LABOUR-PAKISTAN: Footballs Still Produced by Child Labour

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 25 1999 (IPS) - Football manufacturers in Pakistan continued to use poorly-paid child labour despite an International Labour Organisation (ILO) programme designed to eliminate the practise, a new study revealed Thursday.

The study, released by the Washington-based International Labour Rights Fund and based on an investigation by the Lahore- based Association of Networks for Community Empowerment (ANCE), found that, even a year after ILO monitoring began, many factories in Sialkot, Pakistan, still used child labourers.

Other firms, including those based just outside Sialkot, were employing who no longer worked at ILO-monitored centres, the report declared.

“We are deeply concerned that soccer (football) ball manufacturers and retailers are using their participation in the programme to claim that their product is ‘child labour free’ without actually taking sufficient steps to remove children from the production process,” the report contends.

According to ANCE investigators, eight out of 23 centres investigated used children to hand-stitch footballs.

Even when children were not present, the report adds, adult workers at the sites “informed the researchers that…during peak season, it was more likely that children would be brought into the centres, or that excess production would be ‘outsourced’ to children in homes.”

The report also found flaws in the ILO’s efforts since late 1997 to monitor Sialkot’s football-stitching industry by hiring local experts to monitor labour conditions.

“The system of deploying ILO monitors has unwittingly created an ‘early warning’ system for employers,” the report argues. “Interviewees told researchers that employers are often ‘tipped off’ when the monitor is en route to the stitching centre, and are able to hide child workers.”

The ILO programme was forged by a Feburary 1997 agreement signed in Atlanta with Pakistani football manufacturers, after protests against child labour had embarrassed the industry.

Under the agreement, 36 manufacturers – that produce footballs for major retailers like Nike and Reebok – pledged to submit information about their labour practises in Pakistan, where about three-quarters of the world’s footballs are stitched, and to pay dues for monitoring the industry and providing schooling for Sialkot’s children.

The International Labour Rights Foundation, however, said only 16 of the 36 manufacturers had met those conditions, while the other 20, in effect, had been “free riders benefiting from the positive publicity around the ILO programme”.

The ILO, in an assessment of the programme released in November, said that the 36 firms accounted for only half of the manufacturers in Sialkot. Eighteen of those firms had shifted production to 379 ILO-monitored production centres where 15 ILO monitors made surprise visits to ensure that child labour is prohibited.

The ILO also reported that some 5,400 children were being shifted from low-paid work stitching footballs – sometimes for as little as 35 cents per ball – to attending education centres paid for by the programme. Some of the children worked part-time stitching footballs at home even as they begin their studies.

The ILO report and the ANCE the homes and some stitching centres were not being monitored, including ones based in districts neighbouring Sialkot.

Also, both reports said that many child workers had been shifted from football production to the hazardous industry of manufacturing surgical equipment.

“The programme has been a failure,” argues Jeff Ballinger, head of Press for Change, a New Jersey-based labour rights group. “Now some companies are thinking of using the campaign as a model for eliminating child labour in other countries – even though the model hasn’t worked!”

Ballinger said that the World Federation of Sporting Good Industries, which supported the Atlanta agreement, intended to use the Sialkot programme as a model so that it could resist any tougher efforts to police the use of child labour in the manufacture of sporting goods.

The Sialkot programme was developed only after the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA) adopted a labour code in September 1996 which banned child labour and required a certification of fair labour practises for all footballs used in tournament play.

The certification system is now in place although, according to the ANCE research, many of the balls manufactured, and labelled as child labour-free, still used children for hand-stitching.

Despite that problem, few activist groups until now have questioned the Sialkot programme.

Ballinger said that the ‘Foul Ball’ Campaign, a U.S.-based effort to ban child labour in Pakistani football production, has been dormant in recent months as the issue has receded from public attention.