Clearing the hurdles : steps to improving wages and working conditions in the global sportswear industry.

Across the global sportswear industry, workers manufacturing sports apparel, footwear and soccer balls face poor working conditions and substantial violation of rights. This report which brought to focus the sports workers’ problems just before the recent Olympics 2008 is based on interviews with sportswear workers in China, India, Thailand and Indonesia, besides various secondary sources.

The report says that despite more than 15 years of codes of conduct adopted by major sportswear brands, such as Adidas, Nike, New Balance, Puma and Reebok, workers making their products still face extreme pressure to meet production quotas, excessive, undocumented and unpaid overtime, verbal abuse, threats to health and safety. Other issues highlighted by the report include:

• wages for sportswear workers are still well below a local living wage.
• even where governments raises the legal minimum wage employers find new ways to evade their responsibilities
• employers often falsify factory records to mask the labour abuses
• The report identifies solutions to these persistent workplace problems, focusing on three central hurdles:
• lack of respect for freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively
• insecurity of employment caused by industry restructuring
• abuse of short-term labour contracting and other forms of precarious employment

To address the problems, the report recommends that:

• sportswear brands should require suppliers to adopt a policy on freedom of association and communicate this to the workers in the form of a written “Right to Organize Guarantee”
• buyers should report publicly on the company’s policies for supplier/vendor selection, management, CSR performance etc
• buyers should provide information regarding the unit price paid by the buyer to the supplier on a confidential basis to trade union representatives engaged in collective bargaining with suppliers