Labour Behind The Label

The Global Union representing workers in the garment industry, the ITGLWF have released a report on working conditions in Asian sportswear supply chains.

What is life really like for workers making sportswear and merchandise for the London 2012 Olympics? Could you face the dilemmas and pressures of work in a factory, trying to make ends meet and provide for your children?

Step Into Her Trainers is a teaching pack aimed at Fashion & Textiles related courses, Citizenship, and Geography, at KS4, A-level and BTEC. This pack has been produced for the Playfair 2012 campaign, calling for better conditions for workers in sportswear and merchandise factories worldwide in the lead up to the Olympics in London 2012.

Detailed research undertaken inside China by Playfair 08 – represented in the UK by the TUC and Labour Behind the Label - into working conditions in four factories making 2008 Olympic bags, headgear, stationery and other products reveals that factory owners are falsifying employment records, and forcing workers to lie about their wages and conditions.

The world's Football Associations will make over £200m from sponsorship and licensing arrangements this year, while their sponsors are expecting hundreds of millions of pounds in additional revenue from World Cup goods.

Meanwhile, the people stitching the footballs, sewing the shirts and glueing the boots that will earn this money are working late into the night, six or seven days a week, for poverty wages. Those that attempt to form trade unions to try to improve their working conditions are persecuted and often lose their jobs.  This report was produced in 2005 by Labour Behind the Label and the TUC.

This report asks fundamental questions about the global sportswear industry – questions that go to the heart of debates on poverty, workers’ rights, trade, and globalisation.

‘Olympism’, in the words of the Olympic Charter, ‘seeks to create a way of life based on … respect for universal fundamental ethical principles.’ This report from the Playfair 2004 Campaign shows that the business practices of major sportswear companies violate both the spirit and the letter of the Charter.