It is just one year to the day until London hosts the world’s biggest sporting event. While we stand back and admire the Olympic stadia that have been built on time in East London, we should not forget the millions of people working behind the scenes in sweatshops and factories across the developing world supplying major sportswear companies.

The International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation recently surveyed 83 factories supplying major sportswear brands including Adidas, Nike and Speedo. The survey found that Sri Lankan workers, most of them women, tend to earn just 10,000 rupees (£55) a month, less than half of a living wage of 23,500 rupees (£131) a month.

Adidas is the official sportswear partner of the London 2012 Olympics, reportedly paying £100 million for the partnership deal. Today, Adidas has published their Olympic supplier list and we should certainly give them credit for that.

Trade unions, NGOs and journalists will now be able to scrutinise the conditions of workers in those factories. Even this basic level of transparency has been impossible to extract from any other company despite several years of talks with Olympic organisers and suppliers.

The London Organising Committee for the games requires suppliers and licensees to sign up to its sustainable sourcing code. Unfortunately there is no mechanism for enforcing compliance

For example, the code nominally requires companies to comply with the rules of the Ethical Trading Initiative, which stipulate that workers have a universal right to form trade unions and bargain collectively and that workers must be paid a living wage. Adidas has so far refused to commit to a living wage and fails to hold its suppliers to international labour standards on freedom of association.

It would be a tragedy to see a repeat of what happened in the Beijing Olympics 2008, where one of the Adidas suppliers was found to be paying workers just £20 a month to glue sports shoes; another demanded workers put in an 80-hour week stitching footballs With one year to go, companies have a real opportunity to ensure that it is not just the individual athletes and teams crossing the finishing line who are the winners in London 2012.

Playfair 2012 is a UK coalition of trade unions and labour rights organisations which is campaigning for a sweat-free Olympics and calls on the UK government to ensure that the principles of decent work are applied across Olympic supply chains. Playfair 2012 believes that the Olympic movement can and should raise the bar for workers’ rights.

War on Want is a member of the Playfair 2012 coalition. Read more about Playfair 2012 at http://www.playfair2012.org.uk