Adidas’s Worker-Centered ‘AdiVerse’ Is Not What it Seems

Prankster activists impersonating an Adidas executive and the DJ known as Marshmello appeared to convince attendees at last week’s Web Summit that the sportswear Goliath would be paying tens of thousands of supply chain workers in virtual dollars, allowing them to live large in an “AdiVerse” in the cloud with luxuries they would otherwise be unable to afford in the real world.

Aristide Feldholt, the purported executive, was in reality Andy Bichlbaum of The Yes Men. And Marshmello was actually Mike Bonanno, another leading member of the American satirical collective.

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But for a while, the audience at the Lisbon-based conference seemed fooled as “Marshmello” mimed a pair of scissors, giving a group of interpretive dancers the cue to shake off the ropes meant to represent Adidas’s three stripes, and “Feldholt” touted a tiny implantable device that would translate workers’ labors into cryptocurrency known as AdiCoins. As “Marshmello’s” new track, “All Day I Dream.” kicked up, nightmarish AI-generated figures, including ones resembling the QAnon Shaman, Drake and the old man from the Netflix hit show “Squid Game,” spun, cavorted and stretched on screens overhead.

People clapped and hooted, and Bonanno said he was mobbed for autographs. At a press conference The Yes Men held in character later that day, one tech reporter called the idea “revolutionary,” while another only questioned how Adidas would maintain user privacy.

This is the second time in a year that The Yes Men has partnered with the Clean Clothes Campaign, the garment industry’s largest consortium of trade unions and labor rights groups, and the #PayYourWorkers initiative it supports to target Adidas over its “wanting stance” toward the people who make its shoes and clothes. At Berlin Fashion Week in January, the jokesters held a fake show that introduced a Cambodian trade union leader as Adidas’s new co-CEO. That, too, The Yes Men, said, was designed to “highlight Adidas’s hypocrisy” ??when it comes to reports of wage theft and other labor rights violations.

“Adidas spending considerable amounts of money to make up an alternative currency and virtual universe to avoid paying its garment workers what they are owed is not that far from the truth,” said Billy Yates, U.S. director for the #PayYourWorkers. “The reality might be even darker: Adidas has spent hundreds of millions sponsoring FIFA’s Qatar debacle, while ignoring the rightful claims of workers in Cambodia, Indonesia and elsewhere to the money they are owed.”

Yates himself has protested the German giant in public before, including at a breakfast event in Portland, Ore., that featured Rupert Campbell, the Nike rival’s head of North America in March. There, Yates pointed to eight Adidas contractors in Cambodia that “stole” $11.7 million from more than 30,000 workers, amounting to $387 per worker, during the April-May 2021 national lockdown. The country’s Hulu Garment factory, he added, laid off 1,000 workers in 2020 without paying them the $3.6 million they were owed by law. And in Indonesia, PT Panarub employees who made World Cup gear received only half their wages between June and August 2020 because of suspended orders.

The incident took place just weeks after Labour Behind the Label, a workers’ rights group in the United Kingdom, “hijacked” multiple advertising spaces in bus stops in Bristol and Manchester to challenge what it characterized as the company’s “woke-washing” during International Women’s Day.

Adidas told Sourcing Journal that it “rejects the allegations.”

“Throughout the pandemic, Adidas has been committed to ensuring fair labor practices, fair wages and safe working conditions throughout our global supply chain,” a spokesperson said. “We continued to uphold our standard manufacturing terms, including worker rights protection. Ensuring business continuity and a functioning supply chain has kept workers in jobs. We continued to be committed to ensuring legal compliance in terms of pay and benefits for all workers and tracked the working conditions in each and every factory.”

Christie Miedema, campaigns and outreach coordinator at Clean Clothes Campaign, disagreed, however.

“Adidas likes to market itself as a progressive force, but it clearly does not care about the women of color in its supply chain,” she said. “Time and time again, it has failed its workers: allowing the Hulu Garment workers to be tricked into resigning without pay, allowing other garment workers to be paid only partial wages, and failing to ensure that all of the workers making its product are paid bare minimum wages.”

As Adidas sells off its controversial Yeezy stock, bringing in millions of profits that will, in part, benefit anti-hate groups, labor campaigners have been urging it to use some of that cash to compensate workers.

“Adidas often points at the difficult year it had after its break with Ye, but that pales in comparison to the hardship faced by the PT Panarub workers in Indonesia who made Yeezy shoes and lost their jobs,” said Kalpona Akter, president of the Bangladesh Garment and Industrial Workers Federation in Bangladesh. “Though Adidas has gained back moral credit by its decision to donate part of the profits to anti-discriminatory causes, the main chunk of the revenue has served to improve the company’s financial numbers for 2023.”

In May, Akter’s union and three others asked Adidas to spend 2 to 3 percent of the “tainted” Yeezy revenue to “make workers whole.”

“We have received no response,” she said.

Adidas declined to comment about the issue.

On stage at Web Summit, Bonnano, in his guise as Marshmello, said that he dreams of a world where workers can do anything and get anything—even get paid.

“It’s not fair that they go hungry. It’s not cool that we party all night in Fortnite while they’re stuck in the real world. It’s not right that they have to give up their dreams,” he said. “But I dream of a better world…and I’m excited that Adidas will usher in this new world.”