Disney’s Wonderful World of Sweatshops

By John K. Wilson

Disney may be America’s most beloved corporation: from Mickey Mouse to Winnie-the-Pooh to Snow White, no company is more associated with childhood, innocence, and purity. Except that Disney is now being associated with sweatshops around the world where impoverished workers are paid pennies to make Disney merchandise in miserable conditions. “Disney tries to project this image of children’s dreams but in fact they are one of the worst sweatshop abusers in the world,” Charles Kernaghan of the National Labor Committee has noted.

Illinois State University has been the site of the most intense conflict in the country over Disney and its sweatshops. In March, members of United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) at ISU protested a Disney recruiting visit; graduate student Nino Selvaggio was arrested for criminal trespassing (the charges were later dropped) when he disrupted the Disney event at CVA 151 by talking about sweatshops for 15 minutes before police took him away in handcuffs. Another student, David McHone-Chase, dressed as “Sweaty Mouse” for the protest. The USAS students promise another protest when Disney returns to ISU to recruit on October 30.

ISU is one of Disney’s biggest and most enthusiastic recruiting sites. Disney offered positions to 100 students who attended the disrupted meeting last spring. ISU also has a Walt Disney World College Program Alumni Association. Charles Maris, vice-president of the group and a junior in Public Relations who worked in the College Program in Spring 2000, says: “We have one of the highest populations that goes down there.”

However, Maris says, “We’re really not that connected to Disney,” noting that Disney arranges for the room and has volunteers who put up their posters and chalk “Dream it. Do it. Disney” around campus. He emphasizes the group’s volunteer work, raising money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation, cleaning up White Oak Park, and visiting sick children in hospitals.

But it’s clear that the Alumni Association exists to promote Disney. At Festival ISU, the Alumni Association was handing out cards about the Disney presentation, and according to the ISU Disney Alumni Association website (www.ftss.ilstu.edu/wdwcpaa): “The alumni association is the heart of the Walt Disney World College Program presence on campus and they make life easier for the campus representatives. Without the alumni association, ISU would not be the dominant force in the Walt Disney World College Program community that it has consistently been for the past few years.” The Disney students even created an “Alumni of the Month” award to “honor alumni who do an outstanding job of marketing the Walt Disney World College Program here at ISU.”

The Alumni Association leaders say they have no objection to the USAS protests. “I thought that was great,” says Maris. “I think people need to know about the topic.” Ryan Gilbert, president of the alumni group and a junior in Agriculture Education, says about the protestors: “They did what they thought they had to do.” Gilbert says, “we’re very open to dialogue,” and Maris notes, “all of us think it’s awesome that people are trying to raise awareness.” However, that wasn’t the reaction in the spring when the students at the Disney session booed the protestors.

The Disney alums express ambivalence about Disney’s role in sweatshops. Gilbert says, “There’s a lack of information on both sides,” noting that Disney and the protestors give different stories about sweatshops: “I’m confused right now. My mind changes so much.” Maris argues that Disney has responded to concerns about sweatshops: “I believe that sweatshops exist, but I feel that Disney has set in these standards.”

However, the fact that Disney has a Code of Conduct doesn’t matter much. China’s own labor laws are more rigorous than Disney’s Code, but the problem is the lack of enforcement. Disney occasionally does enforce its own code, but usually it withdraws from a factory because of bad publicity rather than working to improve conditions at all of its factories.

The Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee (CIC) made an extensive investigation of Chinese factories making Disney products, and issued a detailed report in February, 2001 about 12 factories employing up to 20,000 workers each.

Xiao Wang, a senior section leader at a Chinese garment factory, made $122-$244 a month when the company made Disney products. However, after Disney pulled out from the factory for violating its Code, his wage was cut to $37-$49 per month. Xiao told the CIC, “Disney is only concerned with its good reputation. When its suppliers are revealed not to comply with the local standards and its Code, they will mostly cut their order and move the production to another facility. What Disney did is to walk away from the scandal and draw a line between this problematic facility and Disney. They wash their hands as if it is none of their business. The Code of Conduct is not made for workers. It is only a tactic of window dressing and PR for Disney.”

At most of the factories, the workers had never heard of the Disney code. However, even when the Disney code was posted and inspections were made, the factories would intimidate workers into silence, although at one factory, workers “are pressured to memorize the Code in order to recite—or ‘entertain’—the monitors.”

Workers in China are producing Disney products for 12 cents an hour or even less. At only a couple of factories did the top salaries ever exceed $100 a month, and half that rate was more common, with workers paid as little as $28 a month during the low season, if they weren’t laid off. The CIC wrote, “it is very common for workers in China to labor 13-15 hours a day and 7 days a week for months at a stretch, let alone their overnight laboring in the peak season.”

At one Disney factory during peak season, the CIC reports, “workers are forced to work till 03:00 and then work as usual in the next day.”

At another, “Occasionally, they are pressed to work overnight and work in the next day without any rest time.” Some factories refuse to pay required overtime and force workers not to punch in so that their working hours can be disguised. Other falsified records for inspections: “Workers pointed that management produced double book keeping with which to cheat the monitors.”

Child labor violations were also kept concealed. At one factory, “Some workers mentioned that management prohibited the young workers to go back to the factory when Disney monitors came in late 1999.”

The CIC noted, “Management instructed workers how to answer the monitors’ questions.” Even in factories where visitors were common, workers rarely knew who they were or if they were monitors, making them unwilling to speak out about working conditions. “Some workers said that Disney monitors visited the factory but management showed them the falsified records.”

Monitors often wouldn’t speak to the workers, and almost never did so privately to prevent the threat of retaliation. Inspections were typically announced rather than surprise visits, and so the factory was cleaned, workers given gloves, and told to keep quiet before an inspection.

Factories sometimes provided dormitories and food, but usually overcharged workers for it. At one factory, 400 workers slept in a room with barred windows. Most other factories housed workers with at least a dozen in a room. Workers frequently complained about the housing and food (at one factory, “Workers describe food as worse as pig feed”).

Even in China, the codes imposed by Disney and other companies have had an impact, but it rarely amounts to more than window dressing. At one factory, the “Disney Section” has been set up for producing Disney products, and workers are paid $2 per day (and 40 cents per hour overtime), far more than other workers. However, the Disney workers are then charged by the company 90 cents per day for room and board, compared to 25 cents per day for other workers, so they are not better off. Workers can’t object or they will be fired, since they have no union to protect them. Anyone who tries to organize a union is fired.

Small fines (often imposed arbitrarily) and suspended wages are used to keep workers under control, and sometimes workers are forced to pay for uniforms, tools, and ID cards before they can get a job. In one factory, fines included talking in the workplace: $3.70; bringing a pack of cigarettes into the factory: $6; wearing jeans: $6; absence of a half-day without prior permission: $6; and going to the toilet without supervisor’s permission and a “seat-leaving card” in hand: 60 cents.

Companies typically employ high-priced consultants with flawed procedures to enforce their conduct codes. MIT professor Dara O’Rourke, an expert on sweatshop monitoring, followed a group of PricewaterhouseCoopers monitors who were inspecting sweatshops, and found that they missed labor law violations, overlooked dangerous safety violations, and only spoke to workers selected by (and in the presence of) the management (http://web.mit.edu/dorourke/www/index.html).

Last year, the magazine Business Week called Wal-Mart’s self-policing of a Kathie Lee Gifford handbag factory in China “a disaster” because five inspections of the plant by company auditors had failed to uncover the fact that workers were being held in near slavery.

Monitoring organizations such as the Worker Rights Consortium (which ISU belongs to) have found that unannounced visits, coordination with non-governmental organizations, and confidential interviews with workers are the only way to find out what happens at these sweatshops and make reforms. But companies such as Disney refuse to endorse independent monitoring.

None of the sweatshop reforms would have happened without outside pressure from the National Labor Committee and other anti-sweatshop activists. The first anti-Disney protests came in 1995 because of the exploitation of workers in Haiti. Between 1983 and 1989, apparel exports from Haiti to the U.S. doubled, but the wages of the workers assembling goods for American imports declined 56%.

In September 1991, the day before President Aristide’s minimum wage increase (to 50 cents an hour) was to go in place, a coup overthrew the democratically-elected government of Haiti. Disney and other American companies used the coup to dramatically increase profits, as the repressive military dictatorship (which killed over 4,000 people) forced down wages to 14 cents an hour. Disney workers in Haiti were paid six cents per garment, 0.3% of the total price for 101 Dalmatians children’s outfits.

In response to the campaign, Disney, Cutler, Wal-Mart, Kmart, J.C. Penney and others sent representatives to Haiti for the first time asking to investigate their contractors. In Haiti, at least, companies began paying the minimum wage and conditions improved. In 1997, under public pressure, Disney amended its corporate Code of Conduct to include the workers right to freedom of association and to form independent unions.

But Disney, like its competitors, refuses to go further and allow independent monitoring or efforts to improve all of its factories. Instead, Disney is happy to dump the small number of sweatshops that can be exposed. Sweatshops are treated as a public relations problem, not a human rights problem.

It is odd that a company obsessed with monitoring its employees (just this year, Disney theme park male workers were allowed to have mustaches for the first time) and controlling its image and products would be unable to stop having its merchandise made in sweatshops. A Los Angeles Times article (December 1, 1998) noted, “as representatives of Disney and other firms kept close watch over production details, such as placement of inseams, hemlines and zippers, monitors hired by the companies failed to notice workers were not being paid.” Disney refuses to see its role in sweatshops because the profits are too large.

Disney’s use of sweatshops is almost certain to grow in the near future. Disney controls 5 percent of America’s children’s apparel market, and plans to double its share with new deals to place Disney garments in all Kmart and J.C. Penney stores. Spencer Craig, a former duty manager for the Magic Kingdom and head of training for EPCOT at Disney University who wrote its curriculum on merchandising, recalled it was CEO Michael Eisner’s decree for 20% profit margins from every business that pushed Disney into the sweatshops. Craig told Peter Schweizer and Rochelle Schweizer, authors of Disney: The Mouse Betrayed: “It used to be that if you brought back a net 6 percent increase, you got promoted. That’s the real world of merchandising. For them to come in and say, ‘You’re going to return twenty percent also,’ it led us to use less scrupulous licensees and manufacturers. The profit motive drove it.” The desire to expand its apparel profits will make Disney unlikely to get rid of its sweatshops unless consumers pressure the company to change.

Yet why is Disney so anxious to sacrifice ethical actions for profits? Unlike its workers in China or Bangladesh, Disney can’t plead poverty. In the year 2000, Disney’s total revenue was $25 billion with profits of nearly $4 billion. In 1998, Disney CEO Michael Eisner awarded himself a stock option worth $181 million, on top of his $8.7 million salary. This was the largest corporate grant in the history of the United States. It would take a typical worker in a sweatshop sewing Disney garments 200,000 years to earn what Eisner made in one year.

When Disney and other global corporations developed this highly profitable technique of exploiting workers around the planet in a race to the bottom, Disney and other sweatshop companies could never have imagined that a bunch of college students in America would object to the often unreported suffering of young women in factories thousands of miles away. It’s a small world, after all.