The Swoosh That Starves: Nike’s Return to the Sweatshop Era

Behind the marketing glow and shareholder payouts lies a grim reality in Cambodia, where women making baby clothes for Nike faint from hunger, drown in debt, and still can’t afford formula.

This is one of those stories that forces us to ask: how many smiling ads and ESG reports does it take to bury the truth?

Nike, the Oregon-born corporate Goliath with a swoosh for a conscience, has long claimed it “evolved” since the 1990s sweatshop scandals. It went from PR disaster to so-called “factory reform leader,” a makeover worthy of a Netflix redemption arc. But peel back the gloss, and the story from Cambodia’s Y&W Garment factory, now defunct, reads like the sequel nobody at Nike HQ wants you to see.

Here we have Phan Oem, 53, working 76-hour weeks packaging baby clothes for Nike, only to be paid the minimum wage, fired for growing “too old,” and left unemployed when Nike pulled out. We meet Vat Vannak, pregnant and protesting alongside hundreds, after the factory shuttered without paying them. And we hear about fainting workers, hospital visits, verbal abuse, and absurd productivity quotas. All this while Nike boasts about its code of conduct and how its suppliers pay "1.9 times" the minimum wage, a statistic conveniently excluding over one-third of its global workforce and based on hand-picked data from unnamed “key suppliers.”

Let’s call it what it is: corporate cosplay ethics.

Nike’s withdrawal from the Y&W factory in late 2023, just as Trump’s tariffs walloped Southeast Asian exports, tells you exactly what kind of "long-term relationship" the company fosters. When the profit math changed, the humanitarian story ended. Labels were destroyed, machines repossessed, and the “thaw kae” boss vanished like a ghost at Lunar New Year, leaving mothers and grandmothers to sleep outside locked gates, hoping someone, anyone, would listen.

Nike did not. Haddad Brands hung up on a reporter. The Cambodian government, ever eager to keep foreign investors happy, threatened arrests.

Meanwhile, co-founder Phil Knight, worth $28.5 billion, shrugs from the pages of his memoir Shoe Dog, claiming Nike can’t just “pay whatever we wish to pay.” Funny, isn’t it? Nike had no trouble returning $13.9 billion to shareholders in two years. But to give the woman stitching your toddler’s hoodie an extra $100 a month? Suddenly, the very fabric of a nation’s economy is at risk.

And when pressed about this moral math, Nike reaches for its get-out-of-guilt-free card: the Anker Living Wage standard, one it helped fund. According to that measure, the Cambodian living wage is $232/month. But workers like Ngin Nearadei say they need at least $400 to get by without overtime. Her actual pay? After 168 hours in two weeks, she pulled in $341.65. Exhaustion is baked into the business model.

What’s truly remarkable is how much less accountability exists now than during the original sweatshop uproar. Back then, activists forced Nike to disclose factory names. Today, you get vague data snapshots and marketing decks filled with “empowerment.” Nike hasn't published factory wage data by country since 2001. Even H&M, no gold standard, does that now.

So here we are in 2025, with Trump’s tariffs pummeling Nike’s stock, and hundreds of Cambodian families absorbing the human cost of a broken supply chain and broken promises. Maybe that’s the point. As long as no brand guarantees a living wage, as long as governments fear raising standards, and as long as executives cite “market forces” while boarding private jets, the whole rigged system keeps humming.

Nike’s legacy, like its logo, is simple, clean, and bent into motion. But the real story is tangled in overtime sheets, fainting workers, and baby clothes made by mothers who couldn’t afford formula. And it begs one final question:

How many decades does it take to finish a reform that Nike started twenty years ago and never truly intended to complete?