Labor & Employment Law

Sweatshop Report Throws Personal Foul Flag on NFL Jersey Maker

By Mike Hall

Chi Fung worker’s home

Some of the fancy replica jerseys bearing the names of NFL stars like Peyton Manning, which fetch upwards of $80 each in U.S. sporting goods stores, were sewn by workers in El Salvador who made about 10 cents for each jersey, according to a new report by the National Labor Committee (NLC).

The report, “NFL and Reebok Fumble: Women Paid 10 Cents to Sew $80 Peyton Manning Jerseys,” says that for the past four years the 550 workers?about 80 percent women?at the Chi Fung factory in San Salvador were forced to work unpaid overtime, cheated of wages and harassed by managers. One worker told the NLC investigators:

We knew the shirts were expensive.  But now we realize the real price is $80, it makes us angry, because it isn’t fair that they pay us such a low wage. The people [who buy these jerseys] don’t imagine everything we have to bear in the factory when we sew these shirts.

With just one $80 shirt, they pay our wages for two weeks. It could be said that with the cost of a single shirt, I have to maintain my family for two weeks. The supervisors are right when they say to us that our wage is not enough to pay for a jersey if we make a mistake.

According to the report, in 2000 Reebok agreed to pay the NFL $250 million over the next 10 years to be the exclusive apparel distributor for the league.

However, the NFL-Reebok mega-deal has done nothing to lift workers across the developing world who sew NFL jerseys out of poverty.

The report says that in 2006 and 2007, it appears that the NFL jerseys being sewn at Chi Fung were a subcontract order from another garment factory called Partex.

In 2008 and 2009, it is unclear if Reebok placed the orders for its exclusive line of NFL jerseys with Chi Fung directly, or whether production continued under subcontract agreements. At any rate, according to Chi Fung’s website, they are an “approved Reebok producer.”

The base wage in El Salvador’s garment factories is 72 cents an hour and overtime is supposed to be paid as double time, or $1.44. The mandatory workweek at Chi Fung is 61 to 65 hours, including 12-hour shifts Monday through Thursday and “12 to 15 hours of obligatory overtime, which is unpaid.”

At Chi Fung, the report says, an assembly line of 28 workers had a mandatory production goal of completing 2,300 NFL jerseys a day or 255 jerseys per hour.

Which meant that each of the 28 workers, in effect, had to sew nine jerseys per hour or one jersey every 6.6 minutes. The workers were paid just 10 cents for each $80 Peyton Manning NFL jersey they sewed. This means that their wages amounted to just a little more than one-tenth of one percent of the jerseys’ retail price.

The report also says cameras were placed throughout the plant, including by the bathrooms, and if a manager monitoring the cameras:

sees a worker is taking too long to use the bathroom, he’ll shout: Hurry up! Sit down fast. Don’t take so much time. You’re hurting production! For the workers, it is humiliating to be embarrassed and harassed in front of the other workers.

In a statement, Reebok disputed the claims in the NLC report and says it regularly conducts inspections and audits of the plant to monitor the working conditions. But according to the NLC report, workers are threatened with dismissal or a complete factory shutdown if they speak out during the inspections. In addition,

the auditors spend more time and attention on the quality of the garments than on factory conditions.  During the audits, production goals are drastically cut back, the pace of production slows down and there is no forced overtime. But the short reprieve is a mixed blessing since when the auditors depart, the supervisors start yelling and urge the workers to “work faster to replace the time lost because of the auditors visit.”

Click here to read the full report.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on February 17, 2010 (boomark / email).