The New York Times reports that some World Cup soccer (football) jerseys are being made my workers with pay of $2.27 per day. You read that right, not by the minute, not by the hour, $2.27 per day. There is no standard of living in the world that supports paying people that low, even Myanmar. This being for jerseys retailing sometimes for over $150 each.
You know that $150 is not the cost of the thread, so somebody is making money and it isn’t the sewing folks and it isn’t the printeres. As usual as bad at that pay is, for some reason the other folks doing most of the work on that jersey, namely the printers, are not even mentioned. Something tells me that they are not paid any better. The world cup may be a celebration of international sports, but its a shameful event in terms of human rights, we know it is shameful regarding jersey production, just guessing shameful on the printing, and in the workers abused during the creation of the facilities which Amnesty International referred to as “the Qatar world cup of shame.”
Other sports jerseys are about the same. Saw a shop in Central America that does licensed sports jerseys and sweaters. Place looked like a prison; reason was to keep employees from taking the jerseys/sweaters out, not keeping people from coming in. I believe the interpreter said they were being paid $0.17 – $0.40 an hour. Think we all know printers that have contracts as full service shops that have to have garments in the stores for less that $6.00 each. That is the blank, printing, price tag, and hanger. Seen them at a happy place on earth for $35.00 – $45.00. Talk about margins and markup.
On one level I understand why this all happens, but on another we as humans need to find a way that in a $150 jersey there is one more dollar that could go to a sewing person in order to drastically improve their life.
This is one of the big problems we’re trying to solve with our tech at Merchadise! I’d love to chat more about this with you, Rick.