Nike overlooks misogynist and racist store manager
By: Niels Louwes
Tags: Racism, Nike, Misogyny, Sexism

Photo by Clark Street Mercantile on Unsplash

A Nike store manager in the Northern city of Groningen, the Netherlands stands accused of gross racism, misogyny, sexism and discrimination. These accusations came from a store lead who joined the company in October and began working at the store. She decided she had no choice but to quit within her probation period due to the number of issues mentioned. She felt that she could not voice the issues directly to her manager due to a lack of faith in the corporate structures allowing this sort of behavior. She felt that she could no longer work in such an environment of blatant discrimination and favoritism from her direct manager and did not feel that she could go directly to her manager to discuss these issues because of fear of retaliation. Instead, she wrote a long letter outlining all of the issues.

During her training, she was taken through the store where the Nike store manager informed her that the store had an issue with theft. He then went on to explain that stereotypes exist for a reason and that it was mostly “brown” and “black “people committing the crime. The store manager also explained that certain associates were sick more often and implied these associates were “black”. When the assistant manager in training pointed out that there were many people working in the store, each with their motivations and background, the store manager pointed out that it was mostly “black” and “brown” people who were the problem. According to the store manager, he never had issues with Slovakian or German employees. It also seems that he favored people who stayed quiet and played along while punishing those who attempted to speak up.

In addition to this obvious racism, assistant managers were tasked with spying on their own employees, specifically targeting employees of non white backgrounds for random searches in their bags. The report also mentioned that the store manager would push female employees to wear mini skirts and he would spend time watching camera footage of these employees unpacking boxes. This is gross misogyny, sexism, and privacy violations all packed up into one. This woman’s report isn’t the only attempt of an employee at the Groningen store to reach the European headquarters. Another woman attempted it some time before this story broke as well without success. In addition, multiple store employees also corroborated the allegations made.

Response from Nike European headquarters has been slow. Dutch news source Ad.nl reached out for a response and gave Nike more than a week to respond before breaking the news. The letter which is featured in the news article was written at the end of October, which is about 7 weeks ago. I am imagining someone from HR receiving the letter and forgetting about it and going on with their day, and focusing instead on “more important” corporate problems.

For comparison to how Nike has responded to a negative event, we can look back on the 2018 incident in South Africa where the husband of a Nike manager released a Whatsapp video while on vacation and in that video he made some nasty racist remarks. Nike responded to this incident within a few days, making public statements and firing the employee. What we see here is a completely different response. We see that Nike prioritizes negative events based on the expected impact to the brand rather than the allegations made. It seems that Nike cares far more for issues that have international reach and could hurt the image of the company far more. Here we see that the South African incident is so much more important to Nike, even though the racist remarks were not even made by the Nike employee but a family member. The extent of the damage and allegations were far less severe than the extent of the allegations made against the Groningen store manager.

It seems, as the woman calls out in her letter, that Nike spends a lot of effort and resources to appear like it is fighting for rights of women, minorities, and fighting against causes such as racism, sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny. But these efforts are largely focused on the corporate environment and seem to be skipping over the retail environment. She calls out in her letter rightfully that it was a great move to support Colin Kaepernick, but at the same time these issues are not dealt with within the company on all levels. It just seems more and more like a PR stunt.

What I notice is that Nike and most other corporations did make great strides in dealing with a number of very important issues. These initiatives included forming support groups within the company, such as LGBTQ groups and groups supporting Black Lives Matter, women, and other minority groups. Additionally, all large companies implemented unconscious bias training and ensured hiring practices are made without bias. Policies were overhauled. But again, I must point out that these are changes made on the corporate level of the company and are heavily marketed to the outside world. I do believe that Nike has solved its issues over the past few years on the corporate level, the home of the more privileged and educated. It’s clear with this example of one store in Groningen, the Netherlands, that the efforts seem to skip over the employees and management on the ground working in the retail stores. Again, we are looking at an environment which largely consists of students and less educated adults who are working these jobs. These are your working class people. This disproportionally affects the less educated segments of society, who are the victims in this case.

One possible explanation is the fact that companies have shifted heavily towards their online stores and presence. It could be the case that oversight slipped when it comes to the retail environment. But I still think the real reason is just a lack of care for the working class on the ground selling shoes. What this just proves is that Nike, like most corporations, only do things if the research shows that it leads to more sales. Many companies have upped their virtue signaling in ads and PR stunts simply because that is popular at the moment. This is one of my biggest criticisms of multinationals, it is too obvious that they believe money and shareholder value first and people second. And even these people, or employees, are ranked into two very distinct groups, the educated corporate employees and those doing the physical labor selling shoes at retail locations.

And while Nike spent incredible efforts and resources to hold managers accountable within the company, it failed to do so for this particular store manager. While this particular man’s behavior is clearly not congruent with Nike’s values as a company, the company must still be held accountable for allowing this type of behavior to go unchecked for so long. It must pay attention to all parts of the organization, not just the corporate environment.

Disclaimer: This article focuses on a single isolated incident. I do not think as a whole that Nike is a bad company to work for. The goal of this article is to point out how initiatives to improve working conditions and rights of employees tend to focus on corporate offices and are big PR stunts and then do not trickle down to the employees on the ground in retail stores.