Rocky denies sweatshop allegations

July 17, 2008  The Athens NEWS

By Jim Phillips, Athens NEWS Senior Writer

The top official at Nelsonville’s Rocky Brands footwear company last week denied allegations by an activist group that the company buys shoes from a sweatshop factory in China that cheats its workers out of pay.

“I can’t name you anything in that article that is true,” declared Mike Brooks, chairman and CEO of Rocky Brands. “It’s just a bunch of lies, is what it is.”

Brooks was referring to a newly released report by SweatFree Communities, a Maine-based organization that describes itself on its Web site as “a national network of grassroots anti-sweatshop organizations that works to build a global economy with justice and equality.”

The report, “Subsidizing Sweatshops,” looks at companies that supply uniforms to government entities in the United States, and where they buy their products. It claims to be based on interviews with workers in 12 factories in nine countries, producing products for eight major uniform brands including Rocky.

The section on Rocky in the report focuses on the Quan Tak Footwear Company in Taiwan, which Brooks acknowledged is a supplier of footwear to Rocky Brands.

The report notes that in January, a Taiwanese newspaper reported that nearly 4,000 workers from Quan Tak had staged a wildcat strike, demanding they be paid for five years’ worth of unpaid overtime.

The Chinese newspaper story added, according to the SweatFree Communities report, that workers at the factory alleged that the company was systematically denying them overtime wages. This supposedly involved stratagems such as requiring employees to work till 10 p.m. or midnight, but turning off the time clock around 8 p.m., or simply not paying overtime for Sunday work.

Though the Quan Tak factory closed shortly after that strike, the report goes on to allege, SweatFree Communities has learned of similar issues “in as many as four other Rocky Shoes suppliers in China.”

The report also alleged that based on Rocky’s purchasing from Chinese factories that abuse workers’ rights, the city of Los Angeles recently removed the company from its list of uniform suppliers for city workers.

Brooks said this just isn’t true.

“We haven’t lost any contracts,” he insisted. He called the SweatFree Communities’ allegations an attempt by a union-connected organization to smear Rocky’s name, in retaliation for its past decisions to outsource production.

“This was a union political deal,” Brooks insisted. “It’s politically motivated, and there’s no truth to it… This is all about our shutting down our (Nelsonville) plant in 2001.”

Victoria Kaplan, the Midwest regional organizer for SweatFree Communities, said she has no idea what Brooks is talking about.

“We are not a union, and I’m not sure to what he would be referring,” she said.

Kaplan said that contrary to what Brooks said, Los Angeles did in fact drop Rocky as a uniform supplier. “It is true that they lost a contract with L.A.,” she insisted.

Curtis Watts, a senior management analyst with the Department of General Services for the city of Los Angeles, confirmed Tuesday that the city did drop Rocky as a subcontractor. Watts said this decision was made based on Rocky’s failure to cooperate with an outside organization the city hires to investigate whether city suppliers use sweatshop labor.

“Rocky Brands was a subcontractor on a contract with the city of Los Angeles,” Watts reported.

After L.A. passed a city anti-sweatshop ordinance requiring that its contractors respect workers’ rights, Watts said, it hired the Workers’ Rights Consortium to investigate companies that have city contracts, to find out whether they meet the standards of the ordinance.

In the case of Rocky, he said, the city never found out whether the company actually deals with sweatshops. What triggered the decision to drop the firm as a supplier was its failure to answer an inquiry letter from the Workers’ Rights Consortium, he said.

“They were told that they should comply with this organization,” Watts explained. “But we never heard anything from Rocky, and that’s why (they were dropped as a subcontractor).”

The allegations about Rocky’s buying from a Chinese sweatshop were the topic of a few posts on a message board of the Yahoo! finance Web site last week.

Brooks said Rocky buys around 5 million pairs of boots and shoes annually from Chinese suppliers.

He said officials visited the Quan Tak and other Chinese factories before ever agreeing to use them as suppliers, and were convinced that the companies treated their workers fairly and humanely.

The SweatFree Communities report can be accessed online at: www.sweatfree.org/docs/subsidizing_sweatshops_hr_color.pdf.