CHINA: As happy young faces in the West play with their Christmas gifts, chances are the toys were made by a child earning 30 cents an hour in China. Jasper Becker reports from Beijing
These days Santa's toys are all churned out in the crowded sweat shops of the Pearl River Delta, not by elves but by 1.5 million peasant girls sweating through a sub-tropical summer in 12- or even 14-hour shifts inhaling toxic fumes.
A 10-year campaign to introduce basic workers' rights has barely begun to improve the shabby treatment of the girls.
"The Chinese toy factory workers are more exploited than before," said May Wong of the Asia Monitor Resource Centre which, together with the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, has produced detailed investigations of the toy industry.
"Wages have actually gone down, there is so much surplus labour," agrees Monina Wong, a researcher with the HK Coalition for the Charter on the Safe Production of Toys, who is preparing a fresh study of China's $7.5 billion worth of annual exports. "Conditions have improved a little, especially regarding overtime because big buyers are putting pressure on sub-contractors," she said.
However, she stressed that workers still have no contracts or unions and little protection from owners who sometimes withhold part or even all of the wages due.
China now makes 70 per cent of the world's toys, and its exports have doubled in just eight years. In addition, it exported nearly a billion dollars' worth of Christmas-related goods, half of it to the United States. A little of this flow of plastic Christmas trees, ornaments and lights, tinsel, plastic angels and bells, Santa suits and framed pictures of Jesus and bible scenes is also ending inside China.
Beijing is full of Christmas decorations. Shops have sprayed Christmas trees and Santas on their windows, and Christmas cards are common, even though Jesus is largely absent. Instead Santa Claus seems transformed into a new Chinese patron deity of consumerism.
Hong Kong and Taiwanese companies which make goods for the likes of Hasbro, Mattel and Disney have shifted production to the mainland, but the cheap unregulated labour has prompted manufacturers to leave other countries such as Thailand or Indonesia.
"One of the main reasons they are moving to China is the increase in workers' activism in those countries," said Mona Wong, who researches the activities of Hong Kong companies which employ a third of China's toy factory workforce.
China has 6,000 manufacturers, largely funded by foreign companies and clustered in the Pearl River Delta, or Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces.
"People who buy toys should care. Conditions in the toy sector are probably worse than other factories," said Dr Anita Chan, an expert on Chinese labour issues at the Austrian National University.
Toy factories hire the least-skilled workers, who spend their time on monotonous tasks such as painting colours with a brush or spraying, or clipping the pieces together. They have just two days off a month, although by law they are entitled to weekends and a 40-hour week.
Sixty per cent are young women between 17 and 23 years old who live cramped in company dormitories, 15 to a room, earning just 30 cents an hour and often inhaling spray paints, glue fumes and toxic dust. Over time this can be fatal, and in the short term the workers often complain of dizziness, headaches and skin rashes.
"A big problem in the toy industry is the occupational and safety hazards because of the paint. I don't think enough attention has been paid to this," said Dr Chan. As temporary migrant workers, the girls are rarely covered by medical insurance although this is compulsory according to Chinese labour law. Some factories employ 200,000 workers, others are sub-sub-contractors with anything from a few dozen to 2,000 employees at the peak order season.
"The factory-owners, who tend to be Asians, say they are being pressed by the Western companies.
"They complain that their profit margin is getting smaller because the Western brand-name companies press them to improve work conditions but do not want to share the cost in raising labour standards," Dr Chan said.
This year China has introduced new laws on occupational health and safety, but campaigners say these tend to make the workers responsible for compliance and are hard to enforce.
"We are not even sure the factory-owners are getting rich. Some complain that the unit price of the production order by big-name buyers is too low for them even to provide the basic wages and benefits for the workers they hire," said May Wong
An investigation into the price of a Mattel Barbie doll, half of which is made in China, found that of the $10 retail price, $8 goes to transportation, marketing, retailing, wholesale and profit for Mattel.
OF THE remaining $2, $1 is shared by the management and transportation in Hong Kong, and 65 cents is shared by the raw materials from Taiwan, Japan, the US and Saudi Arabia. The remaining 35 cents is earned by producers in China for providing factory sites, labour and electricity.
"That investigation was two years ago. Since then the toy market has become more and more competitive," May Wong said.
When a brand-name company offers a production order, usually it is not big, and the delivery deadline is very tight because they are not sure whether the consumers like the new products or not.
Then the workers have to produce the order in a very short period of time and are sacked when there is no order. "We are not sure that even if the unit price is raised, the workers would benefit," she added.
The toy coalition campaign took off in 1993 when the Zhili toy factory in Shenzhen, which was making plastic toys for the Italian company Chicco, was swept by a fire which left 87 dead and 47 injured.
The workers were trapped by blocked exits and barred windows in dormitories built over the warehouse and factory.
It has taken seven years for the victims to receive compensation. The company gave 1.3 million Hong Kong dollars to the workers but this was never paid because a Chinese court withheld the list of names. In 1999, the money went to a mainland charity. Then campaigners traced the the victims themselves and came up with 120 names of families scattered in five provinces. The company eventually settled.
Although the Hong Kong factory-owner was jailed for two years, after he was released he opened another and is still producing toys for Chicco.
"There are still many fires like this one taking place. Just two years ago 16 workers were killed in the Gemao toy factory," May Wong said. Although big companies like Disney have drawn up codes of conduct, trying to enforce them in China is not easy.
"One toy factory I visited at the end of July showed signs of improvements because the brand come to check all the time," Dr Chan said.
"But whether part of the production has been secretly siphoned off to smaller factories that are not under the watchful of monitors, I can't say for sure. My guess is this that big factories might have shown some improvement, but not the smaller sub-sub-contractor," she said. One solution advocated by labour experts on the mainland is changing the restrictions on labour unions and organised strikes. Some foreign-funded factories do have unions, and there are party-run unions in Chinese factories, but they are either controlled by the management or just exist in name.
Chinese workers had the right to strike in the 1954 constitution, but this was taken away when it was amended in 1982. State property belonged to the workers so a strike was held to be against their interests. But now that the Communist Party is privatising the means of production, legal experts say it is only logical that they should be allowed trade union freedoms.