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Winter 2002
Toying with Lives
The Scandalous Plight of China's Toy Workers
Robert A. Senser
Weeks before the deadly fire, two workers addressed letters to the
factory’s "Honorable General Manager" asking for permission to quit. The
two, both young women, gave the same reason: their families in rural China
wanted them to return home. One of them explained further: "I no longer have
the heart to continue working."
An investigator from a labor office in Beijing later found the two letters
among the ruins of the fire that on November 19, 1993, destroyed the Zhili
Toy Factory in southern China. In a long report, titled "Toyland Inferno: A
Journey Through the Ruins," the investigator, Yi Fu, described how flames,
smoke, and panic killed 87 workers, unable to escape through the three-story
factory’s single unlocked exit or its barred windows. From incomplete
records, he verified that one of the two women who wanted to resign had lost
her life in the tragedy. (The full report is published in "China’s Workers
Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy," by Anita
Chan, 2001, M.E. Sharpe.)
Most of the 400 workers at the Zhili factory were young women, age 16 to 25.
So were the fire victims, the 87 dead and 47 others with permanent burns and
other serious injuries. Because they came from rural provinces, they were
officially categorized as "migrants," people with fewer privileges than the
urban residents and only a temporary, job-connected privilege to live away
from their home areas.
In the prosperous special economic zone of Shenzhen, where the Hong
Kong-owned Zhili factory was located, 1,800,000 migrants were employed in
the foreign-owned factories that produced toys, shoes, garments, and other
goods for export, Yi Fu reported at the time. "Not only do they make up 70
percent of Shenzhen’s population," he wrote, "they are also the principal
creators of the region’s prosperity." Their typical reward, he found, was
meager: $1.10 for a 12-hour day, no days off, and long delays in wage
payments, plus horrible working conditions. Yi Fu detailed how Shenzhen
factories, including Zhili, violated health and safety regulations, and even
ignored a city inspection team’s warnings of multiple fire hazards issued
not long before November 19, 1993.
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"The Zhili fire was not fated," Yi Fu wrote. "It was a man-made
tragedy." He blamed various parties in China for, among other things,
being overly protective of foreign investment, to the exclusion of
worker
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rights. Yet he concluded on a hopeful note: "The tragic events at Zhili
should be a catalyst that motivates the government, the employers, and
the unions to fulfill their responsibilities to work together to protect
the rights of workers."
As we reflect on the recent toy-buying season, it’s time to ask: Has
this hope been fulfilled?
In China, the toy industry is booming, thanks largely to exports to the
United States, the world’s largest market for toys. Americans are
spending more than $23 billion a year on products traditionally
classified as toys--dolls, doll houses, stuffed animals, little vehicles
(powered and non-powered, plastic and metal), crayons, building sets,
craft kits, children’s furniture, plastic guns, board games, and
countless other items--plus $6.5 billion more on video games. Those
statistics are from the Toy Industry Association, the New York
City-based trade group representing companies responsible for 85 percent
of U.S. toy sales. Formerly called Toy Manufacturers of America, it
changed its name only last year, belatedly recognizing that for decades
toys labeled "made-in-the-USA" have been mighty few. Most are imported.
And more than half of all toys sold here come from the People’s Republic
of China.
The 1993 Zhili tragedy called worldwide attention to the workers in
China who make their country the world’s largest manufacturer and
exporter of toys. Those men and women--now numbering more than three
million, at least 80 percent of them young women--have continued to come
under close scrutiny, chiefly by the world media and by a network of
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), both in Hong Kong and in Western
countries.
Among the most recent NGO and media reports on how China’s toy workers
are faring, two stand out. One is a Washington Post
article, published May 13, 2002, titled "Worked Till They Drop" and
subtitled "Few Protections for China’s New Laborers." The other is "Toys
of Misery,"W1
(see Webnotes box below) a two-part report
issued by the New York-based National Labor Committee in early 2002.
Both rely heavily on off-job interviews with toy workers themselves,
rather than on conducted tours of factories and the word of management.
Both document the same point: The plight of the working women who make
most of the world’s toys is scandalous.
The Washington Post article centered on a 19-year-old named
Li Chunmei, who quit her rural school in the third grade, first to help
her family eke out a living on the land, and then to work, like her
older sister, in the factories of the Shenzhen special economic zone 700
miles away. Li wound up as a "runner"--she carried the eyes, ears, and
other parts of brand-name stuffed animals from one stitching area to
another, for 12 cents an hour.
"The bosses were always yelling at her to go faster," one co-worker told
the Washington Post reporter Philip P. Pan. One night
during the pre- |
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Voices of Young Toy Workers
"I’ve been working since I was 15 years
old. People said you could earn more in Guangdong, but it’s worse here.
I’ve worked in the spraying department for three years. I’ve always
suspected the paints are poisonous. I’ve been sick ever since I started
working in spraying. And they lie about the wages. We never know how
they’re calculated. There’s no pay stub and no way to check. We’re given
a sheet of paper with a lot of numbers on it to look at for a few
seconds and then have to sign it. We get what they give us."
"Every day we work in temperatures that
can go over 100 degrees. The molding machines are noisy and hot. The air
is filled with a strong chemical smell. I have to repeat the same
motions, over and over: open the machine, put in the plastic, press the
machine, take out the plastic. A lot of us can’t stand the heat, the
smell, and the noise--and some of us faint."
"The chemical smell is strong at the
workplace and you can see paint dust everywhere. I wanted to throw up
every day when I first came. I never stopped having stomachaches and
dizziness in the first month."
"We work long overtime hours like dogs.
It’s after midnight when we get back to the dormitory. And it makes you
even more tired when you see the long line at the bathroom. By the time
I go to bed, it’s already 2 A.M. and at 8 A.M. the next day, I am
already at my workplace. It’s the same every day. It’s very exhausting."
"Only management staff gets [the
legally required] maternity leave. Production workers like myself work
as usual even if we are pregnant. When you are about to give birth, you
have to quit. Management makes sure of that."
"I’ve been here for more than a year.
The highest [monthly] salary I got was rmb 800 ($96.65). I had to work
till 12 midnight or later every day for that. The lowest I got was rmb
200 ($24.16). That was delivered after the Chinese New Year. We had a
bad time this Chinese New Year (end of January). [One factory] delivered
lunch coupons to their workers--we in this factory got nothing. We had
no money for the New Year. We did not even have money to eat. I knew of
workers picking up remains in the canteen. We are still angry about it.
How can you treat workers like this?"
The excerpts above are drawn from "Toys of Misery"
(see Webnote 1)
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Christmas rush season last year, after nearly 16 hours on her feet, Li
fell into her bunk exhausted and coughing up blood. She died before she
could be taken to a hospital. Officially, the cause of her death was
simply called a non-work-related "illness." But in towns where factories
operate day and night to produce for export, her fate is common enough
to have its own name: guolaosi, short for death due to
overwork. Li had been working day after day for two months straight
without even a Sunday off.
In recounting Li Chunmei’s life and death, Pan provided details on labor
conditions that he called "the norm" for tens of millions of workers in
China’s light-assembly industries making toys and other products for the
world. Li’s brief career in Shenzhen illustrated those conditions: |
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Management’s hold on employees. Although Li spoke to colleagues
about quitting and returning home, she feared losing the two months of
back wages that the company, in accordance with a widespread practice, had
withheld. Several other toy workers told Pan they were "trapped" in
similar circumstances.
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Arbitrary fines. Managers dock a worker’s pay for violating company
rules, such as for spending more than five minutes in the toilet or for
wasting food. Once, after being refused a day off, Li did not complete a
night shift in order to rest--she lost three days’ pay.
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The toy business’ contortions. In tracking Li’s brief job history,
Pan learned that at the time of her death she was working for a
subcontractor who worked for a contractor who worked for a Korean-owned
toy manufacturer, Kaiming Industrial Ltd. A Kaiming manager explained this
weird production chain as follows: Although Kaiming’s main factory has
relatively good labor standards for the brand-name products it makes, it
farms out the least profitable and most difficult orders to a contractor
with lower standards, who, after taking a commission, distributes some of
the workload to a subcontractor. So when Pan asked for information about
Li, Kaiming and its contractor both said she wasn’t their responsibility
since she wasn’t working for them. The subcontractor, a woman, was nowhere
to be found.
The Washington Post article did not identify the brand names of
the play animals that Li and her co-workers made. But Charles Kernaghan,
director of the National Labor Committee, operates on the theory that
sunshine is the best cure for sweatshops. Like the committee’s previous
reports on labor abuses in Bangladesh, El Salvador, Haiti, and elsewhere,
"Toys of Misery" identifies dozens of products, manufacturers, retailers,
and licensees by name. In its very first sentence, the report challenges you
to consider the plight of China’s toy workers "when you go into a Wal-Mart
or a Toys ‘R’ Us store to purchase Harry Potter or Disney’s Monsters Inc.,
or Mattel’s Barbie, Sesame Street, Hasbro’s Star Wars or Pokémon....."
Kernaghan follows this with a long litany of miseries endured by those
workers.
The 75-page report, covering 19 factories that export toys to the U.S. and
Europe, is depressing. It describes the usual abuses that plague workers in
China’s sweatshops: illegally low wages, illegally long hours, illegal wage
deductions, and the not -illegal repression of the right to organize
free unions. The report’s commentary on a single factory--Shuihe, which
employs from 3,000 to 4,500 young workers generally in their teens and early
twenties--has 11 pages listing how it violates China’s local and national
legislation. Among the abuses, management imposes "a myriad of rigid,
draconian regulations backed up by stiff fines and the threat of firing."
Workers lose at least one day’s wage for talking during business hours, one
week’s pay for stepping on the factory lawn, one day’s pay for the first
time they punch in late to work and more the second time. Besides, like
other toy workers across China, many Shuihe workers handle toxic chemical
paints, glues, and solvents with their bare hands.
It isn’t as though these types of exposés are new. Not at all. And it’s not
as though various worker and human rights advocates outside mainland China
have not campaigned to ameliorate those horrendous conditions. They have.
Indeed, their efforts have raised world consciousness about the plight of
Chinese workers--probably preventing even greater abuses. But, on the
factory floor, the situation for most workers has not improved. On the
positive side, however, the initiatives that have been undertaken reveal the
channels through which the lives of ordinary people in China, including its
voiceless toy workers, can potentially be improved. Let’s examine several of
these channels.
Corporate Codes of Conduct
In Hong Kong, a network of non-governmental organizations has long been
active in raising public consciousness about the problems of working men and
women both in Hong Kong itself and in the neighboring provinces of the
People’s Republic. One such group, the Christian Industrial Committee (CIC),W2
founded in 1967, pioneered in exposing the health and safety perils in the
toy and other factories owned by Hong Kong and other foreign investors. In a
1987 report on the rising rate of industrial accidents, the Committee wrote:
"None of us should stand by with folded hands," and added, "We cannot rely
on the government alone for improving industrial safety."
That message took on greater urgency after the Zhili disaster in 1993,
followed by the deaths of 11 workers in June 1994, when their illegally
constructed dormitory at a Hong Kong-funded toy factory in Shenzhen
collapsed. The CIC and a dozen other Hong Kong NGOs sprang into action as a
coalition to issue a set of standards, called a Charter on the Safe
Production of Toys, and to agitate for those standards to protect the lives
and limbs of toy workers.
In 1995, the Coalition issued a new report, based on interviews with workers
in nine factories, on how widely toy companies violated the Charter. It
asked the Hong Kong Toy Industry Council, which represented many major
investors in China, to embrace the Charter, and got a flat refusal.
"Somebody is out of their minds," an industry spokesman said. The Coalition
then launched an international campaign, with activists in 10 countries.
They warned of a boycott against those who failed to adopt the Charter and
improve their contractors’ labor abuses.
Reacting to the campaign, the International Council of Toy Industries, an
association of 20 national toy associations, adopted a code of labor
practices in 1995 and has revised it at least twice since then. In 1997,
Mattel, the world’s largest toy corporation, adopted its own corporate code
covering 18 Mattel-owned plants and some 300 contractor-operated factories
in China and elsewhere. The announcement came a month before Christmas and a
year after a Dateline NBC TV report that girls as young as 13 were making
clothes for Mattel’s Barbie doll in Indonesia. Corporate codes on labor
practices began to proliferate in the toy industry and beyond. According to
a survey of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, they now number at least 240.
Significantly, of all the core worker rights promulgated by the UN’s
International Labor Organization, the one that is the most commonly violated
is the right to organize. Most corporate codes either ignore it or fail to
implement it, except perhaps in the corporation’s home country. Many
conveniently qualify that right by making it subject to "local law." The
code of business practices of the International Council of Toy Industries,
for example, stipulates that "all workers are entitled to freely exercise
their rights of employee representation as provided by local law."W3
That’s quite a loophole, given the fact that so much global production these
days comes from China, where the government outlaws the right to unionize
and the police are brutal in suppressing it.
The Toy Industry Association has taken additional steps, which may have only
PR as their inspiration. The association president, Tom Conley, in July
2002, announced two initiatives by his association: developing "a special
working relationship with the Chinese government’s workplace safety
agencies" and setting up an independent unit in Hong Kong to audit
compliance with the industry’s code of conduct and to offer training in
compliance with the code.W4
Are these corporate responsibility codes only public relations gimmicks, or
are they potentially useful instruments for advancing worker rights? Both,
concluded four Hong Kong NGOs in 1999, five years after proposing a code of
conduct for the toy industry. In Change, the newsletter of the
Christian Industrial Committee, they analyzed what they called "the dual
nature of the codes":
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On the one hand, the codes involve a "great deal of moral posturing and
superficial public relations stunts," without improving working conditions
on the production line.
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At the same time, the codes provide the "leverage through which we can
pressure companies to improve their working situation and hopefully
create conditions that facilitate the right to organize and the right to
collective bargaining" (italics in the original).
So far, this leverage has fallen far short of its potential. Above all, it
has not given workers the leverage they need to organize unions of their own
(see special section, "Growing Worker Activism.").
Consumer Pressure
Once considered a useful tool, consumer boycotts are now recognized as
largely unrealistic. Made-in-China goods swamp stores in the United
States. Alternative choices, say of a doll made in South Korea, are
exceedingly rare. And so are the parents and grandparents who will deny
little Jane or Johnny a popular game or doll just because it comes from
in China.
Consumers will not carry the full burden of wiping out sweatshops, and
they cannot. Yet they are not powerless. They can and do exert pressure
on the firms whose products they buy--for instance, by asking companies
for copies of their codes of conduct, by complaining to store managers
about a lack of choice among the countries where goods are made, by
writing letters of concern to the White House, Congress, and the media,
and by joining demonstrations against violations of the human rights of
workers in China. The consumer strategy advocated by Kernaghan of the
National Labor Committee is to concentrate pressure on giant retailers
like Wal-Mart and Toys "R" Us, and big manufacturers like Mattel and
Hasbro, asking them to insist that overseas toy manufacturers obey the
law and allow trade unions.
International Trade Reforms
International and U.S.-China trade agreements have fueled two engines of
China’s economic growth--globalized trade and investment. A major and
little known component of those agreements is their network of
enforceable protections for the property rights of individuals and
corporations engaged in cross-border trade and investment. A major
omission in those agreements is any kind of similar protection for the
rights of the many millions of its workers employed in making toys and
other products.
The AFL-CIO and many other organizations in the U.S. and abroad have
long pressed for a worker rights dimension to balance the rules in trade
and investment agreements such as those administered by the Geneva-based
World Trade Organization. But the WTO has steadfastly refused even to
discuss proposals to establish a study group that would discuss the
idea. |
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What You Can Do
How can you help? Right now, there’s no organized international consumer
campaign aimed at improving working conditions and allowing unions in
China, but consider these ideas:
1. Photocopy this article and take it with you the next time you visit
Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, or any other toy retailer. Give it to the manager
and tell him orally, and also in a letter--
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that you are concerned about the plight of the millions of women and
men who make our toys under sweatshop conditions; and
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that Wal-Mart, Toys "R" Us, and other retailers should live up to the
promises that their national business group, the Toy Industry
Association, made in the code of fair labor practices--and allow
Chinese workers to form independent unions.
2. Write a letter covering the same points to Tom Conley, president of
the Toy Industry Association, 1115 Broadway, Suite 400, New York, NY
10010. You might remind him of his July statement on "Setting the
Standard for Social Responsibility," which you can read at
www.toy-tia.org/industry/news/exchange/0207.html.
3. Check anti-sweatshop Web sites, such as that of the National Labor
Committee (at www.nlcnet.org) in the
United States and the Christian Industrial Committee (www.hkcic.org.hk)
in Hong Kong, for reports on pressing problems and how you can help.
4. Become better informed on how U.S. integration into the global
economy brings us vast benefits as consumers but also opens up
opportunities for us to make sure that working men and women gain rights
now denied. See especially the Web site of the AFL-CIO at
www.aflcio.org/globaleconomy/.
--R.S.
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The reason, according to widespread misinformation, is that developing
countries are very strongly opposed. Actually, the strongest opposition
comes from the governments of some developing countries. In
many of these countries, the unions agree that the WTO’s protections are
unbalanced and should be broadened to cover the interests of the vulnerable
working women and men in the global economy. That idea has such merit that
the struggle to adopt it is sure to continue. A built-in obstacle, however,
is that the WTO is run by government ministers of trade or
finance--officials who, at the international level, are unlikely to deviate
from their role at home, which definitely is not to serve as an advocate of
worker rights.
The AFL-CIO has used every possible opening domestically to demand that the
President and the Congress make U.S. and global trade with China conditional
on progress in the human rights of China’s people, including its working men
and women. All to no avail, either in Democratic or Republican
administrations. China’s economy keeps growing, its workers keep paying the
price, and U.S. trade with China continues, unmoved by the misery it’s
subsidizing.
What will China’s greater integration into the global economy through
accession to the WTO mean for China’s workers? Australian National
University’s Anita Chan, author of "China’s Workers Under Assault" and other
writings based on extensive field research in China, expects that the free
trade rules of the expanded WTO will intensify competition among developing
countries to lower wages and working conditions. "In the migrant worker
areas in south China, along the Coast," she says, "I don’t see the
conditions getting better, only worse."
The above three strategies--codes of conduct, consumer action, and demands
for trade reform--pursued with complementary initiatives, help to keep the
pressure on, and help to prevent greater abuses. But thus far they have
failed to produce substantial forward movement. Significant progress depends
on more pressure for change from within China itself. Pressure from outside
is necessary, but it does not suffice, particularly without the presence in
China of organizations of workers, by workers, and for workers. What could
change this is the growing unrest among Chinese workers--and early signs
that the unrest could slowly germinate an organized worker presence in
China.
| The Struggle for
Democracy in China: Resources for Teachers
This new resource guide from the AFT's International Affairs department
offers everything teachers need to develop a unit on the ongoing
struggle for democracy in China.
Issues addressed include human and worker rights, child labor,
education, the environment, corruption, and ethnic minorities.
To order, send $5 check or money order, payable to AFT, to: The China
Project, International Affairs Department, American Federation of
Teachers, 555 New Jersey Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20001. For more
information, e-mail
iad@aft.org. |
Webnotes
Resources from "Toying with Lives"
W1
"Toys of Misery"
can be found
online at www.nlcnet.org.
W2
For more
information in the Christian Industrial Committee, visit
www.cic.org.hk.
W3
For the text
of the
code of business practices of the International Council of Toy
Industries, see
www.toy.icti.org/mission/bizpracice.htm.
W4
"Setting the Standard
for Corporate Responsibility," statement issued July 2002, is available
at
www.toy-tia.org/industry/news/exchange/0207.html). |
Also See Related Stories
By Robert Senser: "Growing Worker Activism."
Remarks by Han Dongfang: "Creating Political
Space To Defend Chinese Workers"
Robert A. Senser is an editor and freelance writer
specializing in worker rights issues. He spent 21 years in the Foreign
Service as a labor attaché and 10 years with the Asian-American Free Labor
Institute, which at the time was the AFL-CIO’s branch for supporting the
rights of Asian workers. He now runs Human Rights for Workers (www.senser.com),
a Web site that focuses on the need to establish workers’ rights in every
country through governmental or non-governmental channels. The site contains
a monthly bulletin, links to many of Senser’s articles, and links to other
Web sites on labor and trade issues.
Articles may be
reproduced for noncommercial personal or educational use only; additional
permission is required for any other reprinting of the documents.
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