All work, no play for footy's child labourers

Two of Australia's best-known football brands, Sherrin and Canterbury, have operations in India that use banned child labour.

A 12-month investigation by The Saturday Age has discovered that despite reforms to India's massive but poorly regulated sports ball industry, children are still working in the painful hand-stitching of footballs, netballs and soccer balls.

The children who sew Sherrin and Canterbury balls are employed unofficially, through subcontractors who pay them for each ball stitched.

In the Punjab suburb of Basti Danishmanda in Jalandhar, 18-year-old Ruby has been stitching full-time since she was pulled out of school at the age of 14.

''The money they pay is completely unreasonable,'' she says. ''This company, Sherrin, is wrong because they understand the hard work of the people who stitch, and still they are not helping us.''

For stitchers like Ruby, piecing together the four pre-cut panels of a Sherrin Auskick football can take more than an hour. For their work they get 7 rupees, about 12¢. A Canterbury rugby ball earns 11 rupees (19¢).

Soccer balls or netballs, with more panels, pay up to 28 rupees (about 49¢) for three or four hours' work, while the cheapest, smallest, footballs pay as little as four rupees (about 7¢).

Most of the child stitchers earn between 50 and 60 rupees (around $1) a day.

The sourcing manager for Canterbury Australia and New Zealand, Jason Law, said he was ''horrified'' by The Saturday Age evidence, promising to ''stamp out whatever is going on up there''.

Chris Lambert, Australian managing director of Sherrin's parent company, Russell Corporation, said the use of child labour ''in no way comes anywhere close to our standards of corporate social responsibility''.

''It's not acceptable, and it's illegal. We are jumping on it straight away,'' he said.

The children The Saturday Age discovered stitching sit hunched on low stools for between five and eight hours a day, six or seven days a week.

Stitchers often end up with chronic back injuries, regularly pierce their fingers with the needles or slice their hands on the wax-coated string. Working in darkened rooms to keep them hidden from authorities can lead to sight problems.

Keeping children from school to make them work is illegal in India. In 2010, the Right to Education Act made it compulsory for anyone under 14 to attend school.

But across Punjab's industrial cities, The Saturday Age discovered children, almost all of them girls, and as young as seven, who have been pulled out of school to work in secret, stitching sports balls full-time.

Eleven-year-old Sunali sits in her family's one-room home in the same suburb as Ruby, stitching Sherrin Auskick footballs with her sister Rupa, 10, and mother Laxmi. Together they stitch 15 balls a day, for 105 rupees ($1.84).

Sunali doesn't go to school any more. Instead she stitches six days a week. Her family needs the money … ''to eat, to feed my family, I have no choice'', Laxmi says.

A subcontractor in the neighbourhood, Rajkumar, confirms the balls are from the factory of Sherrin's contractor Spartan, and will be sent to Australia.

In neighbouring Basti Pirdad, 12-year-old Reena goes to school infrequently. She has fallen three years behind her classmates.

The Saturday Age finds her at home on a school day, sewing a Canterbury rugby ball.

Reena works at least five hours, seven days a week, her mother says. ''We are very poor people, and I and my daughter stitch as much as possible to support our family.

''Sometimes she is at school, but even if she goes, she comes home around 1pm and starts stitching. She stitches until it is dark.''

India is the largest supplier of sports balls to Australia.

It shipped nearly 10 million to Australia last year.

Canterbury and Russell Corporation have supply agreements with Indian manufacturers. Those manufacturers sign codes of conduct which outlaw child labour, and are regularly independently audited to ensure those conditions are met.

Presented with The Saturday Age findings, Canterbury and Russell promised investigations.