Nike Manager Faces Charges Of Abusing Workers In Vietnam -- Employees Allegedly Forced To Run Laps

HANOI - Authorities in southern Vietnam have charged a Nike factory manager with abusing her employees, a police spokesman said today.

The charges come just days after the U.S. shoe giant suspended the same manager for allegedly forcing factory workers to run laps as punishment.

Capitalizing on Vietnam's low labor costs, Nike has five manufacturing plants here. It has run into a storm of bad publicity in the past week over conditions at those plants.

The manager was identified by police as 27-year-old Hsu Chin-yun from Taiwan. She has been charged with abusing laborers, police said. Her passport was taken away.

She was accused of making 56 female workers at the Nike plant run laps as punishment for not wearing regulation shoes, labor-rights activist Thuyen Nguyen said in a report released last week.

At least 12 of the women fainted and were hospitalized, Nguyen's investigation revealed.

The woman charged was a technical manager at Pou Chen, a Nike subcontractor in Dong Nai, on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City. She was suspended by Nike in response to the labor-rights report.

Police in Dong Nai confirmed the charges against her, but refused to elaborate. Pou Chen company officials said she had not been take into custody.

She is the second foreign factory manager working for Nike in Vietnam to be brought up on charges of mistreating workers.

Last year, a South Korean factory floor manager working for Nike

subcontractor Sam Yang was convicted of beating Vietnamese employees with a shoe.