Dirty Shoes

What a beautiful way to spend an oddly mild Saturday morning in December: running with Cliff’s group in Point Pleasant Park, doing 3 x 8 minute and 1 x 4 minute threshold runs (3:40/km pace). Feels good to get on the trails and do some longer, more sustained pacing after so many weeks of shorter intervals on the track.

Today, I ran with Mike, and Mike was running in a shiny new pair of New Balance shoes – the same brand that I currently wear. He groaned every time we ran through some mud – I totally understood. It’s funny, though; I hate the glowing white of new shoes, but I also hate getting them all mucked up, especially in the first week or two. I guess it’s because running shoes cost so darn much. I want them to last as long as they can before I have to shell out another $150, and a dirty shoe seems closer to death than a clean one.

Thinking about Mike’s new (and now dirty) shoes, though, got me thinking about a question that’s been troubling me for a long time – a question that I’ve refused to ask in any meaningful way for years because, to be honest, I don’t think I really want to know the answer: is running gear made in a socially and environmentally responsible way?

Running shoe companies have been notorious for their less than stellar records. But that was sometime in the 90s, wasn’t it? Mike’s new shoes made me wonder if things are any better today. So tonight, I’ve been doing some preliminary searching on the web, trying to see if my New Balance shoes are the result of an ethical manufacturing process or not.

I started with the New Balance website, and (as you might expect) things looked pretty good. Here’s the first little factoid I learned from the corporate site:

“New Balance is the only athletic shoe manufacturer still making shoes in the US. We’re proud of that commitment. We're proud of the workers in our five New England factories. And we're proud to say that 25% of our shoes sold in North America are made or assembled right here.”

Hey, now there’s something you don’t see every day – running shoes made in the U.S. where there are labour laws and unions and some environmental protection laws (I guess). Could my shoes be part of the 25% that were made practically next door in Maine? I looked for the little U.S. flag on the heel and the Made in the USA sticker: nope. Crap.

Even so, it turns out that “Made in the USA” is not what you might think. Give New Balance credit, though, they are upfront about this, leaving it up to us as consumers to decide the ethics of calling shoes “Somewhat Made in the USA” actually “Made in the USA”:

“Where the domestic value is at least 70%, we have labeled the shoe ‘Made in the USA.’ Where it falls below 70%, we have qualified the label referencing domestic and imported materials. This determination is based in part on the Federal trade Commission's survey of consumers.”

Hmm. Well. Seems a bit fishy. But I guess a shoe doesn’t have to be made in the U.S. in order to be socially responsible. So where are the remaing 75% of New Balance shoes made? Well, the NB corporate website isn’t particularly forthcoming with that information. There’s a really inspiring corporate video about the factories in Maine, but nothing about where the bulk of NB shoes are made. And can you guess where they’re made? Take one guess.

Yup. China.

In order to get this information, I tweaked my Google search a bit from “New Balance shoes” to “New Balance shoes ethics.” Oops. One of the first hits was an article from 2006 published by WorldNetDaily entitled “New Balance 'pays workers 32 cents an hour': Report exposes harsh conditions at 'sweatshop' making American shoes.” Now, I’m not sure if WorldNetDaily is a reputable source of information: on the sidebar of the website there’s a link to the “Impeach Obama” website, so you know the site leans a wee bit to the right. And the study they cite is from the National Labor Committee and China Labor Watch – two organizations that I’m not familiar with. In fact, to make matters worse, the link the article provides to the study is broken.

I did, however, take a quick look at the National Labor Committee web site, and it looks pretty legit. I even found the report the article was talking about. In fact, there’s a press release on New Balance’s site concerning the report. Seems to me if a billion dollar corporation like New Balance notices and responds to a report from the National Labor Committee, then they are probably influential players.

Regardless, it’s no secret that manufacturing in China is not always carried out in ways we happy runners might like: below-subsistence wages, poor factory and living conditions, iffy work safety, mandatory overtime, scant worker’s rights, and so on. But we never come face to face with the manufacturing conditions of any of our gear. We just lace up and go for wonderful Saturday morning runs in the park while others labour long hours halfway around the world to make sure our slightly pronating strides don’t hurt our knees.

And what about the materials our gear is made from? What about the shipping? What about the disposal of the gear and the waste its manufacture produces? Just what are the social and environmental costs of all our gear?

To be fair, New Balance seems to have a lovely domestic corporate responsibility program. From breast cancer to girls in sport to trail maintenance in Maine, New Balance is giving away lots of cash to worthy causes. Does it matter that not one of those causes is in China? Should I care that New Balance is the official shoe provider for the U.S. military?

The messy fact of the matter is that running is not pure when it comes to social and environmental responsibility – our shoes are a little bit dirty. Running makes us healthier in body and maybe even in mind, but it does nothing to make us better consumers.

So what am I supposed to do with this fact? Stop running? Run barefoot? Run naked?

I don’t know how to answer that yet. But there are some questions that I think all runners should start asking: Where is my gear coming from? How is it made? What are the social and environmental costs?

And most importantly: how can we do better?