China Labor Watch released results of undercover investigation.
Laborers at some toy factories in China work without adequate protection, toiling long hours with few, if any, breaks. Many facilities lack proper fire safety measures and subject workers to poor living conditions. For some, quitting means giving up earned wages. According to a new report by China Labor Watch, which investigated five major factories that supply toys to Hasbro and Mattel, labor violations are rampant in Chinese toy factories.
China Labor Watch sent undercover investigators to the factories, which altogether employ about 20,000 laborers. “Over the past 20 years, toy brands and retailers have reaped tremendous benefits from the labor and sometimes even the lives of Chinese workers,” China Labor Watch Program Coordinator Kevin Slaten said in a press release, “yet these companies fail to respect labor rights and to ensure that workers also enjoy the fruits of the toy industry’s success.”
The report found instances of hiring discrimination, mandatory and excessive overtime work, unpaid work, broken labor contracts, poor safety measures and few paths for laborers to seek recourse. Many of these issues also break Chinese labor law.
Mattel and Hasbro didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s requests for comment. (This post will be updated if the companies respond with statements.)
This report is not the non-profit organization’s first time criticizing Hasbro and Mattel. Last year, in response to a critical report by the organization, Mattel released a statement in December 2014 calling China Labor Watch’s claims “incomplete, at best, or false.” The eight-page statement took issue with the undercover instigators’ lack of perspective, saying they were not professional auditors, and it responded point-by-point to criticism. It also noted, “Mattel was one of the first toy companies manufacturing in China to establish a Code of Conduct in 1997 supported by independent inspections of manufacturing facilities, the results of which the company published.”
Chinese factory workers’ poor labor conditions have received international scrutiny since a string of suicides in 2010 at a Foxxconn Technology Group factory. But according to China Labor Watch’s new report, there has been little impact on the factories it surveyed: many problems have endured or even worsened. The Foshan Nanhai Mattel Diecast Company, for example, stopped its hiring discrimination practices since a China Labor Watch report in 2012. Now, the company actively recruits disabled workers. But the factory has taken a step back in other regards. The 2015 report found a new labor violation, in which laborers are forced to accept any future overtime arrangement upon being hired.
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