'Now you can walk down the street without stepping on the worker who made your shoes'

Adam Neiman lovingly fingers the soft blue fabric of his shirt. Instead of offering a standard physical description of his product, his sales pitch goes like this: "It was made in a Chicago union factory where the workers have a contract and a decent living wage."

Nearby, John Studer is at the computer, comfortable in a pair of sneakers that look just like retro black Converse. They go for $35 -- and the buyer gets more than a pair of shoes. Included in every box is a detailed fact sheet that lists the wages and benefits of those who made the shoes in an Indonesian factory.

No Sweat Apparel is making a different kind of fashion statement with its sneakers that are being introduced today -- May Day -- in 14 stores around the country, including two in Cambridge. This marks the first major move of the product line into stores; it is sold largely online. "Sneakers with soul? No Sweat." It's one of the slogans that cofounder Neiman and his band of six employees -- only one full time -- live by. "Now you can walk down the street without stepping on the worker who made your shoes," says the fact sheet.

In a tiny stockroom on a side street in Newton, on shelves that contain boxes of T-shirts, sneakers, jeans, and the like, Neiman pulls out a gray spaghetti-strap tank top with a built-in bra and matching yoga pants. "I'm so excited about these; they just came in from Montreal." He boasts about the shirts from Chicago, the pants from Winnipeg, the T's from Quebec, the sweats from Pennsylvania, and the scarves and caps from New Jersey. All union-made, of course.

And then there's the sneaker that started it all. In 1992, Jeff Ballinger, a union activist, wrote a Harper's magazine article about Nike producing its pricey shoes in Indonesian sweatshops, where the makers of those shoes were working under brutal conditions for low wages and no benefits. The publicity embarrassed the industry giant and led to much antisweatshop debate, which has brought about some reforms.

But the changes were too few for Neiman's left-leaning taste, and in 2002, the Newton businessman and his wife refinanced their home and put $50,000 into a clothing company that hires only union workers and challenges industry leaders such as Nike and Reebok to do the same. They named it No Sweat. "We took a very deep breath," says Neiman, 47. The couple set about finding union shops that could turn out affordable sportswear, and consulted with Ballinger, who put so much time into the effort that he was "bumped up" to cofounder of the company. Harvard students helped research the market, and in the spring of 2002, the first No Sweat T-shirts rolled off the assembly line in Chicago.

In 2003, the company's first full year in business, it made a 15 percent profit. This winter, when it introduced the sneaker and denim jackets and jeans online, sales jumped 500 percent. "If we can gross a million dollars, then we can get investors," says Neiman.

But can a small company operating with little capital make the leap to the big time, or even the medium time? Does guilt-free fashion work? When consumers open the shoebox, will they even read the card that tells them the shoemakers earned 25 percent higher than the minimum wage in Jakarta, that they get a rice allowance, health benefits, shift differential, maternity leave, pensions, burial allowances, and paid time off for Ramadan?

Or will customers just throw the card away?

"A certain percentage will read it," says Neiman, an intense man who has been agitating for one cause or another since he was a boy growing up in Atlanta. "I mean, there's a big vegan market, a big earth-friendly market. People care about the exploitation of animals and the environment. But it all begins with the exploitation of humans. I think most people would prefer not to buy from a sweatshop, as long as it doesn't cost them extra time or money."

No Sweat's products are kept affordable in part because the company doesn't advertise. There's no Michael Jordan or Curt Schilling pitching their products. At No Sweat, Rosie the Riveter, the World War II labor icon flexing her muscles, is the celebrity endorser. Indeed, the T-shirt bearing her likeness is the company's biggest seller.

Ask Neiman why the consumer should care about what happens in a factory across the country, border, or ocean, and he replies with both head and heart. First, he launches into a lecture on the rise and fall of the union movement, ending with what he calls the union-busting movement of the past generation. Today, about 13 percent of US workers are unionized, down from 20 percent in 1983, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the early 1950s, union membership was reportedly as high as 36 percent. In Europe, Canada, and Australia, about 40 percent of workers belong to labor unions.

To Neiman, this dichotomy makes no sense. "We've added six weeks of work to the average American worker at no increase for the person. We're working much more and producing much more, but we're not seeing the gains. It's obvious it's bad for the poor. It's obvious it's bad for the middle class. And it's not good for the rich, either."

Huh?

"It's not only bad for their souls, it's bad for their pockets," he continues. "If you're not producing consumers as fast as you're producing widgets, it's a crisis. I mean, someone's got to buy the widgets." Neiman believes that Americans have a vested interest in raising wages in the developing world so that those workers can become consumers of US products -- not just producers.

Then he cuts to the emotional part of his antisweatshop argument. "People should care if they believe in doing unto others as they would have done unto them."

He was brought up believing in that, a boy whose mother was involved in the civil rights movement in Atlanta and whose first job out of college was as publicist for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. His dad was a small businessman. When his parents divorced, his mother moved the four children to Maryland. Shortly after, at age 12, Neiman was busted by police when he and his older sister joined 20,000 others picketing outside the White House during President Nixon's first inauguration. "My mother came to the police station to get us and boy, did she holler at the cops," he recalls, laughing.

At 15, he interned on George McGovern's staff; summers were spent working construction to save money for college. He turned down Yale and Princeton and chose Harvard, based largely on its liberal activism. But when he got there, he found he couldn't relate to it: "To be a white Jewish male then . . . you had to apologize for your existence. It was the gender thing, the race thing. To me, it was like, my ancestors were an oppressed minority, too. What am I apologizing for?"

He took a year off to work for Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign, then worked as a logger in northern California. When he returned to Harvard, he discovered that he liked the blue-collar world of construction and logging better than academia. After 2 1/2 years in college, he left for good.

"There's something in the blue collar ethos that's kind of fabulous," he says. "The presumption of equality; that you're not worth any more or any less than anyone else in the world. I didn't like the class thing at Harvard and I didn't like the PC thing."

In 1985, in an attempt to quit smoking, he tried acupuncture. He didn't give up cigarettes, but he did fall in love with the acupuncturist. He and his wife, Natalia Muina, have two children; she has three more from a previous marriage. As vice president of No Sweat, "she's the one who keeps me from doing really stupid things," he says.

Muina has mixed feelings about the venture. "On the one hand, it seems that we are poised for a breakthrough. . . . On the other hand, this has seriously disrupted our home life and certainly our finances. I'm glad I didn't know when we started what I know now. I don't think I would have done it, to tell you the truth."

In 1987, Neiman started Rosebud Roofing Company, which does high-end slate and copper roofing. It shares space with No Sweat, which still does most of its business online (www.nosweat

apparel.com). Now, No Sweat is challenging the big companies to follow its small lead by employing only union workers. In a certified letter sent yesterday to Paul Fireman, CEO of Reebok, and Phil Knight, CEO of Nike, Neiman introduced himself as "the CEO of your smallest competitor." He explained the benefits card included in the sneaker boxes and challenged them to adopt the practice. He concluded: "You've had ten years to rectify the problem of sweatshops in the sneaker industry. Your company claims to have done so. If that's true, I'm confident you will welcome this opportunity to provide proof." And then, borrowing Nike's signature line, he ended: "Just do it. We did."

In a statement, Reebok said the Fair Labor Association this week accredited Reebok's program to implement a "rigorous workplace code of conduct in the footwear factories making the company's products.'' Nike, which has workers in more than 900 factories in 50 countries, said in a statement that it has welcomed the attention on factory conditions, which has "led us to partner with organizations that can help us identify worker concerns and issues, address compliance issues . . . and more closely monitor activities. This is a long-term process with no easy solutions."

Why, as a businessman, would Neiman want to share his niche market with the competition? "What's exciting to me is using this market to leverage the entire industry. And that's important, because otherwise we're not changing the world. We're just making money."

No Sweat shoes are available at Cambridge Naturals, 1670 Mass. Ave. and Hubba-Hubba, 534 Mass. Ave., both in Cambridge.