LONDON -- How do you fancy swapping your flashy new trainers for a cheap pair of flip-flop sandals?
According to a report last week from the charity Christian Aid, the workers who actually make the millions of sports shoes worn all over the world never earn enough to afford them.
A sacked Filipino shoe factory worker put it simply: "I made elegant Reebok, Puma and Nike shoes for 11 years. But look at what I wear on my feet -- a cheap pair of plastic sandals. I am like those who build but are homeless and those who till the soil but are hungry."
Sports shoes have exploded onto the market over the past 15 years; whether for fitness or simply for fashion, most people now own a pair or two. But the companies that sell them -- Adidas, Hi-Tec, Nike, Puma and Reebok -- do not actually make them. They sub-contract the production, and if you visit a Thai or Chinese factory you will see the rival brands being produced side by side on parallel conveyor belts.
The wages of Third World workers make up a tiny fraction of the cost of sports shoes. Instead, billions are spent on marketing and endorsement by sports stars to sell an image to customers who will pay dearly for it. You can pay more than 100 pounds these days, though on average a pair of sports shoes sells for around 50 pounds. The 40 or so factory workers who made that pair of shoes will share among them just over 1 pound of that 50 pounds.
As early as the 1920s enterprising sports shoe peddlers were beginning to learn the value of putting their shoes on high-profile stars. When Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics in 1936, he was wearing spikes produced by the German Dassler family, cobblers in the small town of Herzogenaurach, whose two sons Adi and Rudolph quarrelled and set up rival shoe businesses -- Adidas and Puma.
Enormous attention is devoted to so-called innovation. Teams of researchers design and test an endless stream of new concepts and gimmicks, so that today you can even get Nike shoes incorporating "Kevlar, the material they use for bulletproof vests."
But the companies are selling more than a piece of sports equipment. They are offering a dream, a leisure item, a fashion accessory -- and far more shoes are bought for posing than for pounding the pavements. The profit margins seem to justify the huge amounts spent on advertising and endorsement deals. In March Andre Agassi signed a contract with Nike reported to be worth 70 million pounds. Adidas recently did a 2 million pounds deal with Paul Gascoigne. Michael Jordan is said to earn $18-20 million a year from Nike.
By contrast, the shoes themselves cost little to produce. Take a popular model like the Nike Air Pegasus; Christian Aid calculated that the ex-factory price of this shoe is less than 10 pounds. It is available today for between 49.99 and 54.99 pounds. So while Christian Aid has a valid case that the workers are being horribly underpaid, it looks as if, at the other end, the customer is being brutally overcharged.
The companies plead that a vast amount goes into research, but does something as basically simple as a sports shoe need all those fancy and complicated gimmicks?
When Jim Peters sliced minutes off the world marathon record in the 1950s -- running times that would still place him high in races today -- he did it in canvas plimsoles, the sort that schoolboys used to buy in Woolworths. His feet were certainly no tougher than those of Abebe Bikila. He was the first great black African distance runner. Virtually unknown, he amazed everyone by winning the Olympic marathon in Rome in 1960, running over the cobbled streets barefoot. The shoe companies fell over each other to sign him up. By the time he won his second gold, four years later in Tokyo, he was safely kitted out with shoes.
There has been a long and, to the shoe companies, disturbing list of athletes who have reckoned that the shoemaker can do little to improve on the performance of the human foot. Bruce Tulloh, Ron Hill and Jim Hogan would often bid for medals without shoes, and I had the unusual experience of helping to negotiate a lucrative shoe contract with Brooks for Zola Budd, into which was written a clause saying that she could race without wearing the company's (or anyone else's) shoes.
Christian Aid calculated it would cost very little to raise wages in most Asian sports shoe factories to a decent level. "It wouldn't even add the price of a new pair of laces to what you pay for sneakers," it said. But let us hope that if the workers did find new wealth they would not blow it too quickly on the latest flash pair of high-priced running shoes.
Two years ago a group of American researchers brought a small team of Tarahumara Indians from Mexico to run the Leadville Trail 100-mile race in Colorado.
Legend has it that the Tarahumaras subsist on rice and beans and possess prodigious endurance. The prize money on offer would have made any of them instantly rich in their village. One of them, Victoriano Churro, was 55. Like his Indian team-mates he passed up the invitation to compete in expensive designer running shoes. Instead he raced in home-made flip-flop sandals fashioned from leather thongs and rubber cut from discarded tires found at a local rubbish dump the night before the event.
The race was won, of course, by the man in the flip-flops.
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