Nike has established itself as the leading premium brand for basketball merchandise both in domestic and international markets. The company’s biggest signed athlete is still the NBA legend Michael Jordan, who will end this year with more than $330 million in revenue from his Jordan Brand’s sales.

Nike’s CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) wing devises strategies to allocate profits into creating an active and positive social role globally like many other corporations on the planet. One of Nike’s CSR initiatives is its HSI Scholarship Program, which aims to empower young scholars attending Hispanic-serving institutions. The program offers merit-based scholarships ranging from $5,000 to $10,000 to students based on demonstrated financial needs.

To qualify for this scholarship program, the applicants are supposed to write essays that are then reviewed and filtered by concerned officials. However, in what seems to have turned into a rather controversial affair, Nike is now looking for teachers to ‘volunteer’ their time to review 25 such essays from their homes without any compensation.

The issue was brought forward on Reddit by u/BohBellaMia on the r/ChoosingBeggars subreddit. The Redditor shared a screenshot of an email asking teachers to volunteer for this opportunity.

Other Redditors were not happy with Nike’s approach of asking teachers to do free work for the corporation. The incentive provided by Nike, in this case, was appealing to the teachers for community service with their contribution to the program. This didn’t go well with fellow users, who expressed their outrage in the comments. Some have even called out Nike for being extremely tone-deaf in the attached email.

It is worth noting that being a teacher in the United States currently ranks as one of the most underpaid professions. An teacher in the US earns an average salary of around $57,338. However, the range can vary between $48,045 to $70,182 depending on various factors such as education, certification, additional skills, or experience.

The rant against Nike on Reddit is clearly justified, given a multi-billion-dollar company is asking for free work from teachers who are already underpaid and overworked. Given the circumstances and the pressure teachers have to deal with, the opportunity would have been justified if Nike granted adequate monetary compensation instead of dubbing this opportunity as part of ‘community service.’ Meanwhile, Michael Jordan got dragged into the whole mess.

Michael Jordan’s $330 million Nike revenue gets highlighted

While criticizing Nike’s attempt to offer free-work to teachers, one Redditor highlighted Michael Jordan’s Nike revenue. The Redditor named ‘Sufficient-Agent6933’ highlighted Jordan’s income from Nike with a clown emoji.

If we are speaking of Nike’s profits, it’s worth mentioning that the brand’s biggest superstar, Michael Jordan, is one of the main reasons for its global presence. When Jordan signed his 1984 contract with Nike, he agreed on a deal that guaranteed him a 5% royalty on the Jordan Brand’s earnings.

As of 2023, Jordan is expected to earn a $330,000,000 paycheck from his eponymous Nike brand, which is a rapid 28.6% increase in terms of revenue. These earnings and Jordan’s other business portfolio put the Chicago Bulls legend on Forbes’ list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in the United States.

Jordan’s 2023 earnings from Nike is a $74,000,000 rise from his income from last year, wherein he made $256,000,000 from the Jordan brand’s revenue sales. Currently, the 6x NBA champion has a net worth of $3 billion, making him the wealthiest NBA star as of 2023.