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Sweat, Fear and Resignation Amid All the Toys
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/112704V.shtml
By Abigail Goldman
26 November 2004
Despite Mattel's efforts to police factories, thousands of workers are suffering.
Just off a wide dirt road that leads to a densely packed jumble of factories, workers behind one guarded metal gate toil seven days a week,
sometimes as many as 24 hours straight, making toys for about 20 cents an hour.
It is a pace that makes them almost numb to the poor ventilation, the lack of bathroom breaks and a fear that they will be beaten if they
complain.
Sweatshops aren't unusual, of course, in a country that possesses a large and cheap workforce and a permissive government hungry to attract big
business. What makes this situation notable is that these workers make products for a company widely considered one of the most socially responsible
American firms: Mattel Inc.
The El Segundo-based toy manufacturer was one of the first U.S. companies - and the only major player in its industry - to establish an
independent system for monitoring and publicizing how factory workers are treated. In fact, Mattel routinely checks and rechecks hundreds of plants
around the world, aiming to ensure that they comply with its 112-item code of conduct.
The seven-year effort has paid off - at least to a point.
When it comes to limiting work hours, ensuring fair pay and improving health and safety standards, "Mattel is one of the best," said Chan Ka Wai,
associate director of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, which has done extensive investigations into working conditions in the Chinese toy
industry.
Yet for all of that, tens of thousands of workers who make Mattel products still suffer.
One big reason is that half of the toys displaying Mattel's familiar red logo are made in facilities, like the one here in an industrial area of
Shenzhen, that the company doesn't own.
"Mattel has no way to know the truth about what really goes on here," said a 24-year-old worker at the Shenzhen factory. "Every time there is an
inspection, the bosses tell us what lies to say."
Labor advocates agree that the situation is difficult. Mattel may be doing a lot to turn its own factories into showplaces, Chan said.
"But their vendors look very different," he added.
As increasing numbers of Western manufacturers shift production to China and other developing countries, Mattel's experience underscores how
difficult it is to guarantee humane working conditions and still make the ever-cheaper goods that consumers demand. It also raises the question of how
much responsibility a single company should bear when it operates in parts of the world where poverty is omnipresent and the exploitation of workers
is rampant.
The Times interviewed workers at 13 factories in southern China, Indonesia and Mexico that make Mattel products, including company-owned
facilities and contractor-run plants.
Visits to five of the factories were arranged by Mattel. The Times talked independently with employees at the other plants, where workers agreed
to tell their stories only if they and their employers were not identified by name.
Many said they were worried about retaliation from supervisors. Others expressed concern that if Mattel knew about the conditions, the company
would cancel its contracts, casting the workers onto the streets.
"It's good that they monitor, but not if it costs our jobs," said the Shenzhen factory worker, who has performed a variety of tasks for a Mattel
contractor in the last two years, most recently stamping eyes onto plastic animals. "It's better to have bad conditions than no job at all."
Inside Vendor No. 5
Across Guangdong province, on the northeast outskirts of the Guangzhou city limits, Li Xiao Hong helps churn out toys at one of Mattel's
best-regarded contractor factories.
Vendor No. 5, as it's known, boasts dorms with TV rooms, a library, sports facilities, classrooms - even karaoke machines to help Li and her
co-workers unwind after a long stint on the factory floor.
Still, conditions are far from ideal.
The plant's work areas are so poorly lighted that they seem permanently shrouded in gray. A strong smell of solvent wafts across the facility as
rows of workers hunch over pedal- operated sewing machines and gluepots.
Li is the fastest worker on a long, U-shaped assembly line of about 130 women who put together Mini Touch 'n Crawl Minnie, a scampering version of
the Disney character activated by a baby's nudge.
Li moves with lightning speed - gluing the pink bottom, screwing it into place, getting the rest of the casing to adhere, tamping it down with a
special hammer, pulling the battery cover through its slats, soldering where she glued, testing to make sure the leg joints on the other side still
work, then sending it down the line.
The entire process takes 21 seconds.
She generally works 5 1/2 days a week, up to 10 hours at a time. Her monthly wage - about $65 - is typical for this part of China, enough for Li
to send money back home to her poor farming family in Henan province and to afford a computer class in town.
But Li pays a heavy price: Her hands ache terribly, and she is always exhausted - a situation to which the 20-year-old seems resigned.
"People at my age should expect some hardship," said Li, clad in bluejeans and a pink factory blouse, which she left unbuttoned to reveal a white
T-shirt emblazoned with the silhouette of Mickey Mouse. "I should taste bitterness while I'm young."
Besides, many here apparently have it worse.
Last year, Mattel's independent auditors noted that the overtime extracted by Vendor No. 5 often exceeded the maximum allowed under Chinese law
and under what Mattel calls its Global Manufacturing Principles.
The extra hours, inspectors found, were not completely voluntary because workers were forced to seek permission to leave after their regular
shifts, another violation of Mattel's rules. Some were found to have worked for nearly three weeks without a day off, which ran afoul of both Chinese
law and company mandates.
Robert A. Eckert, Mattel's chairman and chief executive, said he wasn't surprised that some contractor factories had violated Mattel's
wage-and-hour restrictions. What's important, he said, is that the company work with its business partners to recognize and correct the problem.
So far, Mattel has terminated 33 suppliers for violating its standards, while refusing to add 28 others to its list of approved vendors because
they failed to meet the company's code.
Eckert made clear, however, that firing factories isn't the goal.
"Our job is to fix it," he said. "We're not in the business to try to cut off plants."
Establishing Standards
Mattel began monitoring factories almost two decades ago, when it focused on issues of health and safety, and greatly expanded the notion of what
it should be accountable for in the mid-1990s.
It was a time when activists around the world were stepping up campaigns against Nike Inc., Gap Inc. and others for allegedly using sweatshop
labor outside the United States.
For Mattel, the stakes were particularly high. A worker abuse scandal like the one that tarred Wal-Mart Stores Inc.'s Kathie Lee Gifford clothing
line in 1996, when activists found that items were made by children working in deplorable conditions, would be especially disastrous for a maker of
kids' toys. Negative headlines would scare off customers and spook Wall Street.
"There isn't a reward for doing the right thing," noted Sean McGowan, a toy industry analyst with Harris Nesbitt in New York. "But there is a
penalty if you get caught doing the wrong thing."
Mattel later added a "social compliance" component to its program, which included a strict set of rules about working hours, wages, factory
conditions and age requirements.
The company formalized these standards in 1997 when it established the Mattel Independent Monitoring Council, a nonprofit group of observers
funded by the company but administered through the Zicklin School of Business at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York.
The group, now called the International Center for Corporate Responsibility, was charged with monitoring factories and publishing detailed reports
as a check on Mattel's internal audits. Critics have questioned the monitors' independence. For its part, Mattel points out that it is the only major
toy company to release outsiders' findings.
(Its largest competitor, Hasbro Inc., has said that all its contractors must comply with International Council of Toy Industries ethics
guidelines, modeled largely on Mattel's program, by the end of 2005. But Hasbro does not make public its independent auditors' reports.)
Beyond scrutinizing its vendor plants in the developing world, Mattel has also built its own first-rate facilities, complete with comfortable
living quarters for its workforce.
The factory floor at Mattel Die-Cast China in Guanyao is bright and airy. Instead of the usual snaking assembly line, where workers perform the
same task over and over and over, many MDC employees move around to different stations, often making an entire toy themselves; this helps eliminate
painful repetitive-stress injuries.
MDC's residence halls are more modern and nicer than dorms at top Chinese universities. In their off hours, workers crowd into the television
rooms on each floor or play badminton on outdoor courts. Some head to the gym or to computer centers to practice lessons they learn in free classes
offered on site.
The quality of life here is written on the face of nearly every MDC worker: They smile, a rare expression at other plants.
"People can sense the difference if you're pushing them for the bottom line or for themselves," said Rug Burad, the general manager of the plant,
where Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars originate.
"You want them to be their best so they produce the best. That's the priority."
Crowding in Indonesia
Even at Mattel's own factories, change doesn't come overnight.
On the eastern side of Jakarta, past the garbage-strewn streets in the main part of the city, Mattel's twin Indonesian production facilities rise
up out of the green fields like gleaming, white-tile temples.
The Dua and Satu factories - where half of the world's more than 100 million Barbie dolls are made each year - consist of low-rise buildings
connected by walkways with lush overhanging plants. The campuses, built in the early 1990s, feature computer rooms, a library, a health clinic, sports
fields and a community garden. Management here has given a nod to both fun and faith: The complex includes a disco as well as two mushollas, prayer
rooms for the workers, 90% of whom are Muslim.
Still, most of the dorm rooms, which house about 40% of the factories' 10,000-plus workers, fail to meet Mattel's guidelines for the maximum
number of workers per room (16) and the minimum amount of personal space allotted to each (20 square feet).
Instead, the rooms are crowded with four rows of four bunk beds lined up side by side, mattress to mattress. For all but those in the outside
beds, getting in and out can require a feat of gymnastics.
Mattel is moving to a less crowded format - two bunk beds in a row, each with a lamp, fan and curtain shielding the bed from the open area - to
come into compliance with its own guidelines. But those changes, Mattel said, take time.
"We can point to deficiencies in the system," said Jim Walter, Mattel's senior vice president of worldwide quality assurance, who oversees the
ethical manufacturing initiatives, "but I'm going to look at how far we've come."
For some, it's still not far enough.
In 2001, a report by the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee rapped Mattel, along with Hasbro, Walt Disney Co., Wal-Mart and others, for
making toys in brutal Chinese sweatshops. The National Labor Committee in New York, the group that exposed the problems with Wal-Mart's Kathie Lee
Gifford clothing line, followed with another critique the next year.
Marie-Claude Hessler-Grisel, a French human rights advocate, still sees many of the same problems that were highlighted in those reports.
Hessler-Grisel says she appreciates that Mattel has poured more than $500 million into its own state-of-the-art facilities and spends about $10
million a year on monitoring factories, upgrading plants and training contractors.
But given that Mattel earned more than $500 million last year on sales of nearly $5 billion, she expects the company to do a lot more and to do it
faster.
"These workers can't wait forever for a change," she said.
"I have nothing personal against Mattel," added Hessler-Grisel, a tiny woman with short gray hair and red-rimmed glasses. "You always go after No.
1, and it trickles down."
Enjoying a 'Day Off'
Around the world, workers at factories making Mattel toys complain about one thing above all else: the grueling hours.
Mattel's rules state that the most anyone can work is 12 hours a day, six days a week - and that's only for very limited periods and when overtime
is voluntary. Regular workdays aren't supposed to exceed 10 hours a day, including overtime. What's more, factory employees are not supposed to work
more than 13 days in a row. But according to more than a dozen workers, the reality is something else.
Near Shenzhen, outside a large vendor plant, two 20-year-olds eating a lunch of boiled noodles recounted how they routinely worked 11 hours a day,
six days a week. The worst time, they said, comes during the monthly changeover, when their group goes from the day shift to the night shift - and
they must plow straight through, with barely a break in between.
In Indonesia, a 21-year-old woman who worked at Mattel's Jakarta plant talked about friends and colleagues who have assembled Barbie dolls for 30
days straight without time off.
Even at a Mattel-owned plant in Guanyao, where the hours are within company guidelines, workers are so fatigued that those who return early from
lunch sleep at their spots on the assembly line, their heads resting on their hands.
In environments like these, the slightest break can seem like a tremendous perk.
Near the city of Dongguan, two young women recently sat in a fourth-floor room sectioned off by crude corrugated-metal walls. They have little to
show for their drudgery; they share a mattress and a hot plate. But they said their life at a Mattel contractor factory had been good. Unlike at the
last plant where they worked, the Mattel vendor gives them a "day off."
But as the two friends described their "day off," it became evident that they don't get anything close: On Sundays, they explained, they get to
leave work at 5 p.m., having put in eight hours instead of the typical 12.
"That's a gift," said one of the women, a migrant from Henan province who frequently flashed a broad, toothy grin that made her look even younger
than her 20 years. "You don't have to work through the night."
Fear of Retaliation
At the Shenzhen factory, where about 1,000 people are employed, it seems everybody knows the drill.
Before Mattel comes through twice a year for inspection, workers said, managers promise to pay them time-and-a-half if they repeat the company
line: that they work just eight hours a day, six days a week, as allowed by Chinese law.
In truth, they slog for far longer than that.
Inside a tiny metal-walled shed a short walk from the factory, the 24-year-old worker reclined on his bed with his fiancee by his side and
recalled how he was recently ordered to work 24 hours straight without rest.
"On the second morning we just kept working," he said, wrinkling his nose as the eye- watering vapors of cooking peppers drifted through the room
from a building a few feet away. His fiancee pressed the tummy of a defective Winnie the Pooh that she had rescued from the trash at work. The bear
meowed three times - she had sewn in a computer chip from a pet toy that someone had found on the factory floor - and the woman laughed.
If all goes well, the couple said, they can each earn about $65 a month, half of which they send home to their families in rural China.
Newcomers and slower workers, they pointed out, sometimes get no pay at all: There is nothing left after charges are subtracted for meals and
rent, as many workers live in company housing.
The couple said they and their colleagues sometimes thought about complaining, but the memory of what happened last year to one who did always
stopped them. At first, they said, the worker was shouted down by the floor manager. Then, about 8 p.m., as he was leaving the factory, he was stabbed
repeatedly by a group of men.
Mattel said it was unaware of any such incident.
Few people saw the stabbing, and no one knew what ultimately happened to the victim, the couple said, although some heard his screams. They didn't
dare help or call the police, they said, lest they suffer the same fate.
Squalor in Mexico
More than 7,000 miles from China, along the U.S.-Mexico border, a 41-year-old Mattel factory worker rocked back and forth on a rusted metal chair
and talked about life at the job site - and beyond.
The Tijuana facility where this woman earns the equivalent of $50 a week, Mattel's Mabamex plant, is clean and well maintained. The company
strictly enforces its work-hour rules here, and she has few complaints. Mabamex appears little different from factories on the U.S. side of the
border.
But outside the 550,000-square-foot factory, the scene of squalor is all too familiar: Like most maquiladoras - assembly plants that produce goods
principally for export - Mabamex is surrounded by the hovels where its workers live.
The dwellings are made of sheets of scrap metal and prefabricated wooden walls - often, discarded garage doors from across the border. Few homes
have anything other than earthen floors. Fewer still have running water. Most bathrooms consist of a system of buckets and open rivulets, which wash
the waste downhill.
The Mattel worker, a mother of four, said she would like to move her family somewhere nicer. But given her salary, there is very little that she
can do.
"When we collect our checks, we feel bad about how little money we make," she said. "We feel the pressure."
For a company like Mattel, it is a tricky proposition figuring out what its obligation to workers - as well as to society at large - should be.
"Is it Mattel's responsibility to determine and pay a living wage? I don't think so," said Walter, the company's quality assurance chief. "But
should Mattel prompt a local government to determine what a reasonable wage is? We should have some impact on that."
The struggle between morality and profitability goes right to the top of the company.
"Do we want to make people's lives better? Absolutely," said Eckert, Mattel's CEO. "Do we want to unilaterally do things that make us
uncompetitive and therefore our products don't sell and therefore nobody gets employed? No."
Few, if any, of the Tijuana maquiladoras do better for their workers than Mattel does, said Alfredo Hualde, director of the Department of Social
Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, a research institution in Tijuana.
Hualde notes that to have even the most basic amenities - sanitary drinking water, indoor plumbing - the 150,000 maquiladora workers would
probably need to see their pay doubled. And that's unimaginable when the Mexican government is doing all it can to keep factories from fleeing Mexico
for cheaper locales such as China.
"The main objective is to keep the maquilas here in Mexico to create employment," Hualde said. "The quality of the employment is secondary."
When the Factory Closes
At the Shenzhen factory, the man who worked 24 hours straight learned during the summer that there is something worse than laboring in terrible
conditions: being out of a job.
Work at the plant started to dry up, and the man went 22 days without getting paid.
Eventually, he landed a new job at a nearby eyeglasses factory. The management is fair, the hours are blessedly shorter, and the pay is better, he
said. He and his fiancee were even able to move into a slightly larger apartment with tile, instead of concrete, floors.
His fiancee hasn't been so lucky, though. When the Mattel contractor finally closed in August, the only job she could find was at a nearby toy
factory - another Mattel supplier.
Conditions there, she said, are worse. The hours are longer and the wages lower. Workers are instructed to keep two timecards so that auditors
can't detect the illegal overtime and insufficient pay. There is no clean drinking water at the factory, she said, and no food for those who, like
her, often work the graveyard shift.
The woman longs for the day she can leave, she said. But she doesn't know when that will be.
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Mexitron
Ultra Nomad
Posts: 3397
Registered: 9-21-2003
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
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Mood: Happy!
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Capitalism relies on a slave/untouchable/peon working class, that's just the way it is....question is when we finally replace all those suffering
employees with robots will they still be working in sweatshops to produce robots?
I remember growing up in the 60's being bottle fed the utopia of Buckminster Fuller et al, something like---"we estimate that in 20 years the workweek
will be reduced to 25 hours and in 40 years robots will do all our work for us"......only thing they forgot was that somebody has to build the robots
and maintain them and that in a capitalistic society wealth is not distributed easily for a non-working class(read:greed gets in the way). Only
well-insulated idealists(or communists) might be able to pull it off.
Don't know how we get from our current status to that ideal world of Star Trek(Next Generation), where money is obsolete, and all material things are
available to anyone who wants them, for free.
Until then we have to make the choice to pay the real costs of products if we want to pay living wages to manufacture them. So, that means that Tonka
Truck is now $25 instead of $10, for instance. Are we willing to upend our economy to a new, less consuming standard(especially if you want to send
all those illegals back to Mexico--hah--you wouldn't believe what it would cost to do construction using Bubba--what do those Union Caterpillar
drivers make? $50-100/hr). Well, its possible, but it will be lean times for us as we adjust to a new economy and millions of people in the world
who now make 20 cents an hour will make nothing.
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Dave
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| Quote: | Originally posted by Anonymous
"The main objective is to keep the maquilas here in Mexico to create employment," Hualde said. "The quality of the employment is secondary."
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That about sums up how the government cares for it's citizens.
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