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• Title: Toy Stories


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Summary Toy Stories ()

TOY STORIES is a unique window into a rapidly changing globalized world, revealing the hidden supply chains of toys, exposing shocking abuses, but also showing the efforts of those who try to make life better - and telling their stories.

Synopsis Toy Stories ()

Everyone can remember a favorite toy. Mine was a red double-decker bus, a Dinky Toy. It was hard, shining metal, a perfect copy of a real London bus. I saved up for several weeks to buy it, and I don't think that since then I have owned anything that I loved more. Children can be obsessed by something they have seen advertised or that their friends all have. Parents and grandparents want their kids to be happy, and toy companies know how to cater to and manipulate these desires. Toys are perhaps the ultimate consumer product, always changing, often poorly made, and rapidly discarded. But it's very hard to know where a toy comes from, or what goes into it. Nobody wants a toy to be dangerous to a child (as some have been), but what about the people who labour to make the toys? What if people are suffering so that our kids can play?

TOY STORIES is a long-form documentary that will reveal what goes into the making of a toy: a 'fashion doll', like Barbie or Bratz. We will tell the personal, dramatic stories of people who make these toys and expose the hidden abuses of a global supply chain. They range from imprisoned teenage fabric workers in India, to struggling migrant labourers in China, to small-time manufacturers squeezed by big international chains, to working families here in Canada.

TOY STORIES will be a unique window into a rapidly changing globalized world, revealing the hidden supply chains of toys, the most innocent and beloved of products, exposing both shocking abuses, but also showing the courageous efforts of those who try to make life better - and telling their moving stories.

CHINA

NB: the following stories, set in different countries, will be intercut. Here they are told in sequence for clarity. In China, we have some subjects. Others we are in the process of finding.

In an early scene, 28-year old MA LI is visiting her child in a remote village. Her daughter is looked after by her grandparents, and Ma Li rarely sees her. Li gives her a Barbie-like fashion doll. It is one she makes in far away Shenzhen. Tearfully, she leaves to go back to the city. She may not see her daughter until next New Year's.

Ma Li is one of two (or possibly three) characters we follow who work making toys. She is a dagongmei, a migrant worker. Millions of women like her have moved from the impoverished countryside to the huge cities of the Pearl River in south China, to feed the astonishing expansion of the southern cities. It's the fastest industrial and urban growth in human history. And the Pearl River district is where 75% of the world's toys are made. We follow Ma Li as she struggles with her work and private life. (Some of her story is also told by former toy workers.) She has worked in the Bright Dawn Toy Factory for several years, living in a crowded dormitory with eight young women, sharing a bathroom, and sleeping only six hours a night. But workers still find time to share their stories, even though they are very tired. Ma Li works long hours making heads for the Barbie fashion doll. She has to work more overtime than the law allows. (Chinese labour laws can be relatively good on paper, but they are often not enforced.) Ma Li would like to make more money, is exhausted all the time, and misses her child.

Mr CHEN owns one of these toy factories (it would be great if it were the same one, but this may not be possible). The prices of cotton, plastic and rubber - his raw materials - are going up. He is squeezed by both competitors and foreign buyers: the toy business worldwide is dominated by five companies, like Mattel and Hasbro, and they have the power to choose their suppliers. He is meeting with a supplier who wants a lower price for the assembly of his fashion doll. And since the toy business is all about the Christmas rush, he wants the dolls very fast. And because the foreigners want to sign off with an NGO that examines factories for labour and safety breaches, he is facing an ethics audit. (Toy factories back in the 90s had some of the highest deaths due to fires and collapses of any industry.) The pressure is bad. It would be better for Chen to either shift production to the poor, interior of China, to automate as much as possible here in Shenzhen - or to shift production to Cambodia, where labour is much cheaper.

Ma Li came to the city for opportunity - and for excitement. But she cannot have her child with her because of the hukou pass system, where migrant workers can go to a new city, but do not have any rights to stay or have a family. It is one way that China controls its migrant population. Li's co-workers talk when they go out for a cheap meal. Many of them are single and think that they may never meet a husband. On the factory floor, they have more trouble: the ramping up of production means lots of overtime, and verbal abuse. It's dirty, unsafe and the fumes are bad. When they find out that the owner is planning to shutter the factory and not pay the promised pension fund they have contributed to, they have had enough.

Mr Chen meets with other toy factory owners, and they complain about getting squeezed by the foreigners and about the audit system. Sometimes there is a simple bribe. (Sometimes, when the auditors come round, the owner has picked workers for them to talk to, has sectioned off a part of the factory that is very clean, and shows them a fake set of books.) The factory owners furiously complain to the American toy association.

Ma Li finds out that her factory has a union - part of the giant Chinese Communist Party workers' union - but they are pretty useless,and usually take the side of management. But she talks to an NGO. Here we meet KEN, a labour activist from Hong Kong. He must tread carefully with the Chinese government - becoming more authoritarian nowadays, and work with what is possible. With Ken's help, Ma Li agrees to secretly take pictures inside the factory to expose abuses. Naturally, she is terribly nervous, but manages to film some of the danger, the drudgery and the abuse. Ken helps her fellow workers organize a slowdown and then a strike - to protest the pension theft.

There are now more strikes happening in China than any other country, and the toy business has seen big confrontations with Disney and others. Will they win? And Ma Li exposes some of the difficulties of her and her fellow migrant workers' lives. How this will play out, we do not yet know. In the end, the international toy association does offer some help. Their Ethical Toy department sets up a program where children of migrant workers can come and stay for a while with their mothers or fathers.

It is a success, and - for a while at least - Ma Li is reunited with her daughter. But it is a minor victory. NB: we are also exploring the lives of plastic workers in south China, who turn garbage into plastic pellets and sell to the toy companies. It is horrid work, with environmental and health horrors, and very low pay. We are also researching the rubber business in Cambodia.

INDIA

Our Barbie (or Barbie-like) fashion doll is mostly made of plastic, rubber and cotton. The cotton for dolls' clothing and stuffed toys made in Shenzhen comes from Tamil Nadu, in the tropical south of India. We are in the office of READ, an NGO, led by KARUPPUSAMY. He is meeting DEEPA and her husband. They are very distressed that their daughter RANI has been lured into a cotton spinning factory and is virtually imprisoned. It is a form of modern slavery. Karuppusamy knows the situation and has dedicated his life to fighting it. (NB: Most of the subjects in India have been found.)

The scheme is called sumangali, or marriage scheme, aimed at teenage Dalit ('untouchable') girls who are very poor, their families often working in subsistence agriculture or picking cotton - a brutal occupation. The girls' families are told that if they work in a cotton factory for three years, they will be given about a thousand dollars at the end - enough to marry. But once they are in the factory, they can almost never leave, sleeping and living in a compound, guarded and surrounded by barbed wire.The girls are told that the lack of light is good for them because at the end of their years there, their skin will be lighter, making them more desirable to possible suitors. Both the conditions and the pay are illegal, but the families are ignorant of the law. And Karuppusamy suspects that the police are paid off. About a hundred girls have died mysteriously in sumangali factories in the last few years.

Karuppusamy and his team have staged a number of dramatic surprise rescues of girls trapped in the sumangali scheme. He now nervously plans another one, with the help of supposedly sympathetic police. The stakes are high for him and for the families. Can he trust the police?

We meet some agents who broker girls to go into the factories. They are surprisingly frank about their work and what the girls are going to face. They know the abuses and they reveal the tricks they use to get families to participate.

Karuppusamy is also dealing with the JANAKI family. They had two daughters imprisoned in the factories. The elder daughter was in hospital, and the younger daughter discloses that they both were raped by factory bosses. The elder girl took (or was forced to take) poison - and died. The factory owner threatened to kill the family if they went to the police. The younger daughter then committed suicide out of shame. The broken-hearted Janaki parents seek justice, and Karuppusamy intends to get it. He pursues the case in the courts.

Karuppusamy is back in his home village, where we meet his kids as they play with their toys and Deepa and her family and their kids. Here we learn that Karuppusamy is himself a Dalit, but he got an education. He left the chance to make decent money behind to found his NGO and help his people. In the village, Karuppusamy stages street theatre to educate people on the rights they have. His NGO, READ, has set up a sewing cooperative for girls who have escaped the brutal factory scheme. They develop skills and together share the profit. We meet some girls who have escaped from the sumangali scheme and work in the sewing co-op. Meanwhile, Karuppusamy meets with the police and gets them to agree to participate in the factory raid.

VERA, an activist with the Canadian company Ulula, is working with READ to deploy worker voice technology. This allows workers to be whistleblowers directly through anonymous cell phone interviews. It is done discreetly and securely, and gets around the problem of corrupt auditors.

The factory raid is on. The police prepare with Karuppusamy. They go in. It is hectic and angry, but the violence is contained. The trouble is there are far fewer girls rescued than Karuppusamy knows are trapped there. Has someone in the police tipped off the owner? (The owners are clever at avoiding the law - one toy factory in India advertises that they plant trees around their factories, to make it more ethically attractive to Western consumers. But the trees are positioned so that the owners can see trouble coming - also they can hide their slaves in the forest when trouble comes!)

We are there as Deepa's daughter is reunited with her family and looks forward to working in the sewing cooperative. But some families are actually angry with Karuppusamy - they wanted the money from selling their daughters.

Karuppusamy plays a long game - the Janaki case of the two lost daughters inches slowly through the courts, but will likely get nowhere. More girls are lured into sumangali. But there is always hope, in the cooperative efforts, in education, and in the worker voice technology from Ulula.

Meanwhile, finished fabrics made by children like Rani are shipped from the port of Chennai to Shenzhen to make apparel for our fashion doll, which will then travel to Canada, where they will be put on the shelves of giant stores for parents to buy for their children.

NB: We have done filming and research in northern India where cotton is grown under horrible conditions. We have not included this part of the supply chain in this, but it is a possibility.

We are also pursuing a story of children in the fireworks business in Tamil Nadu. This is a very dangerous field where children are often employed. Foreign NGOs and local government have had some success in getting children out - but often they go into the cotton business where things are pretty much as bad, with health problems and traumatic injuries. We will be looking at a rarely examined problem - the focus on stopping child labour can sometimes do more harm than good if a child is proudly supporting his or her family. Many foreign NGOs swoop in and stop the child labour, but then do not deal with the wider problem of the family's resulting poverty.

CANADA

NB: One of the Canadian subjects is on board. We are researching others.

ALIZA is a second generation Indo-Canadian. She struggles to make ends meet and look after her two children. Aliza works in a giant retail store that sells toys (her husband drives Uber). It isn't easy. Unions have been broken and retail is particularly stressful. Workers are treated by some customers as servants, and this world is class, race and gender bound. In some ways, life at the bottom of the ladder in Canada is as tough as it is in rapidly growing China (though not India). The parents who buy toys in Aliza's store, their children in tow, are faced with highly marketed - and highly gender stereotyped - toys.

We meet MATTHEW, his wife, their son, WILL and their daughter, BENEDICTA, as they try to navigate this world. Matthew doesn't want his daughter to buy fashion dolls like Barbie or Bratz, but that's what she wants (Benedicta has a kind of shrine to her American Doll collection) while the son (adopted from China) is drawn to superhero dolls that are hyper-masculine. Matthew would like to buy toys from a company that produces locally, that aren't so gendered, and he works with a do-gooder consumer organization. He wants to buy toys for his kids that he knows are not made by other kids. But how do you know? And locally-made toys are usually not what children are desperate to acquire. (And anything that is not part of the global supply chain is far too expensive for Aliza's family.)

One problem the parents deal with is how quickly a new toy ends up being shelved and forgotten, eventually to be thrown out. A noticeable proportion of the Quebec-sized island of floating plastic in the Pacific is made up of forgotten toys. Another is that Aliza is scared that her youngest child is getting poisoned by some bad chemical that a Chinese supplier has used on a doll .

We talk to the owner of one of Canada's largest toy companies - which has its own problems. Building a business on the whims of eight-year-olds, taking risk after risk with products of crazy imagination, almost all of which fail, having to make all your sales in the last quarter and have product to stock, and competing with the likes of giants like Mattel, Hasbro and Disney - not easy. (Although when it succeeds it can make you a billionaire like the owners of Canadian upstart Spin Master.)

When we show them what we have found, they do respond - perhaps. Most people don't want to be doing bad things. But the families do take certain steps, like using new technology to find ethical companies with Benedicta's enthusiastic support. We visit these families as they reflect on their relationship to toys, and what they have learned about where the toys come from and who makes them. We will be connecting some of our characters with each other. And at every opportunity, in China, India and Canada, we will be filming children playing with their toys.

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