quotation: “Sport crosses boundaries. While driving athletes to new peaks of performance, sport can also reach across social, political and geographical borders, affecting whole communities and countries. (…) In the same way, the size and nature of our company is such that its impacts reach far beyond our own facilities, affecting the lives of people around the world and the environment in which they live. Measuring and controlling these impacts is an important part of our drive to becoming a fully sustainable company”.

who: with this words, adidas-Salomon point out its engagement in the The Fair Labor Association (FLA), the organization that gathers 25 diverse international companies whose common aim is to improve working conditions in the factories where they produce apparel and footwear around the world. Adidas-Salomon became an FLA participating company in 1999 and fully supports the FLA obligations. This includes internal auditing, independent and unannounced monitoring, consistent tracking of remedial actions, and transparent communication of the process. Adidas-Salomon is committed to continuously improve working conditions throughout its supply chain, including standards for employment, health and safety and workers rights. Together with its business partners Adidas-Salomon develops and implements action plans for continuous improvement in factory working conditions.

alert: in 1997, a programme to eliminate child labour from the football industry has been set up with funding partly coming from FIFA; the problem was that most of the football stitchers were children working for 7 to 9 hours a day, under minimum wage, in hazardous conditions. In 2000, a similar programme, implemented by the Sports Goods Foundation of India and funded by FIFA was set up in India, second only to Pakistan in world’s production of sporting goods and inflatable balls specifically.

adidas footballs: Adidas-Salomon is able to state, categorically, that official Adidas footballs have not been stitched by underage workers. The production in Pakistan is monitored by an operations team based in Sialkot, which checks compliance against the Standards of Engagement - Adidas’ code of conduct.
Each stitching centre must register with the International Labour Organisation’s IPEC monitoring programme.