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Sacked after fighting for better pay
The Panarub factory, located near Indonesia's capital Jakarta, employs more than 10,000 workers, mostly female. It makes the adidas Predator Pulse boots as well as the +F50.6 Tunit boots which were heavily promoted by some famous footballers during last year's FIFA World Cup.
October 2005: 33 workers from the Panarub factory were fired after they participated in a legal strike trying to get better pay for the thousands of workers in the factory. Workers are paid as little as 60 cents an hour and there have been dramatic rises in the cost of living in Indonesia.
April 2007: On 23 April, the 33 workers, almost the entire Perbupas union leadership at the Panarub factory in Indonesia, accepted severance pay through economic necessity. Thanks to the 9,000 emails sent by Oxfam supporters to adidas in 2006, the dismissed workers were paid a monthly hardship allowance by their management after pressure from adidas. The allowance helped workers to survive while they tried to resolve their case for reinstatement. Despite the good severance pay-out, there are still ongoing violations of workers union rights at the Panarub factory.
Thousands making adidas abandoned without work
November 2006: The Pt Spotec and Pt Dong Joe factories close leaving 10,500 workers without jobs. A third factory, Pt Tong Yang, employing more than 9,000 workers, is also set to close. All three factories produced for Reebok, and then for adidas after adidas bought Reebok. Oxfam Australia is concerned that the buying practices of adidas are likely to be one of the main reasons the factories had to close.
adidas alleges all three supplier factories have “huge and unsustainable debts due to gross financial mismanagement.” So far adidas has not been willing to provide evidence of their allegations of mismanagement by their supplier factories or that their buying practices did not contribute to the closure of PT Spotec and Dong Joe and the imminent closure of Pt Tong Yang. Trade unions involved in the three factories believe that this debt is because of an upgrade in infrastructure that was carried out at the request of adidas.
