APRIL 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 4

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T H E    F R O N T

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"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 a consumer campaign in the United States and Europe. Labor rights and consumer groups are targetting U.S. toy companies that parcel out production work to contractors in Asian countries, demanding that U.S. companies design and enforce codes of conduct to ensure that their Asian subcontractors meet international wage and safety standards.

Workers in Asia, almost 90 percent of whom are women, work 10 to 14 hours a day, six or seven days a week, for paltry wages, labor activists say.

"An average child in the United States receives toys worth over $300 every year, whereas in poor Asian countries, toy workers are paid less than a dollar an hour," says Cheryl Graeve of the AFL-CIO.

"This is unfair," says Graeve. "We want toy companies to adopt fair labor standards in Asia."

Thousands of young girls and women who work in toy factories in Thailand and other parts of Asia are paid only $5 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).

"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 subcontractors, 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, but they turn a blind eye to violations of safety laws, AFL-CIO activists say.

"They are more concerned about foreign corporate investment to boost their economies than about workers' safety," says 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, J.C. Penny, Hasbro, Toys R Us, Fisher Price and Tyco, according to U.S. customs records.

ICFTU investigators who visited the fire site in late 1993 say a majority of the toy workers at Kader were employed on a contractual basis and were paid less than $4 a day.

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

TMA refused to comment on the demand that its members allow independent monitoring of working conditions in their plants. But spokesperson Jodi Levin told Multinational Monitor, "We have our own code of conduct. It's more than adequate."

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

Attracted by cheap labor 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, according to ICFTU.

In late December 1995, Jordan met David Miller, president of the TMA, in New York and asked him to revise the industry's code of conduct. The current TMA code deals only with forced and child labor. "It is the responsibility of the companies to prove that their subcontractors meet minimum standards," Jordan said in a statement. "They must guarantee that their products will not be produced under sweatshop-like conditions."

In response to pressure from the ICTFU and other labor advocacy groups, many European companies are moving to adopt codes of conduct to ensure wage and safety laws, AFL-CIO activists 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,'" says Graeve.

-- Haider Rizvi

	Home	Gross Income	Net Profits
Company	Country	(millions)*	(millions)*	Products include
Mattel	U.S.	$3,205	$256	Barbie, Fisher- Price, Disney
Hasbro	U.S.	$2,670	$179	Sindy, Action Man, Monopoly
Bandi	Japan	$1,231	$102	Power Rangers, Star Trek
Lego A/S	DK	$1,036	$127	Lego, Duplo
Nintendo	Japan	$4,856	$527	Game Boy, NES, Ultra 64
Sega	Japan	$3,540	$225	Game Gear, Pico
Toys R Us	U.S.	$8,746	$532	Retailer; some own brand toys

* 1994 FIGURES

SOURCE: CATHOLIC INSTITUTE FOR INT'L RELATIONS, TRADE UNION CONGRESS, WORLD DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT

WORLD DEVELOPMENT MOVEMENT