LABOUR-ASIA: No Joy from Asian Toys

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

WASHINGTON, Feb 20 1996 (IPS) - Labour and consumer advocacy groups are demanding that U.S. toy companies design codes of conduct to ensure that their Asian subcontractors meet international wage and labour standards.

“I don’t want your toy,” a 10-year-old Illinois boy wrote to the Arkansas-based Wal-mart discount chain last year. He was returning a ‘Power Ranger’ that had been assembled in Thailand.

The child’s letter to Wal-mart is part of the consumer campaign. The groups are targeting U.S. toy companies that parcel out production work to contractors in Asian countries.

Toy workers in Asia — almost 90 percent of them women — work 10 to 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week on low wages, labour activists say. The workers get no overtime payment and are denied health care, housing, and medical treatment. The manufacturing plants often lack safety equipment.

“An average child in the United States receives toys worth over 300 dollars, whereas in poor Asian countries, toy workers are paid less than a dollar an hour,” said Chyrol Graeve of the American Federation of Labour and Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO), the largest trade union body in the United States.

“This is unfair,” said Graeve. “We want toy companies to adopt fair labour standards in Asia.”

Thousands of young girls and women who work in toy factories in Thailand and other parts of Asia are paid only five dollars for 14 hours a day. And workers have been fired for demanding more pay, according to the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).

Consumer groups are demanding that U.S. companies implement codes of conduct that would ensure the enforcement of wage and safety laws. They also want U.S. companies to agree to monitor these laws. They argue that most of the toy plants in Asia are either directly owned or subcontracted by U.S., European and Japanese multinational firms.

“Working conditions in these factories fail to meet even basic internationally agreed standards,” says Bill Jordan, General secretary of the ICFTU.

More than 250 toy workers have lost their lives in the past two years as a result of fires and other industrial accidents in China and Thailand. Trade unionists hold multinational companies and the governments in the region equally responsible for factory fires.

Chinese and Thai officials admit that industrial accidents were due to inadequate safety measures, yet in order to appease foreign investors, they turn a blind eye to violations of safety laws, AFL- CIO activists say.

“They (governments) are more concerned about foreign corporate investment to boost their economies than about workers safety,” said Graeve. “Knowing this, the Western companies don’t worry much about unsafe factories or workers health.”

A fire at Thailand’s Kader Toy factory killed more than 180 workers in May 1993. Kader manufactures toys for some of the biggest names in the U.S. toy industry, including Arco, Kenner, Gund, J.C. Penny, Hasbro, Toys R US, Fisher price, and Tyco, according to the U.S. Customs records.

ICTFU investigators who visited the fire site in late 1993 say a majority of toy workers at Kader were employed on a contractual basis and were paid less than four dollars a day.

In contrast to these conditions, multinational companies’ profits continue to rise.

Toy Manufacturers of America (TMA), a New York-based industry trade group, says that U.S. firms made 20 billion dollars’ worth of sales in 1995. In 1994, their net profit was 900 million dollars — almost 30 percent more than the total profit of European and Japanese companies.

TMA refused to comment on the demand that its members allow independent monitoring of working conditions in their plants. But spokeswoman Jodi Levin told IPS: “We have our own code of conduct, and it’s more than adequate.”

The leading toy companies actively engaged in subcontracting in Asia include the Mattel Inc., and Toys R Us in the United States and Hasbro Inc., Bandai, Nintendo, and Sega in Japan.

Attracted by cheap labour and weak enforcement of wage and safety laws, some of these companies depend heavily on subcontracted production in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and the Philippines.

“About 75 percent of toys sold in the United Kingdom are made in Asia,” says a recent study by the ICTFU.

“It is the responsibility of the companies to prove that their subcontractors meet minimum standards,” Bill Jordan, ICFTU General secretary said in a recent statement. “They must guarantee that their products will not be produced under sweatshop- like conditions.”

In response to pressure from the ITFU and other labour advocacy groups, many European companies are moving to adopt codes of conduct to ensure enforcement of wage and safety laws, AFL-CIO activists here say. But they complain that the response from U.S. companies is disappointing.

“So far, we have not seen any company saying, ‘yes, we will do it’,” said Graeve.