Olympics sponsors are bad employers
In March 2004 Oxfams, Global Unions, and the Clean Clothes Campaign launched a campaign entitled ‘Play Fair at the Olympics’. In response, sports brands are considering whether to co-operate on a ‘programme of work’ aimed at correcting the injustices in the industry.

Research conducted in July 2004 shows that the PT Tae Hwa Indonesia sportswear factory pays inadequate wages, enforces high levels of overtime, imposes impossible work targets, denies trade union rights, and permits sexual harassment and verbal abuse. The company in Tangerang, West Java, employs 5,250 workers making sports shoes for companies including FILA, which fills 70 to 90 percent of Tae Hwa orders.

The research shows that the standard day wage is Rp.26,705 (US$2.93), too low for workers to live on. Workers have to work for an hour to earn enough to buy a kilo of rice, for two hours to buy a kilo of eggs, and for ten hours to buy a kilo of beef. This forces workers to work overtime, which is usually compulsory anyway.

The reports’ authors stress that Tae Hwa and FILA are not unusual in their treatment of workers, other companies are equally bad, and the abuse throughout the sportswear industry needs to be addressed and publicised.

Workers demand better labour conditions
Earlier this year 700 workers at Shamrock resigned from the yellow union SPSI, transferring to the Independent Workers Union Medan (SBMI), which staged a strike in March 2004 demanding better wages, increasing the legal minimum wage, and for wages to be paid promptly.

On 9 August 800 workers at PT Shamrock in Medan, which manufactures rubber gloves, went on strike to protest the sacking of 14 workers who took part in the three-day stoppage in March. Police merely looked on as company thugs assaulted the strikers, smashing their picket line outside the factory.

On 8 September more than 200 police dispersed a demonstration by the 800 strikers, of who about 70 percent were women.

World Socialist Web Site, 18 September 2004