Unseasonal strife in Santa's little sweatshops
Richard Spencer
Daily Telegraph
22 December 2004
It is the week before Christmas, and Santa's helpers are restless. In fact, they have been demonstrating their discontent by striking, smashing their factories, and not turning up for work.
As most adults know, Santa has outsourced production from Lapland to China, in particular the sweatshop grottoes of Guangdong province, near Hong Kong. The plain between Shenzhen and Dongguan makes 70 per cent of the world's toys, assembles its Playstations, stitches its shoes and produces a host of other Christmas gifts.
But after years of compliance, the worker-elves have begun defying their bosses and even the Communist Party. There has been a series of strikes and protests for better pay in recent months, and the delta is also facing a new phenomenon for China: a labour shortage.
Hou Zhenggang, the labour exchange manager in Dongkeng, near Dongguan, estimates that the town is 10 per cent short.
"They are voting with their feet," said Robin Munro, a research director for the monitoring group China Labour Bulletin.
As China's manufacturing has taken off, its workers have endured long hours and sometimes dangerous working conditions for pay that appears negligible. The minimum wage in the Dongguan area is 450 yuan a month about £30.
But cases like that of Wei Meiren are pushing even these workers to their limits. Mrs Wei, a 32-year-old mother of three, left her impoverished village in China's south in April to make extra cash in Dongkeng. Two months later she was dead.
She found work with New-Ray, a Hong Kong-owned toy manufacturer, for 400-500 yuan a month (£27-£33). New-Ray makes model cars that are sold in Britain by the toy firm Halsall.
She was assigned to Factory B, where hundreds of workers spend 10 to 14 hours a day, seven days a week assembling and packing them up.
"We work from 7.30 in the morning to 5.30 in the afternoon, with half an hour break for lunch," said one of her colleagues. "Then when it is busy, we have to go back for another three or four hours after supper. We work 360 days a year." Overtime is compulsory, there are fines for non-attendance and anyone who asks for a rise is sacked, he said.
One day, Mrs Wei got into an argument. "She had a family crisis, but they wouldn't let her go home," said another colleague. "She got really angry. Then she fainted."
Mrs Wei spent two weeks in and out of work after falling ill on June 18. On July 2, she died. The doctor put down heart and organ failure as cause of death. But an official who investigated the case, Song Ci, linked it to a new trend: gulaosi, or death by overwork, of which there have been half a dozen alleged cases this year in China's factories.
He and Mrs Wei's husband found her timesheets. She had two. One, for the benefit of inspectors and "corporate responsibility" auditors sent by foreign importers, recorded her as having worked eight hours a day, five days a week. The other revealed days of 13 or 14 hours, even at weekends, even after she had fainted. Mr Song discovered that another worker, in her twenties, had collapsed and died the month before.
Alan Halsall, the joint managing director of Halsall's, a family business based in Lancashire that sells toys all over the world, said: "The investigations we have taken into this lead us to believe it is not true. We do audit our factories. We don't believe a woman has been killed in the factory."
New-Ray in China refused to answer questions. "We have a policy of not allowing visitors apart from customers," said Francis Chan, the sales manager.
Mr Song said New-Ray denied responsibility for Mrs Wei's death, but had agreed to £200 compensation.
New-Ray's workers said there was a high turnover of staff and scant regard paid to rules. In nearby Chang'an, employees of Stella, a Taiwan-owned shoe firm that manufactures brands such as Clark's, Nike and Timberland, went on the rampage in protest at their wages.
The labour disturbances are part of a growing wave of social unrest in China, where official figures say three million people took part in demonstrations last year, many violent.