask themselves: Who made this for me, and under what circumstances?

John Waters ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in journalism.