Mattel: end abuse of women workers on Barbie factory in China
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Mattel: Stop using Barbie to purple wash your human rights violations in China
The key findings of exploitation in the report:
Low pay that compounds poverty:
- The factories in which we have been conducting investigations for nearly thirty years primarily employ women, often from poor rural areas. Most workers received a basic salary for a standard 40-hour week of 2,200 yuan (€278), not enough to cover the basic needs of someone living in Guangdong Province and making women more dependent on overtime.
- Mattel Chang’an business model seems to be set up to target the most vulnerable and most precarious by offering them a short-term solution that flouts the basic requirements of workplace health and safety, stability and well-being. Precarity and instability are not conducive to a healthy, sustainable working culture. By deducting accommodation and meal costs from employee wages, the factory also presides over a system in which people can work for an entire month but be left with little money to show for it. This system increases workers’ dependence on the factory, trapping them in a cycle of poverty, with no real way to save money or progress up the career ladder.
Precarious working conditions:
- Assembly-line employees work an average of 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, with a 40-minute lunch break. They rack up between 84 and 110 hours of overtime a month, in major breach of Article 41 of the Chinese Labour Law, which states that workers must work no more than 36 hours of overtime a month.
- Workers have to produce at least 2 products a minute. In the workshops, they usually have to work for 10 hours with no or few breaks in order to meet the daily quotas.
- Workplace accidents are common. During the investigation, two relatively serious accidents involving forklifts occurred within the space of a week.
- Workers are exposed to hazardous substances on a daily basis, sometimes without protective equipment.
- Health needs of women unmet, mainly in relation to pregnancy, menstrual health and breastfeeding. Under China’s Law on the Protection of Women’s Rights and Interests workplaces must have spaces for breastfeeding mothers.
- Abuse and harassment from an endless stream of bosses. An extremely hierarchical management model produces and perpetuates a climate of control and surveillance and feeds a culture of domination.
Systemic levels of gender-based violence:
- In 2019 and 2020, two new investigations in Guangdong province revealed the systemic nature of gender-based violence in Mattel factories. Numerous witnesses described a climate of widespread, normalised sexual harassment within the manufacturing facilities, with women subjected to regular abuse, including verbal harassment and unwanted physical advances, from male colleagues or managers. Despite complaints, factory managers turned a blind eye to this abusive behaviour, leaving victims with no protection or support. ‘
- Everyday sexual harassment of women working in the Chang’an factory with “verbal harassment and leering in the workshops, dormitories and in the street’ as well as on the work WeChat group, where men regularly make degrading sexual comments about the physical appearance of their female colleagues.
- Between 2019 and 2024, we collected testimonies from several women who described frequent abuse at the hands of male colleagues and managers. Cyber harassment, which targets women on social media and in employee group chats, emerged as a new form of abuse for women. These women described feeling helpless in the face of inaction by supervisors, the normalisation of acts of harassment and the lack of channels through which they could seek protection.
Link to full report here
ActionAid Ireland today highlighted that hundreds of Chinese women making the popular girls’ toy Barbie are subject to sexual harassment, systemic gender-based violence, low wages, and exploitation. ActionAid France has been warning Mattel about the shocking working conditions in its Asian toy factories, along with those of its subcontractors, for nearly thirty years.
This most recent report – based on an undercover investigation in 2024 led by ActionAid France and China Labour Watch– exposes a litany of abuses facing female production line workers in the Mattel factory in Chang’an, Guandong in southern China, currently the sole Barbie production site in China.
CEO of ActionAid Ireland, Karol Balfe said: “In 2023, millions of people around the world went to see Barbie, a film co-produced by Mattel and expounding feminist principles. While Mattel continues to rake in huge profits from its plastic doll’s global cultural prominence, consumers need to be aware of its guarded manufacturing secrets. ActionAid has repeatedly called on Mattel to take steps to protect the women working in its factories, but to no avail”
Ms Balfe added: “Mattel make billions in profits every year on the exploitation and abuse of workers. Mattel has said that 58 million dolls are sold every year – about 100 dolls a minute – to people in 150 countries around the world. Barbie is once again one of the most popular girls’ toys in Ireland this Christmas. On International Women’s Day this year Barbie encouraged girls to be ‘confident, daring, brave and legendary’. And in the film, Barbie ironically declares that ‘we fixed everything in the real world so all women are happy and powerful’. The real irony is that Chinese women working in the Chang’an factory appear to have missed out on this emancipatory, progressive movement. They experience exploitation and gender-based violence on a daily basis, while Mattel continues to pursue its quest for feminist respectability.”
“By claiming that it is committed to equality even as it exploits female employees and turns a blind eye to the gender-based violence to which they are subjected, Mattel perpetuates the very inequalities it professes to be fighting.
Ms Balfe continued: “This investigation into Mattel is deeply troubling. It also reflects the poor human rights track record of many global corporations. They have been implicated in abuses such as discrimination against women, unsafe working conditions, repression of trade unions and collective bargaining, limiting technology transfer, and environmental destruction. These systemic impacts are especially severe for women in the Global South. Ultimately governments need to better regulate corporations to prevent human rights abuses and consumers should demand that Mattel improve its conditions. Unequal corporate power means that efforts to agree global legally binding accountability mechanisms (including the UN Binding Treaty on business and human rights) face constant roadblocks.”
ActionAid is demanding for Mattel to take full responsibility for the treatment of its workers in its factories by improving working conditions, preventing gender based violence through clear policies, staff training and complaints procedures
Mattel has not responded to requests to speak on this issue but did state that the accusations are being taken seriously, and that an audit has been commissioned.
Ms Balfe added: “Mattel make billions in profits every year on the exploitation and abuse of workers. Mattel has said that 58 million dolls are sold every year – about 100 dolls a minute – to people in 150 countries around the world. Barbie is once again one of the most popular girls’ toys in Ireland this Christmas. On International Women’s Day this year Barbie encouraged girls to be ‘confident, daring, brave and legendary’. And in the film, Barbie ironically declares that ‘we fixed everything in the real world so all women are happy and powerful’. The real irony is that Chinese women working in the Chang’an factory appear to have missed out on this emancipatory, progressive movement. They experience exploitation and gender-based violence on a daily basis, while Mattel continues to pursue its quest for feminist respectability.”
“By claiming that it is committed to equality even as it exploits female employees and turns a blind eye to the gender-based violence to which they are subjected, Mattel perpetuates the very inequalities it professes to be fighting.
Ms Balfe continued: “This investigation into Mattel is deeply troubling. It also reflects the poor human rights track record of many global corporations. They have been implicated in abuses such as discrimination against women, unsafe working conditions, repression of trade unions and collective bargaining, limiting technology transfer, and environmental destruction. These systemic impacts are especially severe for women in the Global South. Ultimately governments need to better regulate corporations to prevent human rights abuses and consumers should demand that Mattel improve its conditions. Unequal corporate power means that efforts to agree global legally binding accountability mechanisms (including the UN Binding Treaty on business and human rights) face constant roadblocks.”
ActionAid is demanding for Mattel to take full responsibility for the treatment of its workers in its factories by improving working conditions, preventing gender based violence through clear policies, staff training and complaints procedures
Mattel has not responded to requests to speak on this issue but did state that the accusations are being taken seriously, and that an audit has been commissioned.
