If you're making a kid-size Nike sweatshirt in the Dominican Republic, it better not take you more than 30.35 seconds. That's half a minute. For both shoulders.

"We found these documents in a garbage dump in the Dominican Republic," grins Charlie Kernaghan, America's leading anti-sweatshop activist, as we chat at a Niketown in Manhattan. "These documents" are Nike's SAM requirements - Standard Allotted Minutes. For every step of every item, Nike has calculated how much time it will allow, to the 1,000th of a second. The grand total from start to finish - raw cloth to stitched, labeled and bagged kiddie sweatshirt? It's 6.6 minutes.

Given that Dominican sweatshop wages are about 70 cents an hour, the labor on that shirt cost about 11 cents. The cost of it to you, at a department store, is $22.99. Go ahead and gulp.

This gaping disparity explains why the fight against overseas sweatshops - particularly market-leader Nike's - has become the biggest civil rights movement on American campuses.

College students have been agitating their universities to stop allowing Nike to manufacture their official college apparel until Nike cleans up its act. This led to some reforms, including a Nike Web site - Nikebiz.com - that finally discloses where Nike's contractors are based around the world.

Over spring break, New York University student Katie Griffiths went down to a big Nike contractor (Nike doesn't own any factories, it just hires them) in Puebla, Mexico. A few months ago the workers there had staged a walkout, initially spurred by rancid meat in the cafeteria.

But the workers were protesting more than just maggots. They wanted the right to organize and a raise beyond their $4 or $5 a day. They were fired, en masse.

Under pressure from the student groups, however, the young women were eventually hired back. ("About 85 percent of all sweatshop workers are women my age," notes Griffiths, 19.) "And the factory has a new catering contract," says Nike spokesman Vada Manager.

"Nike jumps from country to country in search of low wages," says Kernaghan. "For example, they've got tens of thousands [of workers] in Cambodia where wages are 19 cents an hour. In China it's 20 to 25 cents."

Nike's Manager contends these are great wages. But he also admits that a 60-hour work week is not uncommon. And labor is but a small fraction of his goods' cost - 4 percent, he estimates. But in fact the 11 cents it took to make that kiddie sweatshirt is less than 1 percent of the retail cost.

Why couldn't Nike pay 22 cents for that sweatshirt and double its workers' wages? Manager contends this would lead to disaster - for the workers! "If you exponentially increase labor costs, that impacts on the cost of production, which then means the retail cost may increase, which then reduces the amount of [items] sold" - and leads to worker layoffs.

But I don't think an extra 11 cents would keep anyone from buying a shirt, do you?

The only way to get Nike to change is to demand it. A boycott isn't the answer - it really could lead to layoffs, warns Kernaghan. But letters and e-mails to CEO Phil Knight, who is worth $4.1 billion, will let Nike know its swoosh is becoming synonymous with sweatshop.

Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for the New York Daily News.

Copyright 2001 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc

###