England’s World Cup football kit is being made in a Bangladesh factory where workers are paid 21 pence (nearly Tk 23) an hour, reports The Telegraph.
The official jerseys and shorts are made at a factory inside Export Procession Zone where employees are paid as little as 1.68 pounds (nearly Tk 188) a day, it says.
The clothing is available to fans to buy for as much as £160 (apprx. Tk 17,920), according to the report.
“The disclosure will raise concerns about whether the FA (Football Association) has carried out adequate checks on where the garments are being made and could be embarrassing for the England team,” says The Telegraph report.
Simon Hart MP, a Conservative member of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, called on the FA to launch an investigation into where the kit is made.
“The FA has an obligation to look into the way in which this deal was struck and satisfy itself and the players and the fans that it is acting… in the best interests of the people in Bangladesh who are making this product for them,” he told The Telegraph.
A second MP, Jo Stevens MP, also a member of the committee, was quoted in the report saying: “The FA have a duty to oversee every aspect of England’s engagement with the World Cup, including the kit, which we should be proud of as a country. It will be hard to be proud if it turns out it was made on the back of people being exploited in the workplace.”
The Clean Clothes Campaign, the platform working to improve conditions in the global apparel industry, said: “With the minimum wage set at Tk 5,300 (£47), garment workers in Bangladesh are some of the most poorly paid in the global garment industry.”
In 2016 the FA announced a 12-year contract extension with Nike, effective from August this year, worth over 400 million pounds.
Nike is not a signatory in Accord, the buyers’ platform formed for safety regulations following the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, which left over 1,100 workers killed and injured over another 2,000.
A Nike spokesperson told The Telegraph they conduct business “ethically and sustainably” and that their code of conduct was “aligned with International Labour Organization Standards”.
They said their code requires “suppliers to pay their employees at least the local minimum wage or prevailing wage” and ensure that “the regular work week may not exceed 48 hours and the sum of regular and overtime hours in a week may not exceed 60 hours”.
The FA said that as well as manufacturing England kits, “Nike work[s] with many Premier League, European and international teams” and that they had “assurances that all England products are manufactured in accordance with the law” and relevant codes of conduct.