Joseph Kahn, New York Times
Monday, December 8, 2003
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SHENZHEN, China. Workers at Kin Ki Industrial, a leading Chinese toy maker, make a decent salary, rarely work nights or weekends and often "hang out along the street, play Ping-Pong and watch TV".
They all have work contracts, pensions and medical benefits. The factory canteen offers tasty food. The dormitories are comfortable.
These are the official working conditions at Kin Ki as they are described on sheets of paper handed to workers just before inspections.
Those occur when big American clients like Ohio Art, which uses Kin Ki to produce the iconic toy Etch A Sketch, visit to make sure that the factory has good labor standards.
In reality, though, Kin Ki employees, mostly teenage migrants from internal provinces, say they work many more hours and earn about 40 percent less than the company claims They say they sleep head-to-toe in tiny rooms.
They staged two strikes recently to demand that they get paid something closer to the legal minimum wage.
Most do not have pensions, medical insurance or work contracts. The company's handout sheet recommends that if inspectors press to see such documents, workers should "intentionally waste time and then say they can't find them," according to company memos provided to The New York Times by employees.
After first saying that Kin Ki strictly abided by all Chinese labor laws, Johnson Tao, a senior executive with the privately owned company, acknowledged that its wages and benefits fell short of legal levels and vowed to address the issue soon. Tao said that the memos might have reflected attempts by managers to deceive inspectors but that such behavior "did not have the support of senior management".
William Killgallon, the chief executive of Ohio Art, said that he considered Kin Ki executives honest and that he had no knowledge of labor problems there. But he said he intended to visit China soon to "make sure they understand what we expect".
Etch A Sketch is the same drawing toy today that it was in 1960, when Ohio Art first produced it in Bryan, Ohio. But efforts to keep its selling price below $10 on shelves at Wal-Mart and Toys 'R' Us forced the company to move production to China three years ago.
Today the same toy is made not just for lower wages but also under significantly harsher working conditions Kin Ki's workers, in fact, are struggling to obtain rights that their American predecessors at Ohio Art won early in the last century, though the workers are without the aid of independent unions, which remain illegal in China.
China now makes 80 percent of the toys sold in America, according to US government figures, and no industry here has come under greater pressure to adhere to global labor codes. Kin Ki and most other big producers open their doors to foreign inspectors to assuage concerns that products used to entertain children in rich countries not be made under oppressive conditions in poor ones.
But that goal conflicts with price pressures in commodity industries like toys, where manufacturers command no premium for good labor practices. China alone has 8,000 toymakers competing fiercely for contracts by shaving pennies off production costs.
Kin Ki stays competitive, workers say, by paying them 24 cents an hour in Shenzhen, where the legal minimum wage is 33 cents. When the Etch A Sketch line shut down in Ohio just after the Christmas rush in 2000, wages for the unionized work force there had reached $9 an hour. Chinese workers say Kin Ki also denies them legally required nonsalary benefits and compels them to work 84 hours a week, far more than the legal maximum, without required overtime pay.
"I keep this job because my parents and my daughter depend on the money I earn," said one migrant worker, who if named could lose her job for talking about Kin Ki. "No one likes to work in these conditions, but I have no choice".
High walls surround Kin Ki's production lines and warehouses. Dormitory windows are covered in chicken wire. Workers must enter and leave through the guarded front gate.
The factory, workers say, operates with the intensity of a military campaign. Production starts at 7:30 am and, breaking only for lunch and dinner, continues until 10 pm. Saturdays and Sundays are treated as normal workdays, so a workweek consists of seven 12-hour days.
That schedule far exceeds Shenzhen's regulations. The authorities have set a 40-hour, five-day workweek. Local rules allow no more than 32 hours of overtime a month, which must be compensated by paying time and a half on weekdays and double time on weekends.
Kin Ki has set a much lower pay scale, workers said. It pays just 1.3 times pay base for any overtime, weekday or weekend. Workers say their monthly paychecks would more than double, to about $200 from around $85, if the company paid legal wages.
"Most of us would work long hours willingly if we were paid according to the law," one employee said. "The way things are now, we can shut up or leave."
The company acknowledged having significant labor problems.
"I know that I need to increase wages and to comply with the law," said Tao, the senior executive. "I have the intention of doing this and will raise all wages in 2004."
The New York Times
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