With Obama on hand, Nike announces it might make shoes in the U.S. again

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, who represent much of deeply liberal Portland, went further in remarks before Obama's speech, calling Nike "a great metaphor for the evolution of the international economy and trade agreements." He pointed to how Nike improved the working conditions at its overseas plants after sweatshop conditions were publicized in the 1990s.

But trade opponents say Nike's labor practices, dependent on hundreds of thousands of contract workers making substandard wages, continue to be problematic -- including continued reports of worker abuse in its suppliers' factories. And dissatisfaction with Obama's trade push was evident ahead of and during his visit.

Obama arrived in Oregon Thursday evening for a Democratic National Committee fundraiser at a downtown Portland hotel. As his motorcade pulled in, he was greeted with cheers on one side of the hotel, while on the other, several hundred activists shouted, "Hey hey, ho ho, fast track has got to go."

Inside, he briefly mentioned trade to donors, saying that "one of the things that we need to do to put people back to work is make sure that we are accessing the markets of the future."

"We’ve got the best workers in the world, the best universities in the world, the most innovative companies in the world, the best science and research in the world," he said. "So we are not afraid of competition. We are concerned if the playing field is not level. And that’s why we've got to have the kinds of enforceable, tough, fair trade deals that are going to make sure that American workers and American businesses aren't locked out of these markets."

Outside, Tom Chamberlain, president of the Oregon AFL-CIO, said in an interview among the protests that Obama's Nike appearance "epitomizes every fear we have about this trade agreement."

"If the cost of being No. 1 in the world is at the cost of workers' livelihoods and their standard of living, it's not worth it," he said.

In 1998, when criticism of Nike's labor practices was at its peak, Nike founder and Chairman Phil Knight said that returning shoe production to the U.S. would add $100 to the cost of a pair of Nike shoes, which then averaged about $75.

"There are only two ways of making shoe production come back to the United States," he said at a National Press Club speech. "Either new advances in automation, which from my viewpoint are a ways away, or establishing tariffs and quotas that dictate that shoes have to be made in the United States."

Nike's decision to pursue domestic manufacturing, even on a relative small scale and conditioned on the ratification of a complex trade deal, is a triumph for President Obama, who was reported to have pressed another American corporate titan to do the same with little success.

At a 2011 dinner in Silicon Valley, according to a New York Times report, Obama pressed the late Apple chief executive Steve Jobs why iPhones