Nearly a decade after some of the most powerful companies in the world began an effort to eliminate sweatshop labour conditions in Asia, worker abuse is still commonplace in many of the Chinese factories that supply Western companies, according to labour rights groups.

The groups say some Chinese companies routinely shortchange their employees on wages, withhold health benefits and expose their workers to dangerous machinery and harmful chemicals, like lead, cadmium and mercury. “If these things are so dangerous for the consumer, then how about the workers?” said Anita Chan, a labour rights advocate who teaches at the Australian National University. “We may be dealing with these things for a short time, but they deal with them every day.”

And so while Western consumers worry about exposing their children to Chinese-made toys coated in lead, Chinese workers, often as young as 16, face far more serious hazards. In the Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong, for example, factory workers lose or break about 40,000 fingers on the job every year, according to a study published a few years ago by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. Pushing to keep big corporations honest, labour groups regularly smuggle photographs, videos, pay stubs, shipping records and other evidence out of factories that they say violate local law and international worker standards.

In 2007, factories that supplied more than a dozen corporations, including Wal-Mart, Disney and Dell, were accused of unfair labour practices, including using child labour, forcing employees to work 16-hour days on fast-moving assembly lines and paying workers less than minimum wage. In recent weeks, a flood of reports detailing labour abuse have been released, at a time when China is still coping with last year’s wave of made-in-China product safety recalls, and as it tries to change workplace rules with a new labour law that took effect on January 1, 2008.

No company has come under as harsh a spotlight as Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which sourced about $9 billion in goods from China in 2006, everything from hammers and toys to high-definition televisions.

Harsh working conditions

In December, two NGOs documented what they said were abuse and labour violations at 15 factories that produced or supplied goods for Wal-Mart. A spokesman for Huanya, which employs 8,000 workers, denied that the company broke any labour laws. But two workers interviewed outside Huanya’s huge complex said they were forced to work long hours to meet production quotas in harsh conditions. “I work on the plastic molding machine from six in the morning to six at night,” said Xu Wenquan, a tiny, baby-faced 16-year-old whose hands were covered with blisters. Asked what had happened to his hands, he replied, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.”

His brother, Xu Wenjie, 18, said the two young men left their small village in impoverished Guizhou province four months ago and traveled more than 800 kilometers to find work at Huanya. The brothers said they worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, for $120 to $200 a month, far less than they are required to be paid by law. When government inspectors visit the factory, the young brothers are given the day off, they said. A former Huanya employee who was reached by telephone gave a similar account of working conditions, saying many workers suffered from skin rashes after working with gold powders and that others were forced to sign papers “volunteering” to work overtime.

“It’s quite noisy, and you stand up all day, 12 hours, and there’s no air conditioning,” he said. “We get paid by the piece we make but they never told us how much. Sometimes I got $110, sometimes I got $150 a month.”
Jonathan Dong, a Wal-Mart spokesman in Beijing, said the company would soon release details of its own investigation into working conditions at Huanya.    Many multinationals were harshly criticised in the 1990s for using suppliers that maintained sweatshop conditions. Iconic brand names, like Nike, Mattel and Gap, responded by forming corporate social responsibility operations and working with contractors to create a system of factory audits and inspections. Those changes have won praise in some quarters for improving worker conditions.

But despite spending millions of dollars and hiring thousands of auditors, some companies admit many of the programs are flawed. “The factories have improved immeasurably over the past few years,” says Alan Hassenfeld, Chairman of the toy maker Hasbro and Co-Chairman of Care, the ethical-manufacturing program of the International Council of Toy Industries. “But let me be honest: There are some bad factories. We have bribery and corruption occurring, but we are doing our best.”

Bad inspection

Some factories are warned about audits beforehand and some factory owners or managers bribe auditors. Few major Western auditing firms working in China even hire college students from the US to work during the summer as inspectors, an indication that they are not willing to invest in more expensive or sophisticated auditing programs, critics say.

Chinese suppliers regularly outsource to other suppliers, who may in turn outsource to yet another operation, creating a supply chain that is hard to follow — let alone inspect. Many labor experts say part of the problem is cost: Western companies are constantly pressing their Chinese suppliers for lower prices while also insisting that factory owners spend more to upgrade operations, treat workers properly and improve product quality.

At the same time, rising food, energy and raw material costs in China — as well as a shortage of labour in the biggest southern manufacturing zones — are hampering factory owners’ ability to make a profit. The situation may get worse before it improves. The labour law that took effect on January 1 makes it more difficult to dismiss workers and creates a whole new set of laws that experts say will almost certainly increase labour costs.
Yet it may become more difficult for human rights groups to investigate abuses. Concerned about the growing array of threats to profitability, as well as embarrassing exposes, factories are heightening security, harassing labour rights groups and calling the police when journalists show up at their gates.

At the center of the problem is a labour system that relies on young migrant workers, who often leave small rural villages for two or three-year stints at factories, where they hope to earn enough to return home to start families.

As long as life in the cities promises more money than in rural areas, they will brave the harsh conditions in factories in these Chinese cities. And as long as China outlaws independent unions and proves unable to enforce its own labour rules, there is little hope for change.

There is little that any Western company can do about those issues, no matter how seriously they take corporate social responsibility — other than leaving China.

Source: New York Times News Service