The San Francisco-based Global Exchange came under Knight's Bolshevik detector the day before Nike's shareholders meeting, when Global Exchange released a report by Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee saying Nike paid its Chinese factory workers less than the Chinese minimum wage. Nike's response was two-fold. First, the company questioned the report's validity, noting that the authors never set foot inside the factories and instead based their findings on interviews with factory workers. Second, Nike trashed Global Exchange. Speaking to shareholders, Knight said the group supported Fidel Castro and the Marxist rebels in southern Mexico. Knight wasn't the only one suggesting that Global Exchange was left-handed. In a press release the same day, Nike's director of labor practices, Dusty Kidd, called Global Exchange a "fringe group." Without traveling to China, it's tough to say whether Nike's complaints about the report are valid. But a bit of reporting made it clear that the company's attack on Global Exchange was unfounded. Nike PR director Lee Weinstein acknowledges that Nike never looked into who supports and is supported by Global Exchange. He says he "heard" that Global Exchange co-director Medea Benjamin ran a "pro-Castro" group. "Someone just needs to check these guys out," Weinstein told WW. "They get quoted in the press, but no one knows who they are." That may be so, but it's easy to find out. According to public records filed in California and interviews with groups such as Amnesty International, Global Exchange--with assets of $410,000--is a well-respected human-rights group that works with poor communities in Third World countries. To be sure, Global Exchange is to the left of Bill Clinton, but co-director Medea Benjamin sounds more like a "thousand points of light" Republican than a Ho Chi Minh guerrilla. "What we do is a good old capitalist tenet," Benjamin says. "We support organizations that are trying to get small farmers to pull themselves up by their own boot straps, pull themselves up and out of poverty. We are not directing medicine to Cubans to support the Cuban government, just the people who live under that government." (In fact, Benjamin says, she was arrested by the Castro government and deported from Cuba in the late '70s after criticizing a Castro clampdown on farmers markets.) Benjamin founded Global Exchange in 1989 with scholar Kevin Danaher. The group's stated mission is to "build ties between First and Third World nations and promote sustainable development." Working closely with groups such as Amnesty International and Progressive Asset Management, Global Exchange concentrates on human rights and poverty issues in countries including Mexico, Cuba, Honduras, Haiti and Africa. The group sponsors trips to Third World countries where U.S. citizens meet local farmers and workers. According to Global Exchange's federal tax-exempt forms, the group donated a total of $100,000 for projects ranging from a program to educate journalists about race issues to efforts to reunite Vietnamese families separated by the 1975 airlift. Specific grants included $16,000 to Catholic organizations working to bring the Zapatistas and the Mexican government to the negotiating table; $5,000 to provide college scholarships to women in Vietnam; $4,800 to monitor human-rights violations in Haiti; $3,000 to the health clinics and farm workers in Honduras; and $2,000 to deliver medical supplies to Cuba. What seems to irk Nike is Global Exchange's confrontational tactics. "There are two sets of critics," Nike spokesman Vada Manager told Willamette Week. "The responsible groups we have met and talked with like the United Methodists and Amnesty International--and then groups like Global Exchange that do all that tactical stuff that comes with protests. They're just publicity seeking." One of Nike's "responsible" critics, Amnesty International, disagrees. The group is co-sponsoring a fund-raiser with Global Exchange this year. "We have worked closely with Global Exchange," says Carlos Salinas, Amnesty's Latin America advocacy director. "And we hope to do so in the future." |
