The ugly side of the toy story
The colourful playthings on our shop shelves come from Chinese factories where low-paid migrant workers labour in poor conditions while their children remain behind in the countryside, writes Rob Stock.
Making the toys that give Kiwi children so much enjoyment creates millions of ‘‘left-behind’’ children in China, according to workers advocacy organisation China Labour Watch.
They are the estimated 61 million children who remain in their rural home towns and villages while their parents work in faraway cities for low wages, in factories including the ones making the toys sold in New Zealand.
Rocked by international news coverage in 2016, the global toy industry’s ‘‘ethical’’ certification scheme, which boasts members including McDonald’s, Disney, Mattel, Lego, Schleich and Crayola, created a ‘‘family friendly spaces’’ programme to allow left-behind children to spend their holidays near their parents.
But at the end of 2019 just 30 of the 1200 factories in the scheme were participating.
The left-behind children are the offspring of the ‘‘nongmingong’’ – internal Chinese migrants who often live in factory dormitories. Chinese factories churning out plastic and plush playthings rely on these workers to meet the insatiable demand from Western countries, and increasingly, China’s own domestic toy market.
China has become the factory of the world, and it has helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, but China Labour Watch says factory pay remains below a realistic living wage.
China Labour Watch accused Western toy makers of contracting Chinese factories to make their products so cheaply that nongmingong on suppressed wages cannot afford to bring their children with them to set up home near the factories they work in.
‘‘There have been no improvements to one of the most fundamental factors contributing to the phenomenon of left-behind children – low wages and long hours for workers,’’ China Labour Watch founder Li Quiang says.
The left-behind children are often left with grandparents, he says, but as many as 2 million have no adults living with them.
‘‘Given the nature of the work in the toy industry, children of migrant workers are inevitably impacted. Migrant workers place priority on work and earning an income that sustains their family, rather than building an emotionally supportive home,’’ China Labour Watch said in its Dark Side of the Glittering World report in November.
‘‘Their grandparents and other family members are usually unable to provide the adequate educational and support needed. As children rarely see their parents, this significantly affects their development and emotional wellbeing.’’
China has taken some measures to enable migrants’ children to join schools in the areas their parents moved to to work but the problem remained, the report says.
Elaine Lu, programme manager at New Yorkbased China Labour Watch, said that even if the children were with their parents, peak season overtime of 100 hours a month would barely leave any family time.
The real power lies with Western toy companies, which need to pay more for toy production to allow wages to rise, she says.
Unless they do, Chinese factories would continue to keep wages low for fear of losing contracts to factories in even lower-wage countries like Cambodia and Vietnam, Lu says.
‘‘It does make one cynical,’’ she said. Statistics NZ said toy prices had actually declined in real terms since 2006.
Mark Robertson, senior vice-president at the International Council of Toy Industries (ICTI) Ethical Toy Programme, said the Family-Friendly Space factory programme was expanding.
‘‘In 2020 we plan to grow the programme further to cover 50 toy factories in China,’’ Robertson said.
ICTI does not publish a list of which factories have the programme, and which do not.
There was no way for the public to find out whether a specific toy, for example McDonald’s
‘‘It can be difficult as a parent to balance all the social and environmental factors with the desires of your children, especially when advertising comes in to play.’’
Mother-of-two Karla Capper
Happy Meal toys, were made in a factory which had nongmingong workers with left-behind children, or whether the Family-Friendly Space programme was available in those factories.
ICTI is also providing ‘‘migrant parents training’’ (MPT), which helps workers build stronger relationships with their left-behind children, Robertson said.
‘‘In 2019 we delivered 20 MPT sessions reaching 859 workers at 13 factories, and we plan to deliver a further 5 sessions of MPT in the first quarter 2020.’’
New Zealanders are given few insights into where and how the toys they buy are made. Mother-of-two Karla Capper said she hoped, ‘‘probably naively’’, that New Zealand distributors were being responsible in this respect.
‘‘It can be difficult as a parent to balance all the social and environmental factors with the desires of your children, especially when advertising comes in to play.’’
She said that if it was easier to see which brands were made in factories that were treating workers well, she would shop accordingly.
Even toymakers signed up to the ICTI Ethical Toy Programme do not use its green, blue, orange and red logo on their packaging, leaving shoppers
unaware of its existence.
The programme claims more than two-thirds of the world’s toys are produced in factories it covers, though China Labour Watch dubs it ‘‘a glamorised public relations tool for the global toy industry’’.
China Labour Watch’s November 2019 report into five ICTI-audited factories also alleged breaches of Chinese labour laws, including peak production season monthly overtime of 60 to 126 hours per employee despite saying Chinese labour law limiting overtime to 36 hours a month, and a maximum of three hours’ overtime a day.
The factories covered by its report make products for companies including Disney, Hasbro, Mattel, Lego, Schleich, and Melissa & Doug, China Labour Watch says.
ICTI ‘‘investigated’’ the allegations, and while it ‘‘refuted’’ many, earlier this year, accepted several dozen were true.
In all factories, monthly overtime in peak seasons was well above 36 hours, but was within ICTI’s ‘‘working hours standard’’ of 72 hours’ total work each week.
In one factory, queues for the dormitory showers could be an hour.
In another, clocking in or out took up to 15 minutes, making for an hour of unpaid work a day.
Poor air quality, lack of training and safety equipment, unpaid pre-employment training, bed bugs in worker dormitories, decrepit bunk beds, unbroken work stretches of 15 days, poor toilet facilities, and partially blocked fire exits were identified by ICTI in one or more of the factories.
One factory even had a curfew, not allowing workers to leave after midnight without a specific excuse, such as illness.
ICTI audits are carried out by third-party auditors, which ICTI ‘‘expected . . . to adhere to the highest standards of integrity’’, and it had introduced a confidential whistleblower channel.
Simon Holdsworth, at the New Zealand Toy Distributors Association, said the primary focus from New Zealand parents is on toy safety.
But behind the scenes, big-name toy sellers, including The Warehouse and Farmers, have ethical supplier terms and conditions toy distributors agreed to abide by.
These terms and conditions put the onus on suppliers to demonstrate their products are made in factories which complied with local labour laws.
Like the ICTI programme, these ethical supplier terms and conditions do not reference wider social problems such as the left-behind children, and consumers cannot see evidence of whether the policies really prevent toys being made under unsafe or exploitative conditions.
‘‘It’s pretty hard to verify if the toy you purchase has been ethically made,’’ Lu said.
‘‘It’s an issue. We get that question from the public a lot.’’
The Warehouse relies on policing its own supply chains, as well as accepting audit reports from third-party schemes such as ICTI, but its ethical-supplier policy excludes reports from one audit scheme, and it reserves the right to reject suppliers whose reports may be ‘‘too good to be true’’.
It says glowing audit reports ‘‘may indicate a very high level of compliance with certain standards which is significantly at odds with our knowledge of like local norms and practices’’.