When an information technology (IT) technician was beginning their career in IT services at Designer Shoe Warehouse, they had a notion that one day they wanted to end up in Portland.
“The dream was to come here and work at Nike or Adidas,” the IT worker (referred to in this story as "IT manager") who agreed to speak to the Mercury on the condition of anonymity, said. “And that dream turned into a nightmare in a way that still keeps me up at night.”
The dream’s transformation into a nightmare began last summer, when the IT manager responded to a LinkedIn posting for a position at what was described as a global sports brand. The global sports brand was Adidas, which has its North American headquarters in North Portland.
But the job was not with Adidas. Like a number of multinational corporations, Adidas subcontracts its IT work to a company called HCL Technologies Limited or HCLTech—a multinational firm headquartered in Noida in the state Uttar Pradesh in India.
HCLTech is a giant in the software services industry; its revenue in 2024 came out to roughly $13 billion and it reportedly has in excess of 220,000 employees spread across its more than 60 offices across the globe. The IT manager said HCLTech then works with subcontractors of its own to hire staff for the various Adidas offices.
The manager said they were contracted by Teceze, an IT services provider with offices in numerous countries, at a managerial level and given oversight responsibilities in multiple states. Their issues with operations at Adidas started almost immediately.
“Effectively every paycheck I received was late, inaccurate, or incomplete,” the IT manager said. “I had colleagues there who went over three months without getting paid.”
They knew of a colleague in North Carolina, for instance, who was a contracted employee and went two months without receiving a paycheck.
A spokesperson for Adidas declined to comment on contract details with the company’s service providers, but said there are “no issues in our IT operations.” HCLTech and Teceze did not respond to a request for comment.
It wasn’t just issues with on-time and accurate payment that made life at Adidas challenging. Another problem was that the IT manager and many of the people they supervised were hired as contractors instead of as employees, even if they were working full-time, leaving them with virtually no protections in the case of injury, no paid sick time, and no vacation days.
The situation was even worse, they said, for the IT staff being brought in to work at Adidas on H1B visas—the visa that allows foreign workers to come to the US to work in particular occupations.
“I was the direct manager of a couple of these folks—great people,” the IT manager said. “Hard workers. I have nothing bad to say about them. The thing is, those people are getting [exploited] even worse than any of the Americans.”
They said, for example, that one of the people they were responsible for training and supervising at Adidas was an H1B visa holder who was not paid for his first four months with the organization.
“He has no recourse, and he’s afraid to say anything because they’ll send him back to India,” the IT manager said.
That level of precarity, combined with a lack of accountability for the various entities running the IT operation for Adidas, created what the contracted IT manager called an unusually difficult situation in a field that often has scant worker protections to begin with.
“I’ve worked at Apple, I’ve worked at Designer Shoe Warehouse in their corporate IT, I’ve worked for other major global organizations in the footwear apparel and sportswear industries. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
The IT manager said on their last day with the company, they were summoned to a meeting with both Adidas and HCL officials where they were told that the corporate officials did not want to know about issues with the day-to-day operation of the IT department. The IT manager left the job shortly thereafter.
“It’s basically a system that is designed to protect Adidas, because it’s plausible deniability,” the IT manager said.
Another longtime Adidas IT worker, who left their position earlier this year, said they were told Adidas officials were “not allowed to know” about issues with the IT operation.
The IT manager said the nature of the operation, including the layers of contracting and subcontracting, with a focus on lowering costs, points to a broader issue with how IT is thought about by a number of top companies.
“IT is seen as a cost,” the manager said. “So you minimize costs. Whereas design at Adidas is not seen as a cost, it’s how you make money. Design contractors are going to be treated better, because they’re making money for the company instead of costing money.”
Another employee, who had been with Adidas as a contractor for several years before HCL came in, said he and his colleagues at the company knew the new regime could be difficult to work with just from Googling them.
[IT] is not a heavily union-represented field,” the second employee, who also asked that their name not be used, said. “I wish it were, but it’s not. Contract companies are pretty common, so anybody who's been working in the field who doesn't have their head up their ass knows what's coming when a contract company takes over.”
Sure enough, the second employee said, that was how the experience at Adidas played itself out.
“We knew that their whole MO was just to replace the highest paid workers with cheaper labor—and they’ve done that in various ways,” they said.
The second employee, too, had issues getting paid after they were sent to Los Angeles for a period of two weeks to assist a less experienced recent hire who was stationed in the area.
“It took me three months to recoup my expenses that I had lost for that travel after coming back, which was somewhere [around] $3,000 for travel, hotel, food, and so on and so forth,” the second employee said.
They also heard similar stories from other people who had difficulties getting reimbursed for work-related travel. Shortly after voicing frustration with the delay of their own reimbursement last spring, the second employee was told they were being let go.
“They couldn’t even give me a coherent line as to what the reason was,” they said.
In September, the IT manager filed a complaint with the Oregon Bureau of Labor & Industries (BOLI) over owed wages and other wage and hour violations. The IT manager reached out again in October to BOLI as well as a number of Portland-area state legislators and media outlets, to call attention to working conditions in IT at Adidas.
The IT manager received a response from a compliance specialist with BOLI’s Wage and Hour Division, who eventually informed the employee that their complaints had fallen outside of the “current strategic enforcement criteria” of the Bureau’s Proactive Investigations and Enforcement Unit, and thus would not be investigated.
The IT manager said that, to date, they have not heard from any of the elected officials they reached out to with their concerns. Meanwhile, after more than six months out of work, the manager is readying to start a new job in the area and attempting to move on from their experience.
“It still keeps me up at night," the IT manager said. "The weird conversations and the situations I went through there."
