Newsletter of the Clean Clothes Campaign

Number 26 - March 2009

Download this newsletter

Editorial

The Beijing Olympics came to a close in August, but some of the organisations involved in Play Fair 2008 already have their sights on 2010 and 2012. The Olympic organisations and the sportswear industry still have a lot of work to do to ensure respect for workers’ rights, but the Clean Clothes Campaign is encouraged by the plan to form a joint working group with representatives of sportswear brands, trade unions and NGOs to consider steps to promote trade unionism and collective bargaining, as well as improve wages, across the entire sector.

One of the principal demands of the Play Fair campaign was to eliminate the use of precarious employment in sportswear supply chains. As we reported in Clearing the Hurdles: Steps to Improving Wages and Working Conditions in the Global Sportswear Industry, unions and labour rights organisations across the globe have observed an alarming increase in the use of successive short-term contracts and third-party employment contract agencies. Short-term contracts profoundly undermine the security of workers and are often used to deny them basic protections and benefits while undercutting their organising efforts.

Play Fair 2008 challenged the sportswear industry’s addiction to flexibility and insisted that freedom of association and protection from discrimination are more likely to be realised through the development of long-term, stable contracts with suppliers.

Meanwhile, the Clean Clothes Campaign and Oxfam Australia have been reinforcing that same point in a call for sector-wide solutions in Indonesia’s garment and sportswear industry.

Indonesia is the CCC’s leading source of urgent appeals for solidarity support, so we teamed up with Oxfam Australia, unions and labour rights groups in Indonesia to identify concrete solutions to address pervasive labour rights violations.

As is the case elsewhere in the garment industry, the trend toward short-term contract labour was revealed as one of the fundamental issues facing Indonesian workers, who commonly find themselves in factories where 50% or more of the workforce do not have permanent contracts, despite years of dedicated service.

In its forthcoming campaign aimed at the new breed of giant retail stores (see back cover), the CCC and its allies will continue to push companies to systematically address this problem not only by monitoring suppliers’ employment contracts with workers, but also adjusting their own buying practices and supporting, instead of lobbying against, positive legal reforms that curtail the abuse of short-term contracts.