| Subscribe to our free newsletter |
 |
| Stay up to date with changes to our website, news about articles in forthcoming issues of Amandla!, news about our Discussion Forums and Seminars and much more ... click here to subscribe |
| Amandla! Office: 129 Rochester Road, Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa Postal Address: P.O. Box 13349, Mowbray, 7706, Cape Town Telephone: +27 (0)21 4472525 Fax: +27(0) 866378096 |
|
|
| Amandla! is published by |
| Alternative Information & Development Centre (AIDC) a progressive activist think tank that focuses on the multi-dimensional crisis. AIDC sees the necessity of integrating both the ecological and economic dimensions of the crisis into its programmes. It does this from the perspective of developing alternatives that ensure planetary sustainability and social, economic and environmental justice. |
| Soccer ball makers in poverty |
|
by James Rupert June 11, 2010 DELHI: Asian workers who stitch nearly all the world's soccer balls have seen little improvement in lives dominated by poverty, a report said days before the start of the World Cup tonight. Thirteen years ago companies such as adidas and Nike joined labour and development organisations to end the use of an estimated 7000 children to stitch soccer balls. However, ''child labour continues to exist'' in the three main ball-making countries - Pakistan, China and India - the report by the International Labour Rights Forum said. In those countries, and Thailand, the fourth major soccer ball producer, many adult workers were paid too little to support their families. Some children still stitched balls at home; others had migrated to new work, the report said. ''The international campaign of the 1990s removed bonded child labour from our soccer ball industry but these children moved to auto workshops, brick kilns and the like,'' said Arshed Makhdoom Sabir, the president of Ours Pakistan, a non-profit, development organisation in Sialkot, Pakistan. Sialkot was the hub of an industry that made about 75 per cent of the world's hand-sewn soccer balls in the 1990s, and still made most high-quality balls, the report said. The forum surveyed 218 workers for Sialkot companies that export balls and other products to sporting goods companies including Nike and adidas, the two largest in the world. While suppliers for the two big companies provided better conditions, more than half Sialkot's soccer-ball stitchers reported that pay in 2009 was below Pakistan's monthly minimum wage of $US70, its report said. For sewing together the 32 polyurethane outer panels of a soccer ball that sells for $US50 in the US, a Sialkot worker was paid as little as US59¢, ''so obviously international companies can make bigger profits in Pakistan'', Mr Sabir said. Haris Gazdar, an economist at the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi, Pakistan, said by 2008 nearly 83 per cent of male workers, and 93 per cent of employed women worked in the informal economy, some as ball stitchers, beyond the effective reach of minimum-wage laws. *Bloomberg* http://www.smh.com.au/world/soccer-ball-makers-in-poverty-20100610-y0ls.html
|
