The Corporation2003

Charles Kernaghan:
To make this stuff as concrete as possible, we purchase all of the products from the factories that we're talking about. This shirt sells for $14.99, and the women who made this shirt got paid $0.03. Liz Claiborne jackets, made in El Salvador. The jackets cost $178 dollars, and the workers were paid $0.74 for every jacket they made. Alpine car stereos, $0.31 an hour. It's not just sneakers. It's not just apparel. It's everything.

Michael Walker:
Let's look at it from a different point of view. Let's look at from the point of view of the people of Bangladesh who are starving to death. The people in China who are starving to death, and the only thing that they have to offer to anybody that is worth anything is their low cost labour. And, in effect, what they're saying to the world is they have this big flag that says, 'Come over and hire us. We will work for $0.10 an hour. Because $0.10 an hour will buy us the rice that we need not to starve. And come and rescue us from our circumstance.' And so when Nike comes in they are regarded by everybody in the community as an enormous godsend.

Charles Kernaghan:
One day in the Dominican Republic we found a big pile of Nike's internal pricing documents. Nike assigns a timeframe to each operation. They don't talk about minutes. They break the timeframe into ten thousandths of a second. You get to the bottom of all 22 operations; they give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt. It's $0.70 an hour in the Dominican Republic. 6.6 minutes equals $0.08. These are Nike's documents. That means the wages come to three tenths of one percent of the retail price. This is the reality. It's the science of exploitation.