Nike Inc. signage is displayed outside of a store at the Third Street Promenade outdoor mall in Santa Monica, California, U.S, on Monday, Dec. 5, 2011. Since the Federal Reserve’s last meeting early in November, reports on employment, manufacturing and retail sales have dispelled concerns the world’s largest economy may slide back into recession.
Photo: Konrad Fiedler/Bloomberg via Getty Images
After a year’s worth of negotiations, a Nike factory in Indonesia agreed, in an out-of-court settlement, to pay a group of nearly 4,500 employees $1 million in overdue overtime — that’s 600,000 hours of overtime accumulated by the workers over the past two years, the maximum time frame Indonesian courts will consider. (Workers claimed to have been working unpaid overtime for, in many cases, up to eighteen years in their careers at the factory.) The settlement is widely seen as precedent for worker groups to claim against other internationally owned/franchised factories in the country, with a leading trade union leader calling the decision “only the beginning.”
