Oregon Teachers and Asian Garment Workers Launch Joint Campaign Demanding Nike Sign Fair Tax and Wage Agreement

A coalition of Oregon educators and garment workers across five Asian countries launched a campaign Friday demanding Nike sign a legally binding agreement to restore tax payments funding public schools and guarantee living wages throughout its supply chain, according to Women's Wear Daily. The "Just Sign It" campaign alleges the sportswear company has extracted wealth from both constituencies through a $2 billion Oregon tax holiday and pandemic-era order cancellations that left workers unpaid.

The Portland Association of Teachers, Asia Floor Wage Alliance, Global Labor Justice, and Jobs With Justice are backing the effort. They charge Nike with operating what they call a "race to the bottom" economic model that simultaneously drains public education funding in its home state and underpays the predominantly female workforce manufacturing its products in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.

Tax Deal Cited in Oregon School Funding Crisis

The Portland Association of Teachers says Nike secured a 30-year, $2 billion tax exemption after Oregon voters approved a corporate wealth tax in 2012. The union alleges Nike pressured the state legislature into holding a special session that granted the company relief from the new tax, costing Oregon schools an estimated $66 million annually.

Stephen Siegel, a special education teacher at Reynolds High School, described deteriorating school conditions during the campaign launch. "Our schools have been struggling for years to get adequate funding. All it takes is a quick visit to a school to see that mold, rats, broken drinking fountains, dysfunctional heating and cooling, peeling paint, mismatched old chairs and desks, broken blinds—the list goes on," Siegel said.

The union calculates that annual dividends paid to Nike founder Phil Knight's family, estimated at $460 million per year, exceed nine times the amount Oregon schools lose under the tax agreement.

Garment Workers Report Wage Theft Following Pandemic Order Cuts

Twenty garment-sector unions in Asia joined the campaign after filing an international labor complaint with the OECD in 2023. The complaint accused Nike of causing "severe human rights impacts" by canceling or reducing orders during the pandemic without compensating workers for lost wages, then declining mediation offered by the OECD.

An Asia Floor Wage Alliance survey of more than 2,000 workers found they lost an average of three months' pay in 2020. Swasthika Arulingam, president of the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union in Sri Lanka and a member of AFWA's women leadership committee, said workers who were already living on subsistence wages could not afford food or rent without falling deeper into debt.

"It was a terrible crisis for the workers who make the world's clothing," Arulingam said. "At the same time, brands like Nike and wealthy shareholders did better than ever. Phil Knight, Nike's founder, saw his wealth almost double between March 2020 and October 2021. His fortune increased by $28 billion while workers struggled to survive."

The complaint alleges Nike pursued stock buyback schemes to inflate share prices rather than compensating workers or investing in factory safety and productivity programs.

Coalition Frames Fight as Shared Struggle Against Extraction

The campaign organizers describe the Oregon tax deal and supply chain wage practices as two faces of the same corporate strategy. "The garment industry in Asia and public education in Oregon have a shared problem," said Abiramy Sivalogananthan, South Asia coordinator for the Asia Floor Wage Alliance. "Nike has built a system of extraction that benefits executives and investors at the expense of working people. We each have power, but together we have a lot of power."

The coalition is demanding Nike sign an agreement that would terminate the Oregon tax exemption and establish binding wage standards for workers in its Asian supplier factories. The campaign's name inverts Nike's decades-old "Just Do It" slogan. The cross-border organizing approach mirrors strategies used in other industries where workers have coordinated demands across geographic boundaries to counter corporate mobility.

Organizers say the predominantly female garment workforce and public school teachers share economic vulnerability created by corporate policy decisions. The campaign represents an attempt to build leverage by linking two worker constituencies that typically organize separately despite facing related challenges from the same employer.

Context and Outlook

The "Just Sign It" campaign illustrates how labor organizing increasingly operates across borders and sectors to pressure multinational corporations on interconnected issues. By framing Nike's tax avoidance in Oregon and supply chain wage practices in Asia as a unified extraction model, the coalition challenges the company on both its public revenue obligations and its treatment of manufacturing workers.

The campaign faces significant obstacles. Nike declined OECD mediation on the 2023 supply chain complaint, and the company has not historically responded to demands for binding agreements from worker organizations. Oregon's tax deal with Nike remains legally enforceable under current state law, and changing it would require legislative action.

Whether the coalition can generate sufficient public pressure to move Nike on either demand remains uncertain. The campaign's success may depend on its ability to sustain coordinated action between geographically separated worker groups and build broader public support in Oregon for revisiting corporate tax policy. Similar cross-border labor campaigns have achieved limited concessions from apparel brands, but binding wage agreements and tax policy reversals represent more ambitious goals than most prior efforts have secured.