Bratz dolls made under harsh working conditions:

Friday, December 22, 2006

The pouty Bratz dolls so popular as Christmas presents are made at a factory in southern China where workers are obliged to toil up to 94 hours a week, among other violations, a labour rights group said in a report released Friday.

The report by U.S.-based China Labour Watch and the National Labour Committee details allegations of harsh working conditions, especially during peak delivery months, and of violations of workers' rights to injury and health insurance.

More than 120 million Bratz dolls, at the centre of a controversial report alleging they're manufactured in China under harsh working conditions, have been sold since 2001.
(MGA Entertainment/Associated Press) The edgy, urban-styled rival to Barbie is made by a subcontractor in the southern export hub of Shenzhen, as is typical of many products sold in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Workers are paid the equivalent of 17 cents US for each doll, the report said, while the dolls retail for $16 US a piece or more.

Calls to the Van Nuys, Calif., headquarters of MGA Entertainment Inc., which launched the Bratz brand in 2001, were not answered and there was no immediate response to an e-mailed inquiry to the company's public relations office. Calls to the China-based spokesman for Wal-Mart Stores Inc., a main distributor of the dolls, went unanswered Friday.



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A sad situation, exacerbated by the fact--not many people care about how badly the people who manufacture their products are treated.

It boggles the mind...

Reminds me of the history of the antebellum American south, where everything the wealthy planters owned had been gained through slave labor.

Many people in America are counting on slave labor to make more and more money.

Human nature does not change, does it...

Not that it particularly matters what things are being made by slave labor, but the whole idea of the bratz doll bothers me tremendously. It is such a negative image for girls.