Unfair labour for the Olympics

The Playfair 2008 coalition released a report on Sunday alleging poor labour conditions in factories making goods for the 2008 Olympics. No Medal for the Olympics on labour rights focuses primarily on child labour, excessive hours and poor wages. The Playfair coalition includes the Clean Clothes Campaign, Intertational Textile Garments and Leather Workers Federation (ITGLWF) and the International Trade Union Conference  

The allegations though extremely worrying, reflect the general situation in China. Campaigners should be congratulated on their dedication to uncovering the issues. Researchers worked in the factories alongside workers to discover what conditions were reallly like. In one factory they found 20 children, some as young as 12, working in their school holidays. In another factory they found forced overtime, fines and pay 65% less than the local minimum wage.

Play Fair 08 are calling on the International Olympic Commitee to ensure labour standards are upheld. Poor standards clearly contradict Olympian values. After similar campaigns around the 2004 Athens Olympics the IOC should have been better prepared this time around.  

Chinese Workers Paid With Fake Cash

There was a burst of incredulous laughter from one side of the Impactt office this afternoon, as this news piece dropped into our inboxes, signalling a new low for labour standards in China. 

The article, posted on ChinaCSR.com, reports that 20 workers at an unnamed jeans-dyeing factory in Guangdong were paid in fake bank notes. When the workers asked the factory to exchange the fake notes for real ones, they were dismissed. 

The factory reportedly claimed that they were victims of the forgery as well, and that they would pay the workers in real currency when they had resolved the issue with their bank. But this does not explain the dismissal of the workers, and goes against the additonal reports that the factory ‘usually uses the fake notes only for new workers’.  

The story is in fact not remotely funny.

We have spent the past 30 minutes discussing what we should say on this matter, and how we as a company should react to the news. What we all agree on is that this is a form of forgery that goes well beyond the common practice of faking books to show that workers have been paid the correct amount of real currency.