What changed
Official shirts for Arsenal, Celtic, Liverpool, Real Madrid and other major clubs have been traced to two Cambodian factories where workers receive basic pay of less than £1 an hour. Employees described temperatures above 35C, verbal abuse when targets were missed and electrical-safety concerns, while working six eight-hour shifts a week and handling up to 700 items a day.
Why it matters
The club badge may be expensive, but the labour behind it is not being paid at anything like a premium. Bowker Garment Factory employs about 3,400 people and Trax Apparel about 3,200; five payslips showed basic monthly pay of $210-$220, rising to around $300 only after overtime and allowances.
That makes the price of an official shirt harder to explain away as simply fabric and stitching. One previous estimate put the production-related share of an £85 shirt at £8.50 for fabric, sewing and shipping, compared with £37.45 for retail, £16.25 for manufacturing, £9.50 for marketing and £13.60 in VAT.
Both factories are primary Adidas suppliers, although Adidas does not own them. The company says it conducts about 1,200 supply-chain audits each year and works with suppliers to improve conditions. The uncomfortable question is whether auditing is finding problems early enough to protect the people making the shirts.
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