ACADEMICS STUDYING ADIDAS, REEBOK, and NIKE -Pakistan

Source Alephenic; See also Lonely Planet Guide - Pakistan; Dangerous places; Country Profile; Another Profile. 

FACTS

• References on Working Children in Pakistan

EXHIBIT A: The 1996 Life Magazine Story that Created a Revolution in the Soccer Industry. Excerpts...

SOURCE:  Schanberg, Sydney H. (1996) "On the playgrounds of America, Every Kid's Goal is to Score: In Pakistan, Where children stitch soccer balls for Six Cents an hour, the goals is to Survive." Photo by Marie Dorigny. Additional reporting by Jimmie Briggs. Life Magazine (June) pp. 38-48.  

    As our jeep approaches the roadside shed in Mahotra, a village in northern Pakistan, I can see a dozen children and men stitching hexagonal leather pieces into Nike soccer balls. Twelve-year-old Tariq squats in front, having come out of the dank interior for air. At his feet are several white balls with the distinctive Nike swoosh that will soon be finding their way to stores and playing fields in the United States.

    My guide, Sadiq, a gutsy Pakistani human rights worker, suggests I not announce my true profession and pose instead as an American interested in setting up shop in Pakistan to make soccer balls for export. It isn't honest - but it's safer. In recent months, Western journalists have been threatened and assaulted for reporting on child labor in this still-feudal society, particularly in those industries where legions of small children toil for 60 cents a day to make products for export to the U.S., and other developed countries. Sadiq himself had been beaten not long ago by toughs hired by soccer ball factory owners.

    Afzal Butt, the 19-year-old foreman whose brother owns this village factory, quickly warms to the smell of business. "I can get you as many as 100 stitchers if you need them," he says. "Of course, you'll have to pay off their peshgi  to claim them."

    He is referring to the money each of the workers owes his brother-$150 to $180-a debt incurred when they were bought from their parents, or later on from another owner, which bonds them to their master. By law, peshgi is banned in Pakistan, but the practice remains as common as the flies that swarm about the faces of workers.  The masters call it an advance against wages, but few workers are ever able to retire the debt, child workers least of all because they are paid even less than adults. 

This is the key to understanding the pervasiveness of child labor in the third world. Everywhere I went, first in Pakistan, then in India, I was told by the masters that children have agile hands and nimble fingers that make them specially gifted at certain tasks, such as weaving hand-loomed carpets and stitching soccer balls. But if children are so gifted why pay them less per soccer ball than adults?...

    With so many multinational companies - Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Mitre, Umbro, Brine - operating in Pakistan, it seemed a logical place to start. Which is how I cam to be in Mahotra.

    I tell Afral Butt I'll consider his offer of bonded workers, but first I need one of the Nike balls for my engineers to test. No problem, he says, selling me one for 200 rupees (roughly $6).  That's what it cost to make a quality soccer ball in Pakistan, in labor and materials, with a profit thrown in-just $6.  In the U.S., these balls sell for $30 to %50. More than half the nine million soccer balls imported into the U.S. each year come from Pakistan and all enter the country tariff-free.  The words Hand Made are printed clearly on every ball' not printed is any explanation of whose hands made them.

    For the rest of that day in Pakistan, I keep thinking: Someone actually offered to sell me 100 men and children for less than $200 apiece. In effect, I would have owned them. This thought haunted me throughout my trip and, later, when I talked to soccer industry officials.

    "It's an ages-old practice," says Nike spokeswoman Donna Gibbs, acknowledging that her company hasn't implemented its stated goal of eliminating child labor in the production of soccer balls. "And the process of change is going to take time. Too often, well-intentioned human rights groups can cause dramatic negative effects if they scare companies into stopping production and the kids are thrown out on the street." 

    Pakistan's own Human Rights Commission estimates that 11 million children under 14 work six days a week, nine to 10 hours a day, at grinding, illness-breeding jobs in work sheds, brick factories and sun-grilled fields.  They represent a quarter of the country's menial workforce, and their numbers keep rising.  Two years ago the median age of children entering the workforce was eight. Now it is seven. 

    Siakot, a bustling city of 3000,000 about 70 miles from Lahore, is the hub of the nation's soccer ball industry, producing about 35 million balls a year.  But the city's clean, well lit factories are not where the children are.  The factories are manned by adults who heat-press logos onto the leather, die-cut the six-sided pieces and make plastic-bag kits of 32 pieces plus an inflatable bladder. Loaded onto trucks, these kits are then farmed out to the villages, where the most crucial part-the stitching-is performed.

    Stitching sheds are visible in every hamlet, but at each stop the masters shout at the boys to run when they see foreigners with cameras. And the ragged, barefoot kids, fearing a beating from their masters, dash into the thickets and rice fields beyond. At one compound that resembles a nest of grungy one-car garages, with no lights or ventilation, the soccer masters run shed to shed, yelling at the children to strip off the rubber finger-wraps designed to protect them from vicious thread cuts and to flee for cover. But one child doesn't get out in time. As the masters glare and mutter, I ask him about his work.

    "I have a hearing problem, so I cannot speak well," the boy, Kafayat, says in Urdu.  His diction belies his story: his words are well-formed.  I eventually learn that he is eight, has never been to school and has been stitching in the same shed for three years. He is paid 30 cents for each synthetic leather ball he stitches. The balls carry the brand name Cobra and are stamped FIFA Approved. (FIFA is the international soccer federation.)

    At another emptied shed, where Adidas balls are being stitched, we are suddenly surrounded by shouting men. One protests that an American TV broadcast last year hurt business. Another gang of soccer masters comes up the dusty street, adding to the atmosphere of menace. Their focus is our unflinching guide. "I was in the group that beat you up when you brought foreign journalists around here last year," one growls at Sadiq. We decide to retreat, driving hurriedly out of the village, followed by two men on a motorcycle. They wear white Western-style shirts and sunglasses, trademarks of the Pakistani police, who are routinely bribed by the soccer masters. They speed past us into Sumbrial, another of Sialkot's stitching satellites.

    The soccer ball bush-telegraph system has done its work. The sheds in Sumbrial are empty of children. A few men look after mounds of finished balls. A Toyota pickup truck from one of the factories is collecting giant nylon drawstring bags, 50 balls to a bag. In one shed, Adidas balls are heaped at the back under a sign that reads" "SUBLIME stitching centre. Stitchers under 16 age not allowed." 

    Sublime is a Sialkot factory that Adidas, the biggest soccer ball manufacture in Pakistan, has subcontracted with to produce its balls. Amin Javed, chairman of Sublime, cannot be reached for comment, but in the past he has said of child labor: "It is done behind our face... I have no authority to [order] in he villages that the children should not work." 

    Adidas deals with Sublime through an agent, the Japanese sporting goods company Molten. "We do not own any factories," says John Fread, an Adidas spokesman. "We license our ballmaking through Molten. They in turn do the actual factory-sourcing and production. [It's] all subcontracted out." ("Out: is a popular word with sporting goods companies-as in "subcontracting out," "out-sourcing," even "out-stitching." Translation: "Somebody else hires the children, not us.")

    Fread, who says he and other company executives have seen child labor in Pakistan, echoes a common soccer industry refrain: "Pakistan has a very different culture. We can't just sit back and say whether it's right or wrong."

    Industry officials say they have hired a consultant and are working with the Soccer Industry Council of America to address the problem. The effort is still in the embryonic phase, and no money has been committed to any reform measures, such as the creation of schools. But money is available: Nike spends $280 million a year on advertising, not including the millions it pays athletes who endorse it s products... 

I think my understanding of child labor and its deep roots is about as clear as that of most American corporations. I observed it up close when I was posted in India for three years in the 1970s as a correspondent for The New York Times. What I learned then, and again now, was that to accept the system as immutable is to make it immutable. Boycotts and trade embargoes may not be a solution (though often they have a way of getting the attention of intransigent governments), but doing nothing or next to nothing is an antisolution.

    "We used to just say it was a poverty problem," says Rolfe Carriere, UNICEF's representative in Bangladesh. "Our own resignation has accommodated the persistence of child labor for a long time."

    One antidote to child labor is education. The most effective human rights organization in Pakistan, the Bonded Labor Liberation Front (BLLF), has opened 240 free primary schools for poor children, among them many of the 30,000 bonded workers the group has freed over the past eight years. Its success has made it a hated target of the government, which harasses its workers and files false criminal charges against them. Citing the threat of terrorism, police even raided BLLF's offices with weapons drawn, carrying off everything but the desks and chairs. 

    At one BLLF school school northwest of Lahore, 67 students are learning reading and geography, as well as receiving instruction in self-reliance...A focus on primary education, international studies have found, is the common ingredient in the success of Asia's fastest-growing economies, such as South Korea's. In short, schools are good business.

    Why, then, aren't Western corporations that earn their profits in poor countries talking about schools? Possible because it might cost them some money.  Back home, the same multinationals demonstrate their commitment to the communities where they have their headquarters and factories by spending money to upgrade schools and ghetto housing. But with a handful of exceptions, such as Levi Strauss and Gillette, these companies have no budgets for their "out-sourced" communities in the third world...

    ... four-year-olds stitching soccer balls with needles longer than their fingers....trying to do good enough work to avoid the masters' blows. All this takes place against a backdrop of rising affluence enjoyed by the privileged classes-lavish villas with high walls topped by iron spies and satellite dishes on the roofs, luxury cars driven by liveried chauffeurs...

EXHIBIT B: What was Nike's Response to the Life Magazine Story?

TIME LINE

• 1995 - Nike begins manufacture of Soccer balls in Pakistan (Nikebiz). 
  • "On one level, the system of providing soccer ball panels for home stitching made good sense. It allowed workers with other obligations, including rearing children, running a home, and tending to crops and livestock, the opportunity to earn cash income. The industry had functioned this way for decades."
• 1995 - Pakistan -- murdered anti-child labour activist (#272-1995 Oct p4) - This is rug industry, but gives idea of the climate. 
• May. 28, 1996. Knight Ridder, Tribune. (press here) Our purchases keep children in chains By Joel D.
  Joseph/Knight-Ridder/Tribune Tuesday, May 28, 1996- Nike is not only allegedly exploiting women workers in Vietnam, Indonesia and China. Nike products has been found to be made by child labor in Pakistan. 
• According to Nike, "In April 1996, he proposed a plan to begin to construct a series of stitching centers to ring the Sialkot district. In effect, he proposed bringing stitchers out of the home, but not out of the village. Nike managers agreed, and pledged to support the new investment by paying higher prices for soccer balls." (Nikebiz).
• June, 1996. Life Magazine published a shattering article replete with photos of Pakistani children stitching soccer balls for Nike, Adidas AG and other companies.... By May 1996 [knowing in advance that Life Magazine would indeed publish the story with the above photo], Nike was developing a plan with its Pakistani subcontractor to centralize stitching and eliminate the child labor, said Dusty Kidd, manager of Nike's labor practices department (source Oregonian - press here). 
• 1996- Factory: Production is centered at various hand-stitching centers and outsourced to private homes in Sialkot, Pakistan Produces: Soccer Balls ---Contractors: Nike, Adidas, Challenge, with other soccer ball retailers and manufacturers "In 1996, the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) found that the Sialkot-based Pakistani soccer ball stitching industry—which produces 30 million soccer balls a year for companies that include Nike, Adidas, Challenge, and others—employed about 7,000 children" (Source and more). 
• August 1996, Nike Corporation joined the Apparel Industry Partnership, a coalition of companies and labor and human rights groups assembled by the Clinton administration, to draft an industry-wide code of conduct.
• September 9, 1996 Remarks to the Biennial Child Labor Coalition Conference Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich Biennial Child Labor Coalition Conference September 9, 1996
• In 1997, Julie Foudy (soccer star) was cited with the FIFA Fair Play Award for her work against child labor. She received the award at the men's World Cup Draw last December in Marseilles, France. ESPN - 4 May, 2000 article.
• January 28, 1997 - Teens' Efforts Give Soccer Balls the Boot  By LUCILLE RENWICK, Times Staff Writer Activism: Students persuade LAUSD to stop buying gear from countries that use child labor. NORTH HILLS--What began as a class project on international law has transformed two dozen Monroe High School students into outspoken soldiers in the growing war against child labor around the world. The teenagers, who attend the school's law and government magnet, took their research to the Los Angeles Board of Education, persuading trustees to halt the purchase of soccer balls from Pakistan and other countries believed to be using child workers... The first was the story of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani who had been sold into bondage as a child to work as a carpet weaver. He escaped six years later and was an outspoken voice against child labor
  until he was assassinated in 1995 at age 13. (Source and more of this story).
• February, 1997 - HIDDEN CHILD LABOR IN SOCCER BALLS PLANTS CONTRACTED BY NIKE AND REEBOK? (Report of Campaign for labor rights 1.8.97) "In February 1997 representatives of the soccer ball industry signed a Partnership Agreement with UNICEF and the International Labor Organization to address the issue of child labor in the factories of South Asia where soccer balls are sewn. But one- third of the way into the 18 month transition period, Dan McCurry of FoulBall USA reports after a three-month trip to India and Pakistan that little progress has been made."
• February 14, 1997 - ILO Unites With Industry Groups  To Combat Child Labor in Pakistan U.S. Labor Department Provides Funds  Under Appropriation Sponsored by Sen. Harkin --Atlanta - The International Labor Organization today formed a partnership with the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) and UNICEF with the goal of eliminating child labor in the soccer ball industry in Sialkot, Pakistan, during the next 18 months (Source and more).. 
• May 13, 1998 "Nike Pledges to End Child Labor and Increase Safety" New York Times By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. - WASHINGTON -- Bowing to pressure from critics who have tried to turn its famous shoe brand into a synonym for exploitation, Nike Inc. on Tuesday promised to root out underage workers and require overseas manufacturers of its wares to meet strict U.S. health and safety standards [Global Exchange].
• TODAY NIKE says "Today, there are eight Saga stitching centers in the Sialkot district. They employ several thousand stitchers. The average age is 22, and the youngest stitcher is 18. Each of these centers has free lunch;
  a free medical clinic (available to the stitcher and his or her immediate family); a fair price shop to ensure workers have access to reasonably-priced commodities; day-care and kindergarten for children; and a recreation center. One center is dedicated solely to women, in a country where Islamic tradition does not allow men and women to share a workplace (Nikebiz).

HOWEVER

• When you find Child Labor... On March 14, 1999, a PricewaterhouseCoopers monitoring team walked into a factory in South Asia, and began the process of monitoring its labor practices against a set of standards, the Nike Code of Conduct.             They found child labor.            We won't tell you which country, or which factory. We continue to do business there. We believe it is our obligation to do so. But other buyers might run when they read this. And that would cost legal age workers their jobs. The factory in question produces a particular kind of apparel for half the labels hanging from your dorm closet hooks (Nikebiz). 
• False Alarm NIKE ALERTS ILO AND SOCCER GOVERNING BODIES REGARDING COUNTERFEIT SOCCER BALLS BEARING ITS TRADEMARK  Soccer balls recovered by Nike may have been produced with child labor -- August 26, 1999-Beaverton, Oregon. - Nike has notified the International Labor Organization (ILO) today that it has recovered a small number of counterfeit GEO soccer balls bearing its trademarks believed to have been produced by an unauthorized factory in Sialkot, Pakistan, perhaps using children (Nikebiz; See Press release Nike). 
• Listen Phil Knight say "Nike Child Labor was Never a Problem"  (207KB) 

EXHIBIT C: FOLLOW UP STORIES

• "Miles away [from Eric Cantona's Soccer Manchester United Matches] is little Sonia, 11 year old, who stitches soccer balls. The balls in the photograph bear Eric Cantona’s picture and signature, along with the legend `Eric the King’. She lives in a village near Julundhar in northern India. Sonia is blind—she lost her eyes at the age of seven, "It went completely dark in front of my eyes and I was scared," says she. "I didn’t know what was happening", she continues. But Sonia has learnt to stitch soccer balls by touch alone: her aunt Satya matches up the panels ad passes them to her niece. The two of them are the main breadwinners for the extended family since Sonia’s mother fell ill. Sonia has resigned to this fate, "There’s no fun in it but I have no choice," says she in defeated tone. Sonia earns a `princely’ 7 rupees (27 cents) for each of the two balls she stitches in a day—not even enough to buy a litre of milk"  ("The King and I." New Internationalist, July 1997; See Global March which also includes more photos of Life Magazine article) 
• The Guardian April 25th 2001 Rory McCarthy in Sialkot, Pakistan  Football Ban Sends Child Workers Into Worse Jobs Sounds like Nike propaganda? read between the lines
  • Zarina Bhati looks round her damp, half-built home as she nurses the baby on her lap. The unfinished walls and the ageing Sony stereo were paid for by child labour.
    
    For eight years Mrs Bhati and her sons stitched footballs at home, earning enough to move out of their small rented house in Sialkot, close to Pakistan's border with India.
    
    "It was always a big dream to buy a house. I wanted to put cement on the walls and whitewash them," she said. "Now I doubt it will ever happen. There is no work."
    
    Under pressure from public opinion, the world's big football makers - the likes of Nike and Reebok - agreed four years ago with their contractors in Sialkot's vast football-stitching industry to ban work by children under 14.  Production in this grey, featureless town which makes 80% of the world's footballs, was moved from homes like the Bhatis' to larger, well monitored stitching centres; child labour all but disappeared in Sialkot football-making.
    
    "I consider it a blessing," said Nasir Dogar at the UN's International Labour Organisation office in Sialkot. "It was successful and now it is a model for other countries."
    
    But some perplexing implications are emerging. "It was very easy for women to stitch footballs in the household, now many of them have lost their work because they cannot leave their homes," said Sajid Kazmi of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad. "And if children cannot work in the football industry they will shift to more hazardous industries." ... "This approach cannot succeed. We should consider what life a child will have if they are withdrawn from child labour," said Khalid Khalil, project co-ordinator at
    Sahe, a private organisation promoting education in Sialkot. "Quality education is the best way to prevent child labour." ...

EXHIBIT D: LINKS 

• TED Case Studies NIKE: Nike Shoes and Child Labor in Pakistan - partially completed report with some demographics on child labor and Pakistan
• HIDDEN CHILD LABOR IN SOCCER BALLS PLANTS CONTRACTED BY NIKE AND
  REEBOK? (Report of Campaign for labor rights 1.8.97) "In February 1997 representatives of the soccer ball industry signed a Partnership Agreement with UNICEF and the International Labor Organization to address the issue of child labor in the factories of South Asia where soccer balls are sewn. But one- third of the way into the 18 month transition period, Dan McCurry of FoulBall USA reports after a three-month trip to India and Pakistan that little progress has been made."
• Global March site on child labor issues.
• References (very comprehensive) on working children in Pakistan
• "The Human Lives Behind the Label." Rethinking Schools, Vol. 11 #4, 1997.   "Nike knew exactly what it was doing" locating its soccer ball factories in Pakistan.
  

ARTICLES

November, 1997- "Monitors Scan Pakistan for child-labor soccer balls." (Nando Times) NEW YORK (November 12, 1997 3:41 p.m. EST http://www.nando.net) -- Fifteen monitors will begin crisscrossing a region of Pakistan next week to ensure children aren't making soccer balls anymore, a coalition of sporting goods makers and child advocacy groups said... Up to 10,000 Pakistani children have been reported stitching balls in home and small shops, receiving little pay for working up to 10 hours a day. Seventy-five percent of the world's $1 billion soccer ball industry is in Pakistan, mostly in Sialkot.

REEBOK

On April 16th, 1995, the shotgun slaying of a 12-year old boy in a remote Pakistani village drew international
headlines. The boy, Iqbal Masih had, just a year earlier, been the youngest recipient of the international Reebok
Human Rights Youth in Action Award. Unfortunately, Iqbal’s story as a child laborer is not uncommon in today’s
Pakistan (The Tragedy of Child Labor, an edited version of the article originally published in the Summer 1996 issue of Working People). 

Actually, it is Nike and Reebok's contractors who have set up those centers. Reebok contracts for its soccer ball production with Moltex, and Nike with Saga. In fairness, while both Nike and Reebok have put considerable sums into make the stitching centers a reality, neither company is the major customer of its contractor and thus both companies have limited say in the operations of their contractors.

To its credit, Reebok readily granted access to its Moltex-managed center, to which McCurry made both announced and surprise visits. What McCurry saw at Moltex was not entirely reassuring: a potential for child-made balls from outside the factory to be shipped along with adult-made balls from within the factory -- a practice known as "mixing." When McCurry raised his concerns to Reebok officials, they appeared to take the findings seriously and promised to investigate and then  writing, he is awaiting the Reebok reply (HIDDEN CHILD LABOR IN SOCCER BALLS PLANTS CONTRACTED BY NIKE AND REEBOK? Report of Campaign for labor rights 1.8.97).