Living in squalid conditions, workers said they earned a basic salary of $61 (£40) a month for working eight hours a day, six days a week, plus a $5 allowance for health care. They said they could take their wages up to $120 (£78) by increasing their hours to 10 per day.
Adidas insisted on Friday that workers at the factory made an average of $130 a month, and would get a pay rise later this year, along with other garment industry workers.
A spokesman for Adidas confirmed that the Phnom Penh factory produced Olympic "fanwear" but denied that the workers' pay and conditions were in breach of the organising committee's standards.
"Adidas is confident we comply with all Locog standards. Workers at the factory earn an average of $130 a month, which is well above the minimum wage," he said.
A Locog spokesman said: "We understand that the Shen Zhou factory is part of the International Labour Organisation labour rights programme, which means that it is inspected."
In this case, Locog are correct. The daily Telegraph is correct and Adidas are also correct. So what is the issue?
Well, if you go into the ILO/better Work web site, you will see that the above hours of work and overtime claims are legal. Adidas is working in a factory that meets the ILO core conventions.
However, they also have statistics such as these;
- 97% of factories audited in the last 6 months are out of compliance with overtime restrictions.
- During the reporting period, garment factories experienced 27 strikes involving 36,053 workers. This represents approximately a doubling of the number of strikes and the number of workers involved as compared to the last reporting period.
Take a good look at the better factories report, especially if you are working in Cambodia. It makes good reading.
