Offside!

Labour rights and sportswear production in Asia

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Summary

While global sports brands generously sponsor the world’s top sporting teams and players, the women and men in Asia who make their goods struggle to meet their families’ basic needs and many are unable to form or join unions without discrimination, dismissal or violence.

Nike pays USD $16 million (13 million Euro) a year to the Brazilian national football team and adidas pays USD $1.8 million (1.5 million Euro) per year to French player Zinedine Zidane. Meanwhile the Asian workers who make the football boots and other sports gear worn by players are paid as little as 47 cents Euro per hour — 3.76 Euro for a standard working day. Shopping at their cheapest local markets, women producing brand-name sportswear in Indonesia need to work 3.75 hours to earn enough to purchase 1.5kg of uncooked chicken, which for some is all the meat they can afford for a month.

This report considers 12 international sports brands — adidas, ASICS, FILA, Kappa, Lotto, Mizuno, New Balance, Nike, Puma, Reebok, Speedo and Umbro — and examines the steps they take to ensure their suppliers in Asia allow workers to organise trade unions and bargain collectively for better wages and conditions. It concludes that all sportswear companies need to take a more serious approach to workers’ right to freedom of association. Some companies — notably Reebok, Puma, adidas, Nike, ASICS and Umbro — are involved in positive initiatives which have led to improved conditions in some factories, but their overall approach to trade union rights has been inconsistent and at times contradictory. FILA, owned by Sports Brands International (SBI), has taken the least action to improve respect for trade union rights in its Asian supplier factories. FILA has failed to adequately address serious labour rights abuses when they have been brought to the company’s attention and since February 2005 has ignored multiple attempts by labour rights groups and trade unions to communicate with the company about labour issues.

Top football players and other professional athletes are commonly represented by players’ associations which negotiate collective bargaining agreements protecting players’ interests and needs. In contrast, Asian sportswear workers who want to form unions and bargain collectively frequently face discrimination, harassment, threats of dismissal and, in some cases, violent intimidation. Two of the cases researched for this report — one in Sri Lanka and the other in Indonesia — involved violent assaults on workers who were attempting to form unions in sportswear factories. Women, who make up 80% of the global workforce in the sportswear sector, face particular barriers to participating in trade unions due to gender discrimination within their workplaces, their societies and within workers’ organisations.

Transnational corporations (TNCs) in sportswear and other industries cannot, on their own, create the conditions where trade union rights are fully respected. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that labour rights are protected by properly enforced state legislation. However, governments in developing countries are frequently wary of regulating the behaviour of TNCs for fear that they will lose production and investment to other countries. In this context sportswear TNCs can play an important role in ensuring that trade union rights are properly respected in their own supply chains, thereby reducing pressure on governments to erode state protection for these rights.

Date of original publication: May 2006