August 18, 2005
Disneyland
Couldn’t happen to a nicer company:
The National Labor Committee, an anti-sweatshop advocacy group that once exposed labor abuses in apparel produced for Kathie Lee Gifford’s clothing line, made new charges Thursday against The Walt Disney Company, releasing a videotape alleging that two Chinese factories making books for Disney operate under unsafe conditions.
At a press conference, Charles Kernaghan, director of the NLC, released an 11-minute videotape in which workers – their faces hidden – in the Hung Hing and Nord Race factories say they have been injured by unsafe equipment and show their bandaged fingers and cut hands.
“There’s blood on this book,” Kernaghan said as he held up a copy of a child’s book made in China and published by Disney.
The NLC’s Web site goes into more detail:
In China, young women and men are forced to work 10 to 13 hours a day producing Disney’s children’s books six and seven days a week, working a grueling 60 to 90 hours a week. The workers are paid just 33 to 41 cents an hour, trapping them in misery. It is common for the workers to be cheated of their overtime pay. In some factories, women are denied their legal maternity rights. Eight to 12 workers are housed in primitive dorm rooms sleeping on double level bunk beds and fed horrible food at the factory canteen. Workers often faint from exhaustion and the unbearably stifling heat in the factories. Workers have no health insurance, no pension, no rights. They have no right to freedom of association or to organize.
Last year, Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s total compensation was $8.3 million.
Disney says it is investigating, and that it has “conducted approximately 20 ILS [International Labor Standards] audits at these factories since 1998”—audits that “reflect instances of noncompliance followed by remediation.” Swiftly followed, it appears, by recidivism.
It will be interesting to see whether Disney delivers on the pledge it makes on its corporate Web site—that in the case of “egregious violations” of its “Code of Conduct for Manufacturers,” the company will “terminate our authorization of use of the factory for Disney merchandise.”
Can’t get more egregious than the NLC’s video.
Posted by Stephen at 6:46 PM in Business | Permalink | TrackBack (0)
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