This Wimbledon spare a thought for the unfortunate sweatshop labourers who make most of the outfits

international | consumer issues | other press

Tuesday July 01, 2008 09:39

by wageslave

Before you buy that lovely NIKE Rafael Nadal tennis outfit for your kid....

The sun is shining and the athletic and graceful elite of the tennis world
battle it out for glory on the grass of Wimbledon. Perfect role models for your kids
it seems; hard working, dedicated, healthy, polite (mostly).
But draw the line at letting your kids emulate what they are wearing.

Rafael Nadal. Nice fellow, but terrible dress sense!!

Their apparel is produced in many cases under appalling sweatshop conditions in places like Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The lack of environmental costs, ridiculous working hours, use of child labour and weak environmental laws help to generate huge corporate profits whilst riding roughshod over all notions of moral behaviour. This is highlighted in a timely article by Jeffery St. Clair over at counterpunch. A must read for all tennis fans. Suddenly that elegant tennis outfit seems far less attractive!!.

Some Quotes from article:

*"Most of the workers here are young and upwards of 80 percent are female. The average age of the Honduran sweatshop laborer is about fifteen, though some may be as young as ten. Workdays may stretch to fourteen hours, six days a week, in oppressive heat. Laborers are allowed only two tightly monitored breaks for water and bathroom use. And many days the work doesn’t end at the factory. To meet production quotas, some workers lug their sewing home, where the entire family toils away late into the night.

Questions of health benefits, worker compensation, pensions and overtime pay simply have no relevance here. The issues facing workers inside these squalid factories are much more basic. It’s about day-to-day survival, enduring the wrath of abusive managers, working through illness, injury, and depression. And it’s about growing old very fast."
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*"After Korean workers won labor rights in the mid-1980s, Nike picked up its bags and moved once again, this time to Indonesia and China. In the mid-1990s Nike began to shift operations to an even more pliant labor market: Vietnam.

In Vietnam, Nike employs more than 25,000 workers who produce nearly a million pairs of shoes each year. The conditions are grim. Thuyen Nguyen of Vietnam Labor Watch, a New York-based group, says that Nike workers are subject to intense verbal, physical, and sexual abuse. In one factory outside Ho Chi Minh City, nearly sixty female workers were forced to run laps around the factory as punishment for not wearing the proper shoes. A dozen of the women fainted in the oppressive heat and had to be hospitalized. In another instance, twelve female workers were viciously beaten on the head with a shoe by plant supervisors. As discipline for talking on the factory floor, workers have had their mouths sealed with duct tape. “Nike is clearly not controlling its contractors,” Thuyen said. “And the company has known that for a long time.” "
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*"There’s a simple reason companies like Nike have continued to turn a blind eye to these abuses: skyrocketing corporate profits. In Vietnam, it costs Nike only $1.50 to manufacture a pair of basketball shoes that can be sold for $150 in the US. The production costs are low largely because the average pay of a Nike worker in Vietnam is only $42 a month or about $500 a year. Compare this tiny sum to the $20 million a year Nike lavished on Michael Jordon to pitch its basketball shoes, shorts, and hats. Jordan’s salary amounts to nearly twice the annual payroll of the entire workforce of Nike contractors in Vietnam. The disparity with Nike CEO Phil Knight’s annual take is even more grotesque. Knight, who owns 100 million shares of Nike stock, pulls in roughly $80 million in dividend payments each fiscal quarter. At that pace, a Vietnamese worker would need to toil for nearly 4,000 years to equal Knight’s annual income. "
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Full Article Here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair06282008.html

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This Wimbledon spare a thought for the unfortunate sweatshop labourers who make most of the outfits