STEELWORKERS WORKING TO EXPOSE THREE STORIES ABOUT TOXIC IMPORTS

By Kim Pollock

Steelworkers have launched a North America-wide campaign against imports of "Toxic Toys" from China. The campaign, which has been greeted enthusiastically by parents, the public and the media, is really three in one.

First, of course, it's about the urgent threat posed by toxic imports from China to Canada and the US. China has virtually no product-testing or quality standards for exports, even for toys that wind up in the hands - and mouths - of children; there are also minimal standards for products imported into Canada or the US.

The alarm bells started ringing this spring when thousands of North American dogs and cats were poisoned by Chinese pet food made with tainted ingredients. A subsequent cascade of quality problems has included toxic toothpaste, unsafe tires, chemical-laden seafood and millions of lead-painted toys. Just this week Home Depot recalled about 64,000 Chinese-made festive figurines because of the lead paint hazard.

There has also been a recall announcement for Fisher-Price toys representing various Nickelodeon and Sesame Street characters. The Center for Environmental Health and the advocacy group MomsRising exposed extremely high levels of lead in many children's products, including backpacks, children's rain ponchos, and vinyl lunchboxes. They found lead levels ranging from 3,700 parts per million to more than 9,100 ppm in four backpacks, for instance: Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go and Hello Kitty's "Chococat". A Disney-licensed "High School Musical" backpack tested at over 13,000 ppm of lead, more than 21 times the legal limit (600 ppm) for lead in paint.

The second part of our campaign exposes the horrible living and working conditions facing the people who make the products in China. We keep hearing horror stories about low wages, frightful working conditions and polluted cities; until something drastic changes, we shall continue to hear them.

Just this week the New York Times reported on a Chinese Christmas-tree ornament supplier to Wal-Mart and other US and European companies. The National Labour Committee, a US advocacy organization, found that the Guangzhou Huangya Gift Company was paying its employees below the 55-cent-an-hour minimum wage for Guangzhou province, some as little as 28 cents an hour, with an hourly average of 49 cents. And most of those workers were junior high and high-school students, some as young as 12 and 13 - working shifts as longs as 15 hours, seven days a week, using paint and chemicals without protective gear.

Then there were the 32 workers killed and two injured in May when they were engulfed by molten steel at a factory in northeast China. The accident was triggered when a steel ladle, with a capacity of 30 tonnes of liquid steel, sheared off from the blast furnace, spilling molten metal onto the factory floor some three metres below. The molten steel then flowed into an adjacent room where workers were gathered for a shift change. Rescuers were unable to get closer because of the intense heat of the liquid metal; it turns out that the ladle was not designed for use in a steel mill and was too light for the metal it was required to haul; the cable holding it was too light for the ladle.
And then since we're on the topic of toys, there's Li Chunmei, a 19-year-old factory worker in Songgang in southeastern Guangdong province. She died in 2002 after a 16 hour shift "running back and forth inside the Bainan Toy Factory, carrying toy parts from machine to machine," the Washington Post reported. "This was the busy season before Christmas when orders peaked from Japan and the United States for the factory's stuffed animals. Long hours were mandatory and at least two months had passed since Li and the other workers had enjoyed even a Sunday off." She was found curled up on the floor, moaning, blood trickling from her nose and mouth; before an ambulance arrived, Li died, apparently of exhaustion.

Simply put, governments and corporations in China can afford not to care about the conditions in their factories. After all, China has some 300 million people living on less than a dollar a day; on top of this, there is a huge gap in living standards between the millions barely earning a living in the Chinese countryside and even those paid the 75 cents-an-hour average wage in the country's brutally-crowded, polluted industrial cities and discipline-heavy factories. The gap in disposable income between city and country is about 3.2 to 1; government and employers can ruthlessly exploit China's factory workers, knowing there are hundreds of millions waiting to take their places. On top of that, it's a police state, a one-party dictatorship that forbids independent unions and doesn't trifle with political dissent or free speech.
But there's a third part of the story: it's about the North American and European corporations that take advantage of China's lack of labour standards, product-testing regulations or enforcement. They invest in China or buy Chinese products because they can make billions. Remember: from 2002 to 2006 China's share of Canada's imports more than doubled to $35 billion, 10 percent of our total imports; more than we import from Japan and Mexico combined. In 2007 imports from China have grown by 17 percent.

Remember, too, that about 60 percent of our soaring imports from China are produced by North American or European companies, not local or state-run Chinese businesses. In spite of China's dodgy labour and environmental record, total Canadian investment in China rose from about $6 million in 1990 to $4.5 billion in 2004. From 2002-2005 alone, Canadian companies poured $2.8 billion into China.

So in other words, it's the Mattels, the Wal-Marts, the Fisher-Prices, the Home Depots that employ those harassed and exploited workers, manufacture and sell the toxic toys, profit from China's hardline regime and poor labour standards. First they shipped hundreds of thousands of our good-paying manufacturing and export-sector jobs to China. Now they want to profit from poisoning our kids. Steelworkers, parents and advocacy groups are asking Canadians and Americans to say enough is enough this Christmas.

Kim Pollock is a United Steelworkers Canadian research representative based in Burnaby, BC.