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Children in China Pay Price for Our Cheap Toys
For children in China's southern Guangdong province, the holiday season is the most gruelling time of the year.
That's because instead of receiving toys, they make them. Guangdong is the epicentre of China's multi-billion dollar toy industry, with upwards of 1.5 million workers in 5,000 factories. They make everything from stuffed animals to video games, most of which are exported to places like Canada and the U.S. in time for Christmas.
Many of those workers are children from impoverished rural areas. Their desperate parents are often tricked by factory owners into signing contracts they cannot read, unknowingly committing their children to work in the country's burgeoning industrial cities.
While it's impossible to know just how many of them are making our toys - child labourers are usually undocumented - even a single visit to Guangdong's factories leaves no doubt that the problem is an epidemic. In many of them, rows and rows of children, some younger than 10, sit at tiny desks assembling toys. They are usually housed in giant warehouse-like buildings with poor ventilation, meaning chemicals and toxins never escape. There is a bitter taste in the air. Most of the workers are girls - second-class citizens under China's one-child policy.
The children work 80-hour weeks and earn as little as a dollar a day, but still have to pay deductions for their often dilapidated accommodations. If they don't work fast enough, they are beaten.
During the holiday rush, when orders from the West increase dramatically, it's not uncommon for factory employees to work seven days a week, with overtime, for months at a time. That kind of workload can be fatal.
China does have laws banning the use of labourers under 16, as well as restrictions on overtime.
But in a rapidly expanding economy that relies heavily on feeding the world's insatiable demand for cheap goods, those regulations are often ignored. The country now produces 75 per cent of the world's toys - exports worth more than $15 billion a year. While fewer than 4 per cent of the world's children are American, they consume 40 per cent of the world's toys.
That's the troubling irony of today's global marketplace.
Far too often, our desire for the best deals on the latest products comes at the expense of the workers in developing countries, commonly children.
But as this year's holiday season reaches its peak, and many of us head to the malls to check people off our Christmas lists, it's worth remembering that, as consumers, we all have the ability to take action against child labour with the decisions we make every day.
A recent news poll found that nearly two-thirds of Canadians will be buying toys among their Christmas gifts this year. That translates into enormous consumer power. Ask questions when making a purchase to ensure it is made fairly and safely.
If stores don't know a product's history, find out from the company that manufactured it. If they don't know either, voice your concern over the lack of such vital information. Companies need to know that consumers will not stand for the use of child labour.
And why not pressure governments and corporations to team up with NGOs to implement a "child labour-free" labelling system for toys and other products? Similar labels exist in the carpet industry. Expanding them across the market would make socially conscious shopping easy for everyone.
Perhaps then, the holiday season will take on a whole new meaning for children in places like Guangdong.
Craig and Marc Kielburger are children's rights activists and co-founded Free The Children, which is active in the developing world.
© Copyright Toronto Star 1996-2007
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11 Comments so far
Show AllNote that NAFTA (as an example of a prototypical trade agreement) deals with corporate rights but not workers rights. We could put workers rights into trade agreements if we really really wanted to. Trade agreements could be worded so as to discourage the use of child labour for products produced for exportation.
Bill Blaikie was the NDP Environment Critic from 1984 to 1987 and External Affairs Critic in September from 1987 until 2003. Thus, Blaikie did a lot of talking during FTA, NAFTA and MAI etc. Peter Julian seems to be the one who is the most vocal on the SPP.
Bill Blaikie on February 3, 2001:
We need a different kind of level playing field. We need a global level playing field in which all the citizens of the world, as citizens of the world, and as citizens of their various countries, have the same core democratic, human, and labour rights. It's not a level playing field if workers in Canada have to compete with workers who can't organize a union without ending up in the river. It's not a level playing field if the people of democratic countries have to harmonize with what is acceptable in non-democratic countries, or turn a blind eye to human rights violations in the name of trade liberalization. In this sense, China is the worst offender, and with its ascension to the WTO will put at the table one of the worst political configurations yet, a form of one party totalitarian capitalism.
It is not true that trade makes them more like us. What is true that the current model of corporate globalization is making us more like them, as we see the increasing criminalization of dissent, and the transformation of our democracies into political monocultures where the only policy debate that can be taken seriously is that which takes place with the boundaries of the imposed creed. And this limited policy debate itself can only take place within artificially created situations, or temporarily gated communities rendered politically antiseptic.
http://www.billblaikie.ca/node/18
Blaikie in Cancun, Mexico, September 9, 2003
We offer you solidarity in building up a new vision of a global economy in which democracy is not threatened, public services are valued and strengthened, access to lifesaving medicines comes before profit, life itself does not become a patented commodity, the environment is protected by Multi-lateral Environment Agreements to which trade is subordinated, and workers rights are treated with the same seriousness as investor rights.
http://www.billblaikie.ca/node/391
So sad to see that China has been made the "North Pole" for "Santa". Don't expect even the Democrats to speak out on the issue of sweatshop labor let alone do anything to PUNISH the corporate wrongdoers !
Guangdong province is one of the most diseased places on earth. That's where SARS originated. People spit and vomit on the street, and also eat things that would make one puke.
It just amazes me how a country can collapse so rapidly. China will not be a super power for long given how it has polluted its own rivers and air.
maxpayne, the North Pole is still in Canada, don't worry.
As John Lennon would say;
"So this is Christmas.."
Not so-much different than here, in the "good old days" -- you know, the period we've been increasingly regressing-toward since our 'great-communicator', Mr. Reagan.
We've reversed that twice-before (with busted-heads/hearts and a LOT of sacrifice)...and ALWAYS give-away the Gains without a whimper.
SHAME...
vaudree, I don't think so. Toys are manufactured in the North Pole not outsourced to China unlike the current reality!
There is no doubt that China is not a fun place for a lot of their people, especially the young, but it is not possible for our country to set the standards for every other country. The Chinese are better off than the people of Darfur who are living in a hell we can hardly imagine. Then, as bad as conditions are in China, compared to the total destruction of Iraq with possibly a million killed and maimed, and others forced out of their homes and having to leave the country to keep from being killed, the Chinese could have it worse. The way our country is being dealt with by the powergrabbing leaders we now have, we may need the Chinese sympathy in a few years.
maxpayne says: vaudree, I don't think so. Toys are manufactured in the North Pole not outsourced to China unlike the current reality!
If the American Military contracts out to Blackwater and Haliburton to perform tasks that the Military used to perform for itself, then what is so surprising about Santa Claus laying off a few higher paid elves and contracting the work out to China?
Just because Santa Claus is Canadian doesn't mean that he doesn't contract out to places where the elves work for less.
Kernel, Romeo Dallaire has compared what is going on in Darfur to what happened in Rwanda. That would be his first interview on The Hour - this is the second.
Romeo Dallaire and Roy Dupuis on The Hour:
http://www.cbc.ca/thehour/video.php?id=1710
The Movie
http://www.shakehandswiththedevilthemovie.com/
For the average shopper, they would say, "Who cares? As long as I get a bargain."
Seems it is no bargain at all ... I personally have not shopped at a Wal-Mart in over 2 years.
There's a really good video about Mardi-Gras beads and where they come from:
http://www.freespeech.org/fscm2/contentviewer.php?content_id=1616
vaudree,
You're not getting it. I was comparing Christmas with reality.
As for toys and China, well you can KILLton for signing the China PNTR !