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Sweatshop claims hit Adidas and Puma

Adidas and Puma have come under fire for doing business with a sweatshop in El Salvador where people work in inhumane conditions to produce football shirts for Germany’s biggest sportswear firms.

Sweatshop claims hit Adidas and Puma
Adidas CEO Herbert Hainer (l) and Puma's Jochen Zeitz. Photo: DPA

Both firms have in the past made efforts to change their reputation for using sweatshop labour to make their products, and introduced a strict code of conduct for suppliers.

But a study by the American National Labor Committee showed that weekly shifts of more than 60 hours were the norm at producer Ocean Sky, Der Spiegel reported at the weekend.

There around 1,500 workers are watched by cameras as they labour in temperatures of around 37 degrees to sew football shirts for Puma and Adidas subsidiary Reebok.

Both Puma and Adidas have admitted having problems with Ocean Sky last year.

Maik Pflaum from the Christian initiative Romero has criticised them both for irresponsibility. Even ignoring the conditions under which the workers labour, a woman working there full time only earns around a quarter of what is needed to support a family, he said.

Trades unions in the region are traditionally weak and poverty levels high, factors used by the firms to their advantage. Ocean Sky has not responded to questions about its working conditions, while Adidas and Puma said they wanted to check conditions on the ground before commenting, the magazine said.

The Local/hc

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ADIDAS

Germany’s Adidas and Puma join Facebook ad boycott over hate speech

German sportswear makers Adidas and Puma said Tuesday they would join a growing advertiser boycott over hate speech against Facebook and Instagram in July, following major consumer companies like Levi's and Coca-Cola.

Germany's Adidas and Puma join Facebook ad boycott over hate speech
Puma's headquarter Herzogenaurach. Photo: DPA

“Puma will join the #StopHateForProfit campaign…throughout July,” a spokeswoman told AFP, citing a social media hashtag organised by social justice activists taken up by some of the companies.

The leaping-cat brand “is part of an overall effort to create positive change and improvement in Facebook's platform by demanding the removal of inaccurate, hostile and harmful conversation,” she added.

While he did not reference the hashtag, a spokesman for Puma's hometown rival Adidas said the company would “develop criteria to develop and maintain a cosmopolitan and safe environment that will apply to ourselves and our partners” during a Facebook ad pause also encompassing US subsidiary Reebok.

“Racism, discrimination and hateful comments should have no place either in our company or in our society,” he added.

Facebook shares clawed back Monday some of the $50 billion in market value they had shed as the advertiser boycott picked up pace last week.

Around 200 companies including giants like Starbucks and Unilever have followed the appeal of civil rights groups like the NAACP and Anti-Defamation League to stage the July boycott.

The movement against online hate speech has picked up steam following George Floyd's May 25th death at the hands of a white policeman in Minneapolis.

READ ALSO: Tens of thousands rally across Germany against racism and police brutality

On Friday, Facebook had said it would ban a “wider category of hateful content” in ads and add tags to posts that are “newsworthy” but violate platform rules — following the lead of Twitter, which has used such labels on tweets from US President Donald Trump.

But experts have highlighted the social network's massive advertiser base of small- and medium-sized companies chasing over 2.6 billion worldwide users, potentially limiting the impact of big-name boycotts.

Adidas has itself been in the sights of the global anti-discrimination movement.

Earlier this month, the three-stripe brand rejected claims by employees that it was not doing enough to combat racism, after its human resources chief last year described such complaints as “noise” only discussed in the US.

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