The desecration of Olympic values

If hypocrisy and exploitation were a sport, the sportswear industry would win a gold medal

The Olympics are only a fortnight away, and the world's intelligence services are taut and hyper-tense. An al-Qa'ida attack on Athens is "extremely likely", they believe. They are right to worry - but tens of thousands of people have already been tyrannised for the Olympics. No government or intelligence service is going to protect them.

The Olympics are only a fortnight away, and the world's intelligence services are taut and hyper-tense. An al-Qa'ida attack on Athens is "extremely likely", they believe. They are right to worry - but tens of thousands of people have already been tyrannised for the Olympics. No government or intelligence service is going to protect them.

Phan is a 22-year-old Thai woman who sews Olympic sportswear sold under the Puma brand. She arrives at work at 8am; during the peak season, she is allowed to go home at 2 or 3am the next day to catch a few hours of sleep before rushing back to work. This goes on for weeks on end without a day off. But don't fret - she gets an hour-long break at noon, and half an hour at 5pm. She manages to squeeze visits to the toilet into those breaks. "Sometimes we want to rest," she explains, "but our employer forces us to work." In a bad month, she has 50 pence left for the entire four-week period to spend on herself after bare subsistence.

But isn't this issue a bit 1999? Haven't sweatshops been dealt with? We've all heard endless promises of corporate responsibility. And don't most sports shops now have nice reassuring signs telling us that they don't exploit workers?

Oxfam International had the smart idea of sending researchers to the factories which are toiling to supply the Olympic sportswear giants Fila, Kappa, Umbro, Puma, Lotto, Mizuno and Asics. This summer's Olympic logo, "Celebrate Humanity", quickly began to sound like a cruel joke.

Despite all the shiny corporate promises, Oxfam found there has been "very limited" impact on the ground for workers. "The ethical commitments made by purchasing companies are contradicted by their aggressive purchasing practices," they explain. Some simply "adopt comprehensive codes of labour practices in principle but do little to put them into practice ... Some companies have not demonstrated any effective implementation of their codes in the workplace. Evidence reveals that some factory managers simply falsify the evidence during social audits and carry on with business as usual once the inspectors have left."

We can't rely on codes of conduct to mop up this sweat. However much slick PR teams preach about the virtues of their corporation, the industry continues to demand extremely low-wage, temporary workers who must churn out products at an extraordinary rate. The business model followed by the industry guarantees a denial of workers' rights.

So it's big business as usual, and the sweatshop workers of the world will be paying for our shiny Olympic-logoed clothes this summer. At a typical Bulgarian factory, Oxfam found workers suffering from eye damage, varicose veins, back pain and repetitive strain injuries. The workforce may be "flexible", but it turns out their wrists and backs are not. And the health dangers are compounded when factories force the injured to carry on working: in Cambodia, they found factories punishing workers if they took sick leave.

Even if sweatshops were abolished tomorrow, the generation staffing them today may never physically recover. "Corporate profits are generated at the expense of the dignity, health and safety of vulnerable men and women," the report concludes.

This level of corporate abuse does not happen naturally. It is only possible if trade unionists - ordinary people who want to organise to make their factories and wages less unbearable - are suppressed or intimidated. Oxfam discovered that unions were "effectively outlawed" in many of the Olympic sportswear factories they visited. This is an artificial, contrived situation. It is based on a political decision to allow a small number of rich people to organise in corporations yet to forbid the massive number of poor people they employ to organise even in small democratic unions.

"Many of the workers we interviewed," Oxfam explains, "expressed their belief that trade-union representation would give them the bargaining power necessary to change the unhealthy and undignified working conditions in their factories." Their will is being deliberately suppressed.

But surely the organisers of a noble enterprise like the Olympic Games would be appalled to discover they were actively supporting these abuses? The Olympic Charter, after all, says it "seeks to create a way of life based on the joy found in effort, the educational value of a good example, and respect for universal ethical principles."

A coalition, including the Clean Clothes Campaign and Global Unions, pointed out to the International Olympic Committee that the IOC's decision to allow its logo to be used on sweat-drenched clothes blatantly contradicts their own charter. They suggested the Olympic project should only lend its brand to corporations which abide by the International Labour Organisation standards, including a living wage.

The response? After an embarrassed silence, their concerns were "crudely dismissed" by the IOC, the campaigners explain. A meeting was suggested, but then cancelled. Junya Yimprasert from the Thai Labour Campaign explains: "If hypocrisy and exploitation were an Olympic sport, the sportswear industry would win a medal. The industry is sacrificing human rights. Should the race to outfit athletes mean a race to the bottom for these workers?" (You can support Yimprasert and people like him at www.fairolympics.org).

It is unfortunate that the movement against sweatshops is usually led by anti-capitalists. This allows defenders of sweated labour to imply this is a fight between capitalism and some non-alternative like anarchism or communism. In fact, it is a battle between a sweat-drenched capitalism that suppresses unions and bullies democratic governments, and a democratic capitalism that respects them.

Sweatshops don't happen by chance. They are the direct result of political choices. At the moment, major international institutions - like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation - choose to impose on the developing world a particularly extreme form of capitalism, with shrunken states and crippled unions. This guarantees that sweat-shops will proliferate; indeed, some neo-liberals welcome them as a "necessary stage of development".

The IOC - supposedly champions of fair competition and the equality of nations - were in a perfect position to remind the world that another capitalism is possible. They could have backed a capitalism twinned to strong unions and democratic rights, by demanding that all factories making Olympic goods allow workers to organise. This would have emboldened the movements across the developing world for healthier, social-democratic capitalism.

Instead, the organisers of the Olympics have chosen the cheap, worker-abusing route. Along the way, they have casually desecrated the values of the Olympic movement.

j.hari@independent.co.uk