If you don’t know about the National Labor Committee (NLC), you really should. They have been on Wal-Mart’s case since the early 1990s. In fact, if you have a long enough memory, you might remember that they’re the people who made Kathie Lee Gifford cry (with good reason).

Today they’ve come out with a report on conditions in a Chinese factory that supplies Christmas ornaments to Wally World that’s absolutely devastating (.pdf).

From the Executive Summary:

At Wal-Mart, Christmas ornaments are cheap, so are the lives of the young workers in China who make them.

The Guangzhou Gift Company describes itself as being “among the top three Christmas ornament producers in mainland China,” with “long term, friendly, collaborative relationships with industry leaders Wal-Mart…” There are 8,000 workers in the factory.

At the Guangzhou ornaments factory, every single labor law in China, along with internationally recognized labor rights standards, are being systematically violated on a daily basis.

I’ve borrowed one of their photos documenting such violations above. I’ll borrow from the NYT‘s write-up of the report in order to offer details:

The National Labor Committee — citing interviews, wage records and cellphone pictures smuggled out by teenage workers — said that the employees were being paid at less than Guangzhou’s legal minimum of 55 cents per hour and are being forced to work excessive amounts of overtime. Workers were paid by a piecemeal basis, according to the committee, with some earning as little as 26 cents per hour. The wage records, which were from a 10-day period from June 21 to 30 of this year, show a median wage of 49 cents per hour. By law, the employees should have been earning a median of 68 cents per hour because of overtime regulations.

Hundreds of junior high and high school students were recruited over the summer to work at the factory, with some employees as young as 12 and 13, according to the report. A number of 16-year-old employees, recruited from the Guangdong Province Maoming Transportation Technical School about 250 miles from the factory, were angry at being forced to work shifts as long as 15 hours at below wages promised to them by their teachers. They went on strike on July 8 and filed a lawsuit against the company; as a result, they received some of their back wages.

The students said they were being forced to work seven days a week, and those who wanted to take Sundays off were sometimes fined two and a half days of wages. In addition, photos show the students working with paint, chemicals and without any protective gear, not even gloves or masks.

Wal-Mart’s response (also from the NYT), as usual, disregards reality:

Through our rigorous Ethical Standards program, Wal-Mart aggressively deals with any allegations of improper conditions at our suppliers’ factories. Wal-Mart maintains a very strict Supplier’s Code of Conduct, and employs over 200 people to monitor our suppliers and their designated factories’ adherence. Our program is the largest of its kind in the world – last year, we conducted more than 16,000 audits at over 8,700 factories.

Gee, if their inspection program is so hot, how did these daily obscene violations go undetected? The NLC was fully prepared for this “everything is great, keep shopping” defense and goes directly on the attack:

Wal-Mart has hired a new advertising agency, which is being paid a fortune to convince people that it is virtuous to purchase cheap goods, glorifying that every item bought on sale should fill the shopper with emotions and holiday spirit.

Too bad that this holiday spirit only exists in the realm of advertising, as the reality behind the bargain is hardly virtuous, uplifting or pretty.

Did I mention that the factory employs children as young as 12? Oh, just go read the report.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 1524 by Jonathan Rees and is filed under Advertising, China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.