Teach yourself

Some interesting reading in Jonathan Dee's unlikely profiles, A Toy Maker’s Conscience:

With just a few weeks to go until Christmas, the sensory onslaught inside the Times Square Toys “R” Us was well into its merciless ratchet upward. The infrastructure of aggression — the indoor Ferris wheel, the roaring animatronic T-rex, the woman who blocks your path as you enter the store to snap a picture of you that another employee will try to sell to you on your way out — was augmented by the holiday tension on the ground: mothers on cellphones, seasonal employees in the store’s dark blue shirts pushing carts full of inventory, children banging away at the sample electronics. It seemed as loud as a factory floor; but that is only because most of us cannot imagine how loud a factory floor actually is.

Toy Factory Floor Mattel did more than most companies to improve the conditions for workers in Chinese factories. But when it recalled toys with lead paint it still faced a public-relations disaster.
Prakash Sethi, though, didn’t really see any of it. Instead, standing before a vertiginous wall of toys while shoppers eddied around him, the 73-year-old business-school professor and grandfather saw only what the tens of thousands who march through here every Christmas season fail to see, which is how all these toys came to be here in the first place. ...

The work is hot and loud and exhausting and hazardous and underpaid. But it is also, at least for the 60,000 to 80,000 (or many more, according to Sethi) Chinese factory workers employed directly or indirectly by Mattel, measurably less so than it used to be, and that is in large part the achievement of Sethi himself. A career academic, he is the founder and president of the idealistically named International Center for Corporate Accountability, an operation run out of a two-room faculty office at Baruch College in New York. It may be a reach to style a University Distinguished Professor of Management at Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business as a radical, but in that academic context, at least, he’s something of a flamethrower. He has suggested that multinational companies with manufacturing bases in China and elsewhere not merely raise the pathetically low wages of their factory employees but also pay them restitution for years past. When asked why more companies don’t take steps to monitor wages and working conditions, he once answered “bigotry.” This sort of bluntness makes it less than completely surprising that the I.C.C.A. doesn’t have a long list of clients for its monitoring services. “I don’t work with very many companies,” Sethi says equably. “They don’t want me.” ...

Fitzgerald presented what he called “the concept of Prakash” to the Mattel executives at their corporate headquarters in El Segundo, Calif., and they brought him out for a meeting that led to the establishment of the Mattel Independent Monitoring Council, the precursor to his International Center for Corporate Accountability. (When, several years later, the possibility arose of Sethi and his staff’s monitoring other companies as well, everyone involved agreed it would be best to get Mattel’s name off the door.) What the council was being asked to monitor was Mattel’s adherence to its own “global manufacturing principles” — a two-page pledge consisting mostly of vague ethical declarations to which no one could object, like “facilities must have environmental programs in place to minimize their impact on the environment.” For Sethi — who had spent his career publishing books and delivering lectures on corporate morality more or less into a void — this was an almost unbelievable opportunity to carry his ideas inside the walls of a commercial behemoth, one with sales of more than $5 billion a year. “It was totally unprecedented,” he says. “Really intoxicating. I was inventing everything as I went along. There just weren’t any systems of its kind. Nobody could say, ‘It can’t be done.’ ” ...

Resistance can take different forms. On one audit, a Chinese colleague called Sethi’s attention to a group of men standing beside a black S.U.V. parked outside the factory. At first Sethi didn’t see anything unusual about it. “Where,” his colleague asked him rhetorically, “would you see a group of such healthy Chinese men standing around smoking cigarettes and doing nothing?” The intimation was that the men might be the local police sent by someone to intimidate them. (Sethi had been followed in other countries before.) Rather than risk some sort of incident, the rest of the audit was called off, but six months later Sethi returned to the same factory and wasn’t bothered. ...

Fitzgerald, who left Mattel in 2000, says: “The changes we made in the living conditions in China were extraordinary. I think you can tell from the passion in my voice that I am very proud of what we accomplished. It was a big damn deal. And without Prakash, it could never have worked.”

Sethi remembers one epic argument with a factory manager who didn’t want to upgrade his filthy dormitory on the grounds that it was built before the company created its global manufacturing principles. In the end, Mattel worked out a deal that resulted in a new dorm, and the manager and Sethi became friends. According to Sethi, the manager said, “Prakash, these workers and the ones after them, they’ll never know what a crummy Indian did for them.” ...

But the global manufacturing principles are all about protecting workers; as it developed, there is another constituency whose welfare has been put at risk by Mattel’s operations in China: namely, the consumers who bought and the children who played with what was made there. In early July, a European retailer discovered lead paint on some of Mattel’s toys; on Aug. 2, Mattel announced the recall of 83 different toys, a total of 1.5 million items. Twelve days later, more than 400,000 additional toys were recalled for containing lead-based paint — together with millions more recalled for the choking hazard posed by tiny magnets, which had nothing to do with production shortcuts but were instead caused by flaws in Mattel’s own designs. ...

Alan Hassenfeld, the chairman of Hasbro and the co-chairman of the ICTI CARE foundation, called for a one-code approach in remarks at a Columbia Business School forum last spring that seemed directed at Mattel, offering a somewhat tin-eared anecdote about a Chinese factory that moved the fire extinguishers six inches up and down the walls depending on who was monitoring its conditions that week — as if the real hardship inside these factories was an excess of bureaucracy. ...

There will always be those who consider big business’s vows to make the world a better place fundamentally cynical. But capitalism has often longed for, if not technically required, a moral justification, and for most of the 20th century it was provided by socialism and the various forms of government representing it. Now that opposition is gone, and in search of a nonmaterial rationale, the lords of acquisition have to look elsewhere. The sense of moral aspiration behind corporate social responsibility seems mostly genuine — which is somehow both the most and least appealing thing about it, for it encourages a lot of back-patting among the world’s economic elite, whose members seem able to discern, in their own hunt for the cheapest possible work force, a humanitarian aim.

“I know we have brought a lot of modernity to that part of the world,” Hassenfeld told the audience at that Columbia forum. He said Japan, Korea and Taiwan “exploded” when Hasbro was manufacturing there, adding, “We had to be doing something right.” As for the ICTI CARE code, which now governs the welfare of almost a million Chinese workers inside 1,461 factories, he said: “We’re an industry-driven code. It’s the old ‘fox guarding the henhouse.’ . . . But I made an agreement and shook hands that no matter what we found, we would try and remediate that factory. Be a teacher.”

When I relayed the gist of these remarks to Sethi, he smiled angrily and shook his head. “That’s why I don’t get invited to those things,” he said.

Ah, be a teacher--I wonder if the textbooks will include The Jungle, How The Other Half Lives, and manuals on how to design lead-free toys.

Not to mention each of those countries Hassenfeld thinks Hasbro taught actually invested in education themselves--which is why they outperform us on study after study.