Fair trade toysTake a look at this excerpt from a Toronto Star article:
It will not surprise you to know that I blame Wal-Mart for this. Wal-Mart demands completely unreasonbly low prices from suppliers and then other retailers follow suit in order to compete.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.
Well, what can we do if we have children to buy for? Here's a site for ordering fair trade and US made toys. And here's another one. I have a great-niece and a goddaughter on my gift list. I bought both of their toys at the Fair Trade Bazaar at Fellowship Congregational Church here in Tulsa that's held every November.
Take the time to do some research. It's worth it not to support child exploitation with your dollars.
Maybe, if more time was spent addressing the true source of the problem--the suppliers--something might actually get done. Money is made either by selling high with low volume, or selling low with high volume. The suppliers saw the chance to make their money selling low with high volume when Wal-Mart came along. Then, when the United States changed so many of the laws in regards to trade, the suppliers saw a chance to improve their profit margins even more by moving production outside of the U.S. where production costs were low. How long do you think Wal-Mart would have lasted if suppliers had said no thank you at the very beginning? How long do you think Wal-Mart would last if the suppliers said no even now. These suppliers were big players in their industries long before Wal-Mart came along. No one strong armed them. Suppliers saw a chance to make more money and they took it. So, who is truly at fault--Wal-Mart, the suppliers, or the American consumers?
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