The sports brand is in crisis anyway, and now it has been accused of exploiting workers in Asia in a performance. Adidas takes a stand.
The activist group The Yes Men had posed relatively credibly as the sports brand Adidas. “I can’t breathe” reads the foil wrapped around the model’s head.Michael Wittig Berlin
The Berlin Fashion Week started with a bang on Monday – and it hadn’t been able to do that for a long time. With a fake show, a kind of fake press conference including a fashion show. The activist group The Yes Men had posed as the sports brand Adidas in a relatively credible way – at least so credible that a press release sent in advance in the name of Adidas and also fake was online for several hours on the industry platform Fashion United, among others. Until the whole thing blew up.
Guerrilla performance with satirical features
The message said what was then to be announced on Monday afternoon in the alternative fashion location Platte by an alleged “senior creator” of the label: They wanted to acknowledge the catastrophic working conditions in supplying textile factories in Cambodia, a former worker from there to co- Appointing a CEO to finally help set up a fair supply chain, followed by a fashion show unveiling a new collection of tattered Adidas items – allegedly also by workers from the low-wage Asian country – at the time it then dawned on even the last of the audience that it was a question of a critical guerrilla performance with satirical traits.
The activist group around the initiator Mike Bonanno specifically accuses the Herzogenaurach brand of not responding to the demands of eight trade unionists at Tram Apparel in Cambodia: They would have demanded fairer wages, but would have been fired instead. According to The Yes Men, the NGO Clean Clothes Campaign calculated that Adidas owed more than 5,000 workers at a garment factory in Cambodia a total of $3.6 million in statutory severance pay, as well as workers at eight other supplier factories the country’s total of $11.7 million in lost wages. These are the figures that the activist group circulated after their Berlin performance on Monday.
The sports brand Adidas, for its part, rejects the allegations. At the request of the trade journal Horizont yesterday evening, the label said: “Adidas has been using a variety of measures to ensure fair and safe working conditions for the employees in its supply chain for more than 25 years.” continuously further developed in the interests of the workers. The income of the workers in the supplier companies is usually well above the statutory minimum wage in the respective country.
Adidas also says it employs around 50 experts worldwide who continuously monitor compliance with these standards. And: “In the event of violations of our standards, there is a sanction mechanism up to and including the termination of the business relationship.” Either way, the label is likely to suffer further image damage from the Berlin performance – and that comes for Adidas and its newly appointed CEO Bjørn three weeks ago guilders at a difficult time.
Because the brand is in a crisis anyway: because it had stuck to an extremely lucrative collaboration with rapper Kanye West for too long, who, after several failures, had recently also made anti-Semitic statements. And because Adidas just lost a lawsuit against the New York designer Thom Browne last week: The sports giant had sued Browne for $7.8 million in damages because he designed a stripe design that was too similar to those of Adidas. Ultimately, however, the jury of a New York court ruled in favor of the designer. The turbulent times in Herzogenaurach are only slightly noticeable on the stock exchange: According to industry magazines, the shares of the Dax company are stable, but cannot achieve outstanding results.