Marcy Kaptur: “in support of our ``Come Shop with Me'' campaign, the New York Times fortunately ran a story this month on the business…”

“in support of our ``Come Shop with Me'' campaign, the New York Times fortunately ran a story this month on the business page with the subtitle ``Low Wages Would Foreign Business, But the Price Is Worker Poverty.'' The story, which I will enter in the Record tonight, describes how a 22-year-old Indonesian man named Tongris was dismissed from his job making Nike shoes for export to the United States because he was organizing his fellow workers to demand more than the government-dictated poverty wage. How much was Tongris and his co-workers getting paid to make Nike shoes? Twenty cents an hour. And that is with no benefits. More than 5,000 workers turn out Nike shoes at this plant in Indonesia, shoes which often sell for over $100 a pair here in the United States. Nike and thousands of other manufacturers have been lured to set up business in Indonesia by the pitifully low wage level, along with the assurance by the Indonesian government that it will tolerate no strikes or independent worker associations. But as the Indonesian government itself admits in the article, it sets its wage purpose fully extremely low to only provide the minimum calories the worker need to survive each day. My friends, this is no different from how plantation owners though about feeding their slaves. Feed them enough so that they will not die on the job.…”