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Article Excerpt
The 2008 Beijing Olympics represents a golden opportunity for the brand-conscious sportswear industry to associate its products with the cherished Olympic brand. For a costly, but manageable sponsorship or licensing fee, a sportswear company can infuse its athletic shoes and clothes with the lofty Olympic ideals of fair play, perseverance and, most importantly, winning.
By linking their brands with the Olympic Games, as well as other sporting events like the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) 2008 Euro Cup, sportswear companies hope to reach for the gold in sales, market share and brand recognition. And if the past is any guide, these major sporting events should prove extremely profitable for some of the major players in this global industry.
But there is another side to the story. Before the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, the Play Fair at the Olympics Campaign--the biggest international worker rights mobilization of its kind ever undertaken--brought the world's attention to the underside of the sportswear industry: the abysmal working conditions endured by the young women and men, and children, who make the shoes, jerseys, footballs and other items in contract factories and subcontract facilities around the world.
Flash forward four years, with the Beijing Olympics upon the horizon, and it's time to ask, "What, if anything, has improved?"
What Researchers Found
Based on interviews with over 320 sportswear workers in China, India, Thailand, and Indonesia, as well as reviews of company and industry profiles, published and unpublished reports, newspaper articles, web sites, and factory advertisements, researchers from the Play Fair network found that while some brands have developed labor rights monitoring and compliance programs and taken action on a number of issues and cases, substantial violations of worker rights are still the norm for workers in the sportswear industry.
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 related to the high quotas and exposure to toxic chemicals, and a failure to provide legally required health and other insurance programs.
Play Fair researchers also found that wages for sportswear workers are still well below a local living wage. Even where governments raised the...
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