For decades, Nike told the world to “just do it.” Now, Oregon educators and Asian garment workers say they’re just done.
If the affinity between the two groups—backed by the Asia Floor Wage Alliance, Global Labor Justice, the Portland Association of Teachers and Jobs With Justice—isn’t obvious, it’s only at first glance. Both charge the sportswear Goliath with fueling a “race to the bottom” by cutting tax deals that siphon funds from public education and underpaying the people who make its sneakers and clothes.
Their “Just Sign It” campaign, launched Friday, calls on Nike to sign a legally binding fair tax and wage agreement that funds Oregon’s schools and pays a living wage to workers across its supply chains in Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Instead of bossing others around, they say, it’s time to heed the predominantly female workers who churn out its merchandise and the working Oregonians who have subsidized its profits.
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“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, a coalition of trade unions and labor rights organizations. “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.”
This is a familiar struggle for the 20 garment-sector unions that joined AFWA and GLJ in 2023 to file an international labor complaint with the OECD. In it, they accused Nike of triggering “severe human rights impacts,” including layoffs and wage theft, through its pandemic-era decision to cancel or reduce orders, then ignoring requests for dialogue. In a rare move, the OECD accepted the complaint, offering Nike mediation, though the company ultimately declined.
But workers are still feeling the fallout of Nike’s order cancellations, said Swasthika Arulingam, president of the Commercial and Industrial Workers Union in Sri Lanka and a member of AFWA’s women leadership committee. An AFWA survey of more than 2,000 workers found they lost an average of three months’ pay in 2020, leaving many who were already on the brink unable to afford food or rent without falling further into debt. Instead of compensating workers or investing in safety and productivity programs, the complaint said, Nike pursued buyback schemes to inflate its stock price.
“It was a terrible crisis for the workers who make the world’s clothing,” she 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.”
Oregon teachers also want the Swoosh to pay up. The Portland Association of Teachers says that after Oregonians voted for a wealth tax in 2012, Nike “bullied” the Oregon legislature into calling a special session that granted the company a $2 billion tax holiday over 30 years. Losing out on $66 million a year, it said, has sparked a “funding crisis” in the public school system, undermining education statewide.
Meanwhile, the dividends paid to Knight’s family, an estimated $460 million a year, could fill the budget gap nine times over.
“Our schools have been struggling for years to get adequate funding,” said Stephen Siegel, a special education teacher at Reynolds High School. “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. It’s as if we rely on duct tape to keep our schools from collapsing. Unless we take dramatic action, universal public education will eventually cease to exist.”
Siegel said that while it’s easy to assume the state’s schools are in this situation because there’s no money and “there’s nothing we can do except to keep tightening our belts and begging for scraps,” this narrative is simply wrong.
“There is no shortage of money in Oregon to adequately fund our schools,” he said. “We can easily and fairly raise the revenue needed by raising taxes on the ultra-rich like Phil Knight and the corporations that are hoarding it, like Nike.”
Nike disputed the allegations, calling the $2 billion figure “inaccurate” and a “gross misrepresentation of reality.”
“Since 2005, Oregon has required all companies operating within the state, including Nike, to calculate and file their Oregon corporate income taxes based on the single sales factor method,” it said, referring to a state tax formula that calculates a company’s tax liability based solely on the percentage of its total sales made within the state. “Our tax positions are in line with and support our business operations in the communities where we conduct business.”
The Air Jordan maker also defended its commitment to “advancing a responsible and resilient supply chain,” saying that its goal is to ensure that everyone involved in manufacturing Nike’s products is “respected, valued and treated fairly.”
“While progress is not perfect or linear, we are proud of the steps we’ve taken to push for systemic improvements across the industry over time,” it said. “We work with our suppliers around the world as they seek to develop strategic compensation capabilities that meet their workforces’ basic needs, including some discretionary income.”
In 2025, the Swoosh reported full-year revenues of $46.3 billion, down 10 percent from the year before. It also returned an estimated $5.3 billion to shareholders, including $2.3 billion in dividends, up 6 percent from the prior year.
Nike has made reparations before, most notably in 2025 when it helped broker $200,000 in back wages to more than 3,300 workers at Thailand’s Hong Seng Knitting who said they were coerced into unpaid leave during the 2020 pandemic. But this came only after five years of pressure and covered just one-third of the $600,000 the Worker Rights Consortium, a Washington-based watchdog, calculated workers were actually owed.
At the same time, the contrast between the total cost of global remediation and Nike’s advertising budget is “really striking,” said Sahiba Gill, deputy legal director at GLJ. While workers struggle to recover a few hundred dollars each, the company spends nearly $5 billion a year on a brand image that often features women of color—the very demographic, she noted, that Nike refuses to meet at the bargaining table.
“It’s the exact opposite of what responsible businesses should be doing now, which is really being accountable to these rule-based standards, rather than just doing CSR,” Gill added. She said GLJ will continue following up with the U.S. State Department over the OECD complaint.
Investors have piled on, too. In 2023, ABN AMRO Bank, the Netherlands’ third-largest bank, and CCLA Investment Management, Britain’s largest manager of charitable assets, led a dozen Nike stakeholders to voice “growing concerns” over “non-payment issues.” The following year, a group of 70 investors managing $4 trillion in assets filed a shareholders’ request urging the company to settle the unpaid wages.
For Young Mon, a labor activist who worked at the Nike-linked Violet Apparel in Cambodia for 12 years before it shuttered in 2020, owing more than 1,200 workers over $1 million in severance, the push continues because giving up isn’t an option.
“Over the past three years, we have built a larger alliance of workers and unions fighting Nike than ever before,” she said. “I have met with workers just like me across Asia. I have met allies in unions in the U.S. Nike refusing to bargain with us just makes us more determined, because we cannot keep living like this.”
The same goes for Claire Reneau, who teaches French in the Beaverton School District, “right in the shadow of Nike’s pristine, guarded headquarters.” While the company donates old desks and backpacks, she said, those gestures feel “hollow” compared with the damage it’s done by “effectively defunding” classrooms.
“Here’s my reality. I get $200 a year for 180 students,” Reneau said. “That’s roughly $1 per student for the entire year. That barely covers hand sanitizer and whiteboard markers. There is nothing left for books, games or world language digital tools. Like most Oregon teachers, I spent over $400 of my own salary just to keep my classroom functional.”
Nike’s relationship with the district isn’t a partnership, she said—it’s toxic.
“Nike can keep donating used furniture, but if it wants to support our community, it can start by paying its fair share to the state coffers they emptied. Our students deserve more than corporate leftovers,” Reneau said. “Beaverton teachers stand in solidarity with our Nike comrades across the world, because an injury to one is an injury to all.”
