With soccer gaining popularity in Australia, more and more parents are likely to purchase a soccer ball for Christmas. But as our children are enjoying a game in the park, millions of children in Pakistan are forced to work day and night, hand-stitching the very balls our children play with. Cosima Brand investigates the complex truth about the soccer ball industry.

Pakistan is a country, like many developing countries wherein extreme polarisation of wealth distribution and levels of development and modernisation is evident. In a country where nearly ten million children under the age of fourteen are working, there has been a particular focus and outcry over the use of child labour in the soccer ball stitching industry. In Pakistan the soccer ball industry is focused in the region of Sialkot, and from this one city more than seventy five percent of the world’s soccer balls are hand-stitched and exported.

In 1996 the issue of child labour in the manufacture of soccer balls for export came to a head after increased awareness in Western countries saw a sharp decline in sales of soccer balls and other goods made using child labour. The International Labour Organization (ILO) in collaboration with UNICEF and the Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) entered into a formal partnership to eliminate the use of children in the soccer ball industry. The agreement was signed in 1997 and set up quite rigorous benchmarks to be met by participating manufacturers. When the program started, twenty two manufacturers volunteered for the ILO program and by 2002 this had increased to ninety eight manufacturers, nearly ninety five percent of the manufacturers in Sialkot.

As with most things Pakistan, there has been an uneven – and in some cases adverse effect resulting from the change in the child labour laws and the implementation of the ILO Partnership agreement. The first problem faced by the ILO inspectors was the ‘cottage’ style of production, where most manufacturers used middlemen to employ families who worked from home. In many cases every member of the family, including the children were involved in stitching, and this made it very difficult to monitor. Manufacturers were given time in this regard to conduct a full supply chain audit and to register all stitchers in their employ, but again the home-based nature of the work made it difficult to enforce. In response to this many manufacturers decided to set up stitching facilities, and whilst many have been successful in this regard, the consequences of the change in work locale has had diverse and far reaching affects on the community at large.

[pullquote]Saga Sport’s factories have received international acclaim and recognition … [it] provides its workers with the equivalent wages of a Pakistani University lecturer, provides healthcare and day-care services, transport to and from villages, free meals at work, a company hospital and a dedicated women-only stitching factory.[/pullquote]

There are the shining examples of success, such as Pakistan’s Saga Sports, led by Mr Khurshid Soofi, who was also a signatory on the ILO partnership agreement. Saga Sport’s factories have received international acclaim and recognition and its approach to CSR has been a very comprehensive and thorough one. Saga Sports provides its workers with the equivalent wages of a Pakistani University lecturer, provides healthcare and day-care services, transport to and from villages, free meals at work, a company hospital and a dedicated women-only stitching factory. They also provide education awareness programs on diseases like AIDS, provide free vaccinations and offer a ‘Hajj Lottery’ for thirteen employees annually, as well as investing in community infrastructure. They are, sadly, an exception.

The flipside of the story has seen the resulting deficit in family incomes left by the expulsion of children from the soccer ball stitching industry. Mr Soofi claims that this is a large part of why Saga Sports has initiated so many programs and benefits for its workers, to offer remuneration for the income lost.

In many cases the income deficit has been filled not by employers offering better working wages and conditions, but by the children being used in far more dangerous work, such as the making of medical instruments, which is also a huge proportion of the Sialkot manufacturing industry. More sinister still, many children (without the proper educational systems provided by the government to allow them to attend school) are forced to beg, and more seriously still are forced into child prostitution. Such was also the case in Bangladesh when a similar program was introduced, and although the ILO Partnership sought to counter the negative impacts witnesses in the Bangladeshi programs, they have nevertheless been repeated to some degree in Pakistan.

Child labour continues in Pakistan, with nearly 10 million children under the age of 14 in employment.

Further repercussion of the ILO Partnership have included the further exclusion of women from the workforce. Under the old ‘cottage’ home-based stitching system thousands of women gained employment and made a meaningful contribution to the family income, and although there are manufacturers like Saga Sports who have tried to offer an alternative, many women, due to cultural and lingering caste system restrictions are not able to go outside the home for work, and are thus once more limited in their options.

Because of the change in manufacturing styles, it is now also more costly for manufacturers to produce soccer balls. The increased overheads of running a factory are pushing the prices up from around thirty five Rupees per ball previously to nearly fifty Rupees per ball – a price which unfortunately most of the manufacturing companies have to absorb, as many international buyers are proving unwilling to buy at an increased cost, even for child labour free products.

It is somewhat of a conundrum, as the soccer ball stitching is in fact the safest, most flexible industry in which children are involved, with no chemicals, hazardous machines or worse. No one wants a child to have to work, but if faced with the choice of stitching a soccer ball at home, or working in chemical factories, or making medical instruments or untangling threads in the giant (deadly) looms of the carpet making factories one would probably choose the soccer balls.

The situation in Pakistan is one which really has far-reaching implications for the country; touching on the lack of government involvement and regulation of manufacturing industries to the dire lack of adequate and affordable schooling in the country, and the overall exploitation of cheap labour by multinational corporations who on the whole have been unwilling to foot the bill for the increased costs of taking children out of the soccer ball industry.

So whilst the children of the West are now playing with soccer balls which are mostly free from child labour, the children who used to stitch the soccer balls have in many cases been forced by circumstance and a world in desperate need of a conscience to enter into for more dangerous work, and suffer a further loss of innocence.

Cosima Brand is an Australian writer based in Pakistan.

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EthicalLiving.com.au