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On July 10, 2008, following the Ethical Trading Forum in Vancouver at which transparency and Olympic licensing was debated with companies, trade unions, NGOs and Olympic organizers, Nike publicly released the full list of factories that produced its products for the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
As the clock ticks down to the Beijing Olympics, international sportswear companies are amassing huge profits and arranging multi-million dollar sponsorship deals with the Games, Olympic athletes and national teams.
Meanwhile, workers producing their goods are still living in poverty. In a new report, “Clearing the Hurdles: Steps to improving working conditions in the global sportswear industry”, Play Fair 2008 calls upon brands, manufacturers, and multi-stakeholder initiatives to overcome four major hurdles to make real, measurable progress on wages and working conditions in the global sportswear industry.
The largest German and European discounter, Aldi, is selling its clothing bargains at a high price: in its study, the SÜDWIND Institute provides evidence of unprecedented violations of labour laws in Chinese and Indonesian factories which supply Aldi.
A new report released by Play Fair 2008 looks at some of the root issues underlying child labour in China, and focuses on the reasons why so many school-going children end up working in factories or on farms.
On July 31, the Beijing Organizing Committee of the 2008 Olympic Games (BOCOG) announced the results of its investigation into Play Fair's findings of child labour and gross violations of adult workers' rights in certain factories producing licensed goods for the 2008 Olympics. While BOCOG confirmed some of Play Fair's findings, it neglected others and failed to commit to acting positively to improve workers' conditions, choosing instead to cut and run from factories implicated in Play Fair's original report.
This Marketplace report focuses on the exploitive conditions under which toys are made, with a particular focus on China. It presents a number of interviews with people who have done research into the labour that goes into making toys as well as with the former president of Irwing Toys. The video briefly looks at how companies like Mattel and Disney fit into the picture and how the rise of sweatshops is related to globalization trends. This report on toys is aimed at appealing to parents shopping for gifts during the holiday season
A new report released today by the Play Fair 2008 Campaign exposes gross violations of workers’ rights by several Chinese factories supplying goods under license for the Beijing Olympics, including employment of children, adults being paid half the legal minimum wage, and employees forced to work 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
Coming ten months after the demise of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA), the Asia-Latina Women's Exchange was designed to give participants an opportunity to share what the end of the import quota system has meant for workers and communities in Thailand, China/Hong Kong, Cambodia, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and the Dominican Republic and to discuss strategies for better defending workers' rights in a post-quota industry.
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