Human rights discussed

Activist Leslie Kretzu began her speech Wednesday by quoting Gandhi, saying, "Poverty is the worst form of violence." The lecture, "American Activists Starve on Nike Sweatshop Wage in Indonesia," featured Jim Keady, a former soccer professional, and Kretzu, a human rights activist.\nBoth Keady and Kretzu spent last summer living in solidarity with the Nike workers in Tangerang, Indonesia. They survived on the same wages the Nike workers live on -- $1.25 a day.\n"Our goal was to humanize the lived realities of these workers, who stand 8 to 15 hours a day with regulated and infrequent bathroom breaks," Kretzu said.\nSophomore Adriana Madiol said she was in awe of what the speakers lived through. \n"It is simply amazing what they did," Madiol said. "It is important to actually do something about these issues, but they more than took action."\nKeady, a former soccer coach, said he and Kretzu went to Indonesia with two questions in mind -- "Is working in a Nike shoe factory a good job for these Indonesia men and women?" and "Can you live on $1.25 a day in Indonesia?"\nThe answers Keady and Kretzu said they found were beyond the simple figures and results of globalization and the continual desire to cut costs and squeeze labor.\n"The state of these Indonesian workers is the result of a capitalistic government undermining human dignity for a profit," Kretzu said.\nKeady and Kretzu quoted the figures of several necessities. To take a sick child to the doctor once in Indonesia costs two-thirds of the amount allotted through a Nike health plan. To get a child medicine costs 694 percent of one day's wages. If a child is malnutritioned and needs vitamins, that is 66 percent of one day's wages, and baby food costs 119 percent of a day's wages.\nKeady and Kretzu said they lived beside these families, feeling their struggles and hearing their cries of indignation. \n"These people barely get by in houses infested with rats the size of footballs, overrun with cockroaches the size of a human hand, and situated right beside open sewers," Kretzu said. "No Indonesian can drink their water. The common Indonesian families must boil their own water, where middle and upper class families drink bottled water."\nKeady said after he returned to the United States, he learned the piles of burning shoe scraps and plastic scraps in Indonesia produce carcinogens.\n"These scraps are burned every other day in open places where children play," Keady said. "These children are slowly getting cancer from these fumes." \nAt the end of the speech, Keady and Kretzu called upon the students to write their congresspersons and urge them to take action on this issue.\nFor more information about their campaign against sweatshops, visit www.nikewages.org.