I'm wearing my new pair of Nikes. My brand new FREE pair of Nikes! Sweat-shop or not, this is a great company! They really take care of their employees.

So, I worked Monday thru Thursday at Nike. Basically, just a cog in the wheel, but the days go by really fast. On any given day, this center ships out 100,000 to 300,000 pairs of shoes a day. It supplies the entire country! How do I fit in? Well, this distribution center is a HUGE warehouse (725,000 sq. ft.) with 7.7 miles of conveyor belts and 223 employees. I work in a "small" section of the warehouse which is three levels filled with about 15 rows of shoe inventory racks and conveyor belts. The "pickers" work in the inventory rows, pulling shoes and putting them in various-size boxes. They then get placed on the conveyor belt to travel to the end of the row where the "carton sealers" (that's me!) check the contents for accuracy, stuff the boxes with paper for shipping, seal them up with tape and put them onto another conveyor belt that sends them out of our department and over to the shipping dock where they get loaded onto palettes and into trucks. I work on the third level. It gets pretty hot up there and we work so fast and relentlessly sometimes! As we speak, my sweat is being shipped all across the country. So, next time you buy a pair of Nikes, I want you to think of me because if you do it in the near future, there's a good chance that I had something to do with it! If you smell sweat, it's more likely from me than from the 8 year-old in Indonesia who assembled the shoe.

Nike Wilsonville Distribution Center fact: the shipping record is 3,768,813 pairs of shoes in July 1997!

It's kind of fun job. I don't mean fun fun, but it's nice to just slip into "the zone" and push yourself to the limits of your endurance. Tuesday and Wednesday were 15 hour days! So, we all went into overtime after 10 hours. And because we worked so hard, Nike rewarded us with a "Bonus Shoe-pick". After work, they marched us over to the shoe-pick cage so we could select a free pair of shoes from one of many huge boxes brimming with so much leather and insoles! We were all pretty psyched and are ready to come back for another heavy workload. Nike, if you keep showing me your gratitude like that, I'll keep sealing my sweat... er, your shoes up for as long as you want!

--RP--