• Fair Trade Groups from Pakistan

  • Fair Trade Sports, Inc.

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Fair Trade Sports, Inc.

Fair Trade Sports, Inc is the first sports equipment company in the US to launch a full line of Fair Trade sports balls, ensuring fair wages and healthy working conditions for their adult workers. They are a small group of folks from around the globe committed to fighting poverty through business. And doing so in a transparent and authentic way.

Part of that team consists of Shahzad and his manufacturing team, Talon Sports in Pakistan where all of Fair Trade Sports Balls are made. Talon Sports, is a large-scale producer employing around 2,500 factory workers and contract stitchers. Production is split 50/50 between sports clothing and sports balls - mainly soccer balls but also rugby balls, volleyballs, rugby balls, and more - that are assembled at more than 50 stitching centers. Talon Sports is the leading manufacturer producing sports balls that are certified to be Fair Trade and thus free from child-labor.

Pakistan supplies around 70% of the world's soccer balls, with an estimated 44,000 men and women stitchers in the Sialkot region of Pakistan involved in the production of 35 million soccer balls every year. The industry has been criticized for low pay, poor working conditions and the widespread illegal employment of children who are forced into work because adult wages are often too low to support a family. International campaigns in the 1990s saw some success with gradually moving production away from home-based stitchers to independently monitored stitching centers and providing constructive alternatives for children such as basic education and skills training. However, low pay and a lack of social benefits remain issues for workers in the industry.

Fair Trade Sports, Inc buys the balls from their manufacturers and in the payments a 20% premium is included, which is used for improving the lives of the workers, their families and their communities. Together, workers and management form a "Talon Workers Welfare Society" and decide how to disperse the Fair Trade Sports 20% premium. Programs include community clinics and healthcare insurance - a first in this industry - as well as micro-credit loans and more.

For balls ordered under Fair Trade conditions, stitchers receive wages which are approximately 50% higher than before. The piece rates have been calculated in such a way that two stichers can earn 6,000 Pakistani rupees, enough to provide for an average family.

Factory workers produce the internal bladders and also laminate, cut and print the 32 panels that make up each soccer ball. The sets are then delivered to dozens of small stitching centers in villages around Sialkot. The balls are stitched together then returned to the factory for washing, quality control and packing. The stitching centers employ up to 15 workers who stitch a maximum of three balls a day, each one requiring around 650 stitches. The centers are operated by the main factories or by subcontractors and are segregated by gender to comply with religious and cultural values.

Fair Trade sports, Inc are committed to donate all profits after taxes to children's charities, both domestic and international. Sound familiar? It's a similar idea to the one behind the Newman's Own brand you see in the grocery store. They expect to reach profitability in late 2007. Until then, they are donating $1000 annually to these charities, which benefit at-risk children worldwide.