Sport, Civil Liberties and Human Rights

Richard Giulianotti, David McArdle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317994763
• Edition: 1

What is the relationship between sport and human rights? Can sport protect and enhance the human rights of competitors and sport workers? Can it also undermine those rights?

These topical issues are among the many that are explored in this groundbreaking volume which analyzes how sports both contribute to, and undermine the human rights of participants, spectators and workers. The papers are written by esteemed academics whose work is at the cutting-edge of this burgeoning area of study. Experts from around the world have contributed to this important work, and examine controversial issues such as:

* sexual harassment
* racism
* freedom of movement
* sport as popular protest.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Workers’ Playtime? Child Labour at the Extremes of the Sporting Spectrum

Peter Donnelly and Leanne Petherick

Workers’ Playtime was a BBC Radio lunchtime variety programme, broadcast live from factory canteens around Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Its title recognized lunchtime as a break from work, a time when workers might play. When applied to children, when children are workers, this title takes on a more sinister connotation. Play is supposed to be characteristic of childhood, and play is considered to be intrinsic to healthy child development – physical, mental, and social. When applied to children who work at sport, and in the industries that supply sporting goods, ‘workers’ playtime’ has a cruel irony. This article is about those children.

The vast majority of the world’s nations have ratified the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)¹. By their signature, nations have committed themselves to the best interests of children (defined as all humans under 18 years of age). Forty of the 54 Articles in the CRC deal directly with children’s rights, and four refer directly or indirectly to children’s participation in sport and physical activity. For example, Article 24 affirms ‘the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health …’, Article 28 ‘recognize[s] the right of the child to education …’, physical education being implicit in this right since it was previously affirmed in the 1978 UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) International Charter of Physical Education and Sport,² and Article 29 states that education involves ‘the development of the child’s personality, talents and mental and physical abilities to their fullest’. However, it is Article 31 that directly recognizes:

1. the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child …

2. the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and [States Parties] shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.

Given this international recognition of children’s rights to participate in sport and physical activity, it may be surprising to note that almost half of the 40 Articles dealing directly with children’s rights are occasionally or routinely violated in most countries when we consider children’s involvement – direct and indirect – with sports. Human rights are interconnected in various ways, and although this article deals most directly with Article 32 of the CRC (Child Labour), the process of child labour involves violation of many of the other rights acclaimed in the CRC. The essay begins with a short overview of child labour; moves on to consider three specific forms of child labour in sport: children’s involvement in the manufacture of sporting goods, child trafficking for the purposes of sport, and children’s involvement in high-performance sport; and concludes with recommendations for resolving the issue of child labour in sports.

Child Labour

Article 32 of the CRC recognizes:

… the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child’s education, or to be harmful to the child’s health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.

States’ Parties are expected to establish a minimum age for employment, regulate the hours and conditions of employment, and set appropriate penalties in order to enforce these standards.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) recognizes that work is normal for children:

After the age of six or seven, children may have small tasks around the home, run errands, or spend some time helping parents to run the family farm. This can make a healthy contribution to their development … [with] children learn [ing] to take responsibility and pride in their own activities …. Even in the wealthiest countries, children may be encouraged to work a few hours a week.³

Child labour is different. In child labour, children ‘are being exploited, or overworked, or deprived of their rights to health and education’.⁴ Blanchard notes that child labour may be defined as: ‘children prematurely leading adult lives, working long hours for low wages under conditions damaging to their health and to their physical and mental development, sometimes separated from their families, frequently deprived of meaningful education and training opportunities that could open up for them a better future’.⁵

The ILO is even more specific about the characteristics of child labour:

• working too young (children in developing countries often start factory work at age 6 or 7) working long hours (in some cases 12 to 16 hours a day)

• working under strain (physical, social or psychological)

• working on the streets (in unhealthy and dangerous conditions)

• working for very little pay (as little as US$3 for a 60-hour week)

• working with little stimulation (dull, repetitive tasks which stunt the child’s social and psychological development)

• taking too much responsibility (children often have charge of siblings only a year or two younger than themselves)

• subject to intimidation (which inhibits self confidence and self esteem, as with slave labour and sexual exploitation).⁶

Nobody knows how many child labourers there are in the world. The ILO estimates that 16 per cent of the world’s children (some 246 million) are child labourers; that 12 per cent of the world’s children are in the worst forms of child labour (approx. 184 million), and that some 186 million are less than 15 years of age.⁷ ILO Convention 182 (2001) is specifically intended to end the worst forms of child labour (e.g. sex workers, working in dirty and dangerous conditions, etc.), and the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) has been established to monitor progress.

Child Labour in Sport

As noted in the introduction, there is an essential contradiction between labour and sport, especially for children. Children labour in the cause of sport in various ways. Some are workers in the sports equipment and sportswear factories of developing nations, labouring to produce the equipment and uniforms that will be used by others (including other children) to participate in sport. Others are physically talented children in wealthy nations whose talents have been recognized, and who have been encouraged to specialize early on the high-performance sport development track. Between these two are children from poor countries who are bought and sold to be athletes in wealthier countries. The sociology of sport is only beginning to recognize children’s involvement in the production of sporting goods, and child trafficking in sport.⁸ However, there is a growing body of literature in the sociology of sport on the problems of children in high-performance sport, and that is reflected in the third section below.

Child Labour in the Sporting Goods Industry

The processes of economic globalization that resulted in the downloading of manufacturing jobs to developing nations led to the emergence of two related protest campaigns in the 1990s. The first concerned the conditions of labour, and particular attention was paid to the manufacture of sports shoes and clothing; the second concerned the issue of child labour. While sociologists of sport have paid some attention to the anti-Nike and other campaigns concerning sweatshop work,⁹ they have not responded to evidence from NGOs such as Christian Aid and Global March about the widespread involvement of children in the manufacture of sports equipment ranging from soccer and rugby balls to badminton birdies and boxing equipment.

The first reports of child labour in the sporting goods industry appeared in 1995, and the issue started to come to public attention in 1997, with the signing of the Atlanta Agreement and the publication of Christian Aid’s research report, ‘A Sporting Chance: Tackling Child Labour in India’s Sporting Goods Industry’ .¹⁰ The Atlanta Agreement was conducted under the auspices of the US Department of Labor, which had reported the employment of children in the sporting goods industry in their document ‘By the Sweat and Toil of Children’. The Agreement was signed by the Sialkot (Pakistan) Chamber of Commerce and Industry – Sialkot being the largest producing city in the world for soccer balls – the ILO and the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). The objectives of the Agreement were to:

1. Prevent and progressively eliminate the child labor in the manufacture or assembly of soccer balls in Sialkot and its environs;

2. Identify and remove children under the age of 14 from work and provide them with education and other opportunities; and

3. Facilitate changes in community and family attitudes towards child labor.

The Atlanta Agreement was joined by Save the Children – UK, which took on the responsibility of funding two NGOs in Sialkot, each working to improve education and the rehabilitation of children and families impacted by child labour.¹¹ The Christian Aid report, the research for which was carried out in conjunction with the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS), identified child labour in settings such as a tannery preparing leather used in the manufacture of cricket balls, stitching Everlast boxing equipment, and stitching the panels in soccer balls in Sialkot’s counterpart in India, Jalandhar. They pointed out that Sialkot produces 35 million balls a year – some 54,945 a day, or 2,289 an hour.¹² Christian Aid urged the British government to hold large corporations accountable for unethical corporate conduct.

Soccer balls became the focus of media attention in the lead up to the 1998 World Cup in France, with a number of newspaper articles around the world reporting that the balls to be used in the World Cup had been hand-stitched by child labourers in India and Pakistan. Two sport sociologists, John Sugden and Alan Tomlinson of the University of Brighton in England, attended a press conference in Paris just before the start of the World Cup (they were involved in a major research project on or FIFA Federation Internationale de Football), when the first question that was asked concerned the child labour issue. A spokesperson for Adidas pointed out that children’s small hands were necessary to carry out the task of stitching together the panels of soccer balls, and that the children were not mistreated. A rather docile audience of sports reporters appeared to accept this absurd explanation. As Sugden and Tomlinson¹³ pointed out, it was not credible to think that humans, whose technological know-how had permitted them to land on the moon, could not devise a machine to stitch soccer balls; and the economic realities were that child labour was cheaper than the development of machinery. Christian Aid reported that children received as little as 14p for stitching a ball that sold in the UK for £14.99.¹⁴

Although children are involved in the manufacture of sports equipment other than soccer balls, and in other parts of the world (e.g. China, Softball stitching in Latin America, etc.), the focus has remained largely on the manufacture of soccer balls in South Asia. The issue re-appeared with renewed energy when the organization, Global March against Child Labour, started a major campaign (‘Kick Child Labour out of Soccer’) leading up to the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea.¹⁵ They were able to obtain assurances from Adidas-Salomon that none of the balls used in the World Cup would be products of child labour, and that the company would no longer use child labour in the manufacture of soccer balls. The assurances were part of an agreement between FIFA, the World Federation of Sports Goods Industry (including Adidas-Salomon, Nike, Puma, Decathlon and Reebok), and the Sports Goods Foundation of India (SGFI). The agreement, outlined on the Global March website, involved the following assurances:

1. Limit number of suppliers’ stitching centres that are used; all production facilities are audited against child labour and health and safety standards for general compliance; stitching centres must register with the ILO IPEC monitorin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Worker’s Playtime? Child Labour at the Extremes of the Sporting Spectrum
• 2. Women and Children First? Child Abuse and Child Protection in Sport
• 3. Innocence Lost: Child Athletes in China
• 4. Human Rights, Globalization and Sentimental Education: The Case of Sport
• 5. The Olympic Industry and Civil Liberties: The Threat to Free Speech and Freedom of Assembly
• 6. Watching Brief: Cultural Citizenship and Viewing Rights
• 7. Beyond Bosman: The European Union’s Influence upon Professional Athletes’ Freedom of Movement
• 8. Civil Rights, Doping Control and the World Anti-doping Code
• 9. Privacy, Confidentiality and Human Rights in Sport
• 10. Breaking Post-War Ice: Open Fun Football Schools in Bosnia and Herzegovina
• 11. The Lords of Misrule: Football and the Rights of the Child in Liberia, West Africa
• Notes on Contributors
• Index