Disney Sweatshops????

[floridaminnie]

Stop having their products made there? Inspect the companies they are using more frequently?

That's not going to happen, b/c that's not the world we live in.

 

[Duckfan-in-Chicago]

I would prefer that they were made in America. I would prefer a lot of things were. I would bet that almost every major retailer has something made in a sweatshop. I saw on a news show that some of the people who worked for those sweatshops cherished those jobs. If the wages got too high, they wouldn't have these jobs that we would consider below us. I saw that a lot of people were put out of work after Kathy Lee's sweatshops were exposed. When I was younger, the world was a lot more black and white. The world is a very grey place.

 

[shelby_36]

I know companies go overseas to make this stuff more affordable, I too wish they were all made here but i know that isn't likely to happen. I would like these companies to help to improve working conditions overseas and they could start by only letting their products be made in reputatble factories. I'm not saying they should go over there and change to governement, but if each company policed their own factories 9or the factories their stuff is being made at) then it would improve. But by saying 'its not my problem" "Its not my responsibility" or "Everyone else does it" Is being ignorant and will do nothing to saove these problems.
Then people wonder whythe world looks down on the US. We don't mind abusing THEIR workers..just don't abuse ours.

 

[Duckfan-in-Chicago]

Then people wonder whythe world looks down on the US. We don't mind abusing THEIR workers..just don't abuse ours.

These countries actually want these factories in their country. These governments allow these sweatshops to exist. If interviewed the people who work there would say they'd like more money, but I don't know of anyone in this country who says they're happy with what they make, and if offered would turn down a raise. I don't think you've quite got your finger on the problem with US/world relations.

 

[shelby_36]

'forced employees to work 10 to 13-hour work days and paid them below the legal minimum at the factories."

Are you FORCED to work? Do you get paid UNDER Minimum wage? So if the governement says "here abuse my workers" then we should say "ok"? that is ridiculous. And also the gov. could care less if they are treated well..they get their money that is all that counts. Why would THEY stop sweatshops?

 

[floridaminnie]

http://www.thestandard.com.hk/stdn/std/Metro/GH19Ak01.html


Disney vows to investigate claims of abuse at factories



Wendy Leung


August 19, 2005



Allegations of dangerous work conditions, overwork and underpayment in mainland factories manufacturing merchandise for Hong Kong Disneyland will be investigated, the theme park's officials said.

Disney's response came after a group of Hong Kong students and scholars claimed in a 29-page report that factory workers in Dongguan, Shenzhen and Zhongshan are being abused by their bosses.

Disneyland spokesperson Alannah Goss said Thursday: ``Disney takes these claims very seriously. We were not aware of the violations that have been mentioned in the factories and we will investigate these claims diligently.''

The group teamed up with Disney Hunter, an SAR concern group which keeps an eye on the labor practices of Hong Kong Disneyland.

They alleged the company shirked its corporate and social responsibilities by neglecting to look into what they described as the deprivation of mainland workers. Their accusations followed four months of research.

Goss said if the company's own investigation reveals the factories are abusing their workers, ``we will terminate our contract with the factories.''

But the concern group's chief coordinator, Billy Hung, said termination of the contract would mean the workers would lose their jobs.

``We hope Disney will talk to the contractors to see how to protect the interests of the workers, rather than terminate the contracts,'' he said.

According to the report, Disney's mainland contractors often force workers to put in long hours under dangerous working conditions.

Hung said the group had documented the plight of workers at four printing factories across the border, adding

that Disney should have checked out the factories before awarding the contracts.

``If they had looked into the factories earlier, they would have found out they are treating their workers illegally,'' Hung claimed.

One of the factories named in the report, Hung Hing Printing Group, which has offices in Shenzhen and Zhongshan, denied it underpays and overworks its workers.

``We have complied with the labor ordinance of China. We are now following up this issue and have no further comment to make,'' a spokesman said.


According to the report, workers in four factories are underpaid, receiving an hourly wage of 2.7 yuan (HK$2.59) instead of the legal wage of 3.33 to 3.43 yuan.

The employees also worked between 260 and 312 hours a month, which exceeds the 100 hours overtime set by the government. However, no overtime pay is given, the report alleged.

More important are the dangerous working conditions in the factories, which do not provide proper training in use of the equipment, which has resulted in workers suffering broken fingers, the report claimed.

``This is a very common injury among the workers,'' research-team member Vivian Yau said.

She claimed those who were injured were not compensated because the factory owners did not inform the insurance companies due to the no-claims bonuses in the policies.

``It's really horrible. The employers would just take the injured staff to the hospital to have the wounds bandaged,'' Yau said.

The report urged Disney to be more socially responsible and name factories which are violating the law.

``Consumers will then have the chance to know if they are buying merchandise from an unethical factory,'' Hung said.

``Other multi-national corporations, including Adidas, publish annual reports on the number of workers injured, as well as naming those factories violating the law,'' he said.

wendy.leung@singtaonewscorp.com





Copyright 2005, The Standard, Sing Tao Newspaper Group and Global China Group. All rights reserved. No content may be redistributed or republished, either electronically or in print, without express written consent of The Standard.


So Disney is investigating it and if it's true, they are canceling the contract, which isn't what anyone wants.

 

[floridaminnie]

'forced employees to work 10 to 13-hour work days and paid them below the legal minimum at the factories."

Are you FORCED to work? Do you get paid UNDER Minimum wage? So if the governement says "here abuse my workers" then we should say "ok"? that is ridiculous. And also the gov. could care less if they are treated well..they get their money that is all that counts. Why would THEY stop sweatshops?

First off I live in a democracy which China is not. So you can't compare apples to oranges.

 

[shelby_36]

I'm glad they are going to investigate it. but this guy said THURSDAY he didn't have a clue. maybe someone should fax him this article... Disney working conditions is nothing new.

By the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee
December 1, 2000

It is no longer news simply to expose the unacceptable working conditions of Disney sweatshops to the world. Although Disney's code of conduct was established a few years ago and the company has repeatedly declared its unshakable commitment to respect workers' rights, the stories of exploitation of workers from Haiti, Burma, and Vietnam to Mainland China, producing and supplying to Disney keep surfacing. Long working hours, poverty wage, workplace hazards, awful food, and dangerous and overcrowding dorms are still iron-clad facts revealed in this research on Disney sweatshops.

A year after the release of our previous Disney report, Mulan's sisters: Working for Disney is no Fairy Tale, HKCIC conducted a follow-up research project on the working and living conditions in factories in South China supplying Disney. We did follow-up reports on three factories we visited for the previous research report. We also investigated the working and living conditions in 12 factories producing for Disney in Guangdong province. They include 5 toy factories, 3 accessory factories, 2 garment factories, a plastic factory and a watch factory. They are located in Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. This research was conducted from March to November 2000. All twelve factories were found to be manufacturing for Disney within this period. Some of them are regular suppliers, others are seasonal suppliers. Our researchers interviewed five to fifteen workers from each factory.

Through this research, we found that most of the products manufactured in these factories are exported to the North American and European market. Workers are mainly young migrant women. They work up to seven days a week and 12-18 hours a day, for as little as RMB 400-700 (US$49-85) a month. Even worse, some of them are forced to work overnight in the peak season. Moreover, there are many unreasonable systems of fines in the factories. It is very common for workers to be fined RMB 5-300 (US$0.60-37.00) for breaking a particular factory regulation, e.g. arriving late, leaving without permission, not switching off the lights in the dorms during the daytime. On the subject of food and accommodation, many workers complain that the food provided in the factories is as worse than "pig's feed." Some workers have to sleep on triple-decker bunk beds in overcrowded rooms. Furthermore, many factories do not respect occupational health and safety regulations. Workers have to labor under very dangerous conditions.

The "so-called" independent monitoring system does not help much in improving workers' living and working conditions. On the contrary, it subjects workers to new threats. It is very common for management to coerce workers into signing falsified records or answering the monitors' questions "properly" according to management-prepared scripts. Workers are bullied and penalized if they fail to do so.

Obviously, all of these practices not only violate Chinese Labor Law but Disney's Code of Conduct as well. Most workers know little or nothing about the company code. It seems the promises, principles and clauses written in the company's code can be found only in a virtual "Disneyland." None of them are implemented in the real world.



And if you note : China is not a democracy but they do have labor laws. and Disney is helping to violate them by not stopping the illegal policies.

 

[floridaminnie]

Yeah, but China has "labor laws" not to actually enforce but more for the UN to say see we have these laws. They really don't have them to enforce.

 

[floridaminnie]

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Hamermesh/sweatshops.htm


TWO CHEERS FOR SWEATSHOPS



Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, New York Times, 9/24/00



It was breakfast time, and the food stand in the village in northeastern Thailand was crowded. Maesubin Sisoipha, middle-aged woman cooking the food, was friendly, her por*tions large and the price right For the equivalent of about 5 cents, she offered a huge green mango leaf filled with rice, fish paste and fried beetles. It was a hearty breakfast, if one

didn't mind the odd antenna left sticking in one's teeth.

One of the half-dozen men and women sitting on a bench eating was a sinewy; bare-chested laborer in his late 30's named Mongkol Latlakorn. It was a hot, lazy day, and so we started chatting idly about the food and, eventually, our families. Mongkol mentioned that his 4aughter, Darin, was 15, and his voice softened as he spoke of her. She was beautiful and smart, and her father's hopes rested on her.

"Is she in school?" we asked.

"Oh, no," Mongkol said, his eyes sparkling with amusement. "She's working in a factory in Bangkok She's making clothing for export to America." He explained that she was paid $2 a day for a nine-hojir shift, six days a week.

"It's dangerous work," Mongkol added. "Twice the needles went right through her hands. But the managers bandaged up her hands, and both times she got better again and went back to work."

"How terrible," we murmured sympathetically.

Mongkol looked up, puzzled. "It's good pay," he said. "I hope she can keep that job. There's all this talk about factories closing now, and she said there are rumors that her factory might close. I hope that doesn't happen. I don't know what she would do then."

He was not, of course, indifferent to his daughter's suffering; he simply had a different perspective from ours - not only when it came to food but also when it came to what constituted desirable work.

Nothing captures the difference in mind-set between East and West more than attitudes toward sweatshops. Nike and other American compa*nies have been hammered in the Western press over the last decade for pro*ducing shoes, toys and other products in grim little factories with dismal conditions. Protests against sweatshops and the dark forces of globaliza*tion that they seem to represent have become common at meetings of the World Bank and the World Trade Organization and, this month, at a World Economic Forum in Australia, livening up the scene for Olympic athletes arriving for the competition. Yet sweatshops that seem brutal from the vantage point of an American sitting in his living room can appear tantaliz*ing to a Thai laborer getting by on beetles.

Fourteen years ago, we moved to Asia and began reporting there. Like most Westerners, we arrived in the region outraged at sweatshops. In time, though, we came to accept the view supported by most Asians: that the campaign against sweatshops risks harming the very people it is intended to help. For beneath their grime, sweatshops are a clear sign of the indus*trial revolution that is beginning to reshape Asia.

This is not to praise sweatshops. Some managers are brutal in the way they house workers in firetraps, expose children to dangerous chemicals, deny bathroom breaks, demand sexual favors, force people to work double shifts or dismiss anyone who tries to organize a union. Agitation for im*proved safety conditions can be helpful, just as it was in 19th-century Eu*rope. But Asian workers would be aghast at the idea of American consum*ers boycotting certain toys or clothing in protest. The simplest way to help the poorest Asians would be to buy more from sweatshops, not less.



ON OUR FIRST EXTENDED TRIP TO CHINA, IN 1987, WE TRAVELED TO

the Pearl River delta in the south of the country. There we visited several factories, including one in the boomtown of Dongguan, where about 100 female workers sat at workbenches stitching together bits of leather to make purses for a Hong Kong company. We chatted with several women as their fingers flew over their work and asked about their hours.

"I start at about 6:30, after breakfast, and go until about 7 p.m.," explained one shy teenage girl. "We break for lunch, and I take half an hour off then."

"You do this six days a week?"

"Oh, no. Every day."

"Seven days a week?"

'Yes." She laughed at our surprise. "But then I take a week or two off at Chinese New Year to go back to my village."



The others we talked to all seemed to regard it as a plus that the factory allowed them to work long hours. Indeed, some had sought out this fac*tory precisely because it offered them the chance to earn more.

"It's actually pretty annoying how hard they want to work," said the factory manager, a Hong Kong man. "It means we have to worry about se*curity and have a supervisor around. Most constantly"

It sounded pretty dreadful, and it was. We and other journalists wrote about the problems of child labor and oppressive conditions in both China and South Korea. But, looking back, our worries were excessive. Those sweatshops tended to generate the wealth to solve the problems they cre*ated. If Americans had reacted to the horror stories in the 1980's by curb*ing imports of those sweatshop products, then neither southern China nor South Korea would have registered as much progress as they have today.

The truth is, those grim factories in Dongguan and the rest of southern China contributed to a remarkable explosion of wealth. In the years since our first conversations there, we've returned many times to Dongguan and the surrounding towns and seen the transformation. Wages have risen from about $50 a month to $250 a month or more today Factory con*ditions have improved as businesses have scrambled to attract and keep the best laborers. A private housing market has emerged, and video arcades and computer schools have opened to cater to workers with rising in*comes. A hint of a middle class has appeared - as has China's closest thing to a Western-style independent newspaper; Southern Weekend.

Partly because of these tens of thousands of sweatshops, China's j economy has become one of the hottest in the world. Indeed, if China's i¾30 provinces were counted as individual countries, then the 20 fastest *growing countries in the world between 1978 and 1995 would all have been Chinese. When Britain launched the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th century, it took 58 years for per capita output to double. In China, per cap*ita output has been doubling every 10 years.

In fact, the most vibrant parts of Asia are nearly all in what might be called the Sweatshop Belt, from China and South Korea to Malaysia, Indo*-



nesia and even Bangladesh and India. Today these sweatshop coun*tries control about one-quarter of the global economy. As the in*dustrial revolution spreads through China and India, there are good reasons to think that Asia will continue to pick up speed. Some World Bank forecasts show Asia's share of global gross do*mestic product rising to 55 to 60 percent by about 2025- roughly the West's share at its peak half a century ago. The sweatshops have helped lay the groundwork for a historic economic realignment that is putting Asia back on its feet. Countries are rebounding from the economic crisis of 1997-98 and the sweatshops - seen by Westerners as evidence of moribund economies - actually reflect an industrial revolution that is raising living standards in the East.



OF COURSE, IT MAY SOUND SILLY TO SAY THAT SWEATSHOPS

offer a route to prosperity, when wages in the poorest countries are sometimes less than $1 a day. Still, for an impoverished Indo*nesian or Bangladeshi woman with a handful of kids who would otherwise drop out of school and risk dying of mundane diseases like diarrhea, $1 or $2 a day can be a lifeLtransforming wage.

This was made abundantly clear in Cambodia, when we met a 40-year-old woman named Nhem Yen, who told us why she moved to an area with particularly lethal malaria. "We needed to eat," she said. 'And here there is wood, so we thought we could cut it and sell it."

But then Nhem Yen's daughter and son-in-law both died of ma*laria, leaving her with two grandchildren and five children of her own. With just one mosquito net, she had to choose which chil*dren would sleep protected and which would sleep exposed.

In Cambodia, a large mosquito net costs $5. If there had been a sweatshop in the area, however harsh or dangerous, Nhem Yen would have leapt at the chance to work in it, to earn enough to buy a net big enough to cover all her children.

For all the misery they can engender, sweatshops at least offer a precar*ious escape from the poverty that is the developing world's greatest prob*lem. Over the past 50 years, countries like India resisted foreign exploita*tion, while countries that started at a similar economic level - like Taiwan and South Korea - accepted sweatshops as the price of development. To*day there can be no doubt about which approach worked better. Taiwan and South Korea are modern countries with low rates of infant mortality and high levels of education; in contrast, every year 3.1 million Indian chil*dren die before the age of 5, mostly from diseases of poverty like diarrhea.

The effect of American pressure on sweatshops is complicated. While it clearly improves conditions at factories that produce branded merchandise for companies like Nike, it also raises labor costs across the board. That encourages less well established companies to mechanize and to reduce the number of employees needed. The upshot is to help people who currently have jobs in Nike plants but to risk jobs for others. The only thing a coun*try like Cambodia has to offer is terribly cheap wages; if companies are scolded for paying those wages, they will shift their manufacturing to mar*ginally richer areas like Malaysia or Mexico.

Sweatshop monitors do have a useful role. They can compel factories to improve safety. They can also call attention to the impact of sweatshops on the environment. The greatest downside of industrialization is not exploi*tation of workers but toxic air and water. In Asia each year three million people die from the effects of pollution. The factories springing up throughout the region are far more likely to kill people through the chem*icals they expel than through terrible working conditions.

By focusing on these issues, by working closely with organizations and news media in foreign countries, sweatshops can be improved. But refus*ing to buy sweatshop products risks making Americans feel good while harming those we are trying to help. As a Chinese proverb goes, "First comes the bitterness, then there is sweetness and wealth and honor for 10,000 years."





Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who received a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China, are the authors of "Thunder From the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia" (Knopf), from which this article is adapted.


If you remember the industrial revolution in the US where the poor imigrants worked in the factories and the working conditions then. Slowly it changed, and it will there.

 

[shelby_36]

How absolutely awful. that would make me want to improve working conditions even more- esp for a company as family oriented as disney! Har to think these poor people would rather send their kids to work like that or work in those conditions and be happy about it..how horrible it must be. Again exactly why the US is frowned upon by these countries. they know we supply jobs(if you can call them that) and then we sit here in our houses planning our thousands of dollar vacations. I;d hate us too.
thanks for posting this.

 

[Duckfan-in-Chicago]

'forced employees to work 10 to 13-hour work days and paid them below the legal minimum at the factories."

Are you FORCED to work? Do you get paid UNDER Minimum wage? So if the governement says "here abuse my workers" then we should say "ok"? that is ridiculous. And also the gov. could care less if they are treated well..they get their money that is all that counts. Why would THEY stop sweatshops?

I am forced to work overtime I don't want to work all the time. If there are people being paid under the minimum wage, and violations of gov. laws, the outrage should be directed towards the Chinese Government, and not Disney.

 

[bicker]

that would make me want to improve working conditions even more

But the question is whether or not it makes you want to deliberately spend more for the same product, to provide better working conditions for all workers all over the world.

Again exactly why the US is frowned upon by these countries.

Hardly. Clothing manufacturing is about as far from relevance to the animosity some countries have towards the United States as you can get. Where there is conflict, it stems from energy sources, not textiles.

 

[DawnCt1]

What an arrogant thing to say as it is even more remarkable how many people living in oppressive regimes have had or will have to work under horrible conditions to manufacture cheap merchandise for the American and European market

Without which they may have not worked at all and starved.