by Rob Davis

This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches, to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In Phnom Penh’s hot season, when the Cambodian capital’s sweltering, subtropical air routinely soars to 100 degrees, more workers than usual visited the infirmaries inside a factory that made baby clothes for Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel brand.

As many as 15 people a month typically became too weak to work in May and June, according to a medical worker employed by the factory. Even at other times of year, she said, eight to 10 workers wound up in the clinic monthly because they felt weak, including one or two a month who fell unconscious and needed to go to the hospital.

Other former employees told ProPublica they sometimes saw two or three people a day taken to an on-site clinic. One described how he carried workers too weak to walk. Another said she saw thin workers being taken to the clinic, their faces pale and eyes closed.

Y&W Garment’s employees — at one time numbering around 4,500 — operated sewing machines and packaged clothing in cavernous buildings with fans but no air conditioning. The fans sometimes broke and weren’t fixed, one worker said. Another said the inside of the factory could get hotter than it was outdoors. “It’s so hot,” said Phan Oem, 53, who started working there shortly after the factory opened in 2012. “I’m sweaty. It’s too hot.”

Workers have fainted for years inside Cambodia’s garment factories, where more than 57,000 people now produce Nike goods. People at Nike’s suppliers fainted en masse in 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018 and 2019, according to news reports at the time, part of a string of events in which thousands of Cambodians got sick, vomited or collapsed on the job. (The term “fainting” in Cambodia is used for conditions that range from losing consciousness to becoming too dizzy or weak to work.)

Nike had moved into Cambodia in 2000, just two years after co-founder Phil Knight promised to end labor abuses that accompanied its push into Southeast Asia.

Nike took action after faintings made headlines. It sent executives on a fact-finding mission in 2012. It asked for international labor officials to investigate. Nike in 2017 told The Guardian, “We take the issue of fainting seriously, as it can be both a social response and an indication of issues within a factory that may require corrective action.”

Yet for all the measures Nike says it relies on to keep workers safe, which include heat standards in factories, internal and external audits, announced and unannounced visits, Y&W workers said fainting persisted during the two years Nike products were made there.

Jill Tucker, who led the U.N.-backed oversight group Better Factories Cambodia from 2011 to 2014, said she was not surprised to hear that workers regularly fainted at Y&W Garment.

The problem is “a consequence of low wages and poor working conditions that continue, even after decades of work on this issue,” Tucker said. “People work very hard for very little pay.”

Representatives of Y&W Garment and its parent company, Hong Kong-based Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to emails, text messages or calls.

It’s unclear what Nike knew about working........

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