The New York Times, June 12, 2005, Sunday

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

June 12, 2005 Sunday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 1; Column 1; Foreign Desk; Pg. 10

HEADLINE: Mexico Labor Case Grows For Maker of Barbie Gowns

BYLINE: By ELISABETH MALKIN; Elisabeth Malkin also reported from Tepeji del Rio for this article.

DATELINE: MEXICO CITY, June 11

BODY:
There was not much that Guadalupe Avila Jimenez liked about her factory job making children's costumes, including flowing Barbie gowns for little girls who like to play princess.
''They shouted at us, they did not let us go to the bathroom, they gave us food that made us vomit,'' said Ms. Avila, 21, reciting a litany of indignities she said she had suffered at the factory, in Tepeji del Rio. About the only thing she did like were the costumes the workers made. ''What we made was really pretty,'' she said.
Today the factory is facing a labor dispute that is anything but pretty. What started out as a local struggle may now shift its focus to the American toy giant Mattel, which licenses the Barbie label to the plant's owner, Rubie's Costume Company, based in Richmond Hill, Queens. Unlike other toy companies, Mattel has an eight-year-old code of conduct for subcontractors and licensees.
Saying they were fed up with managers who called them names, closed factory doors to force overtime and required them to buy work equipment and even toilet paper, Ms. Avila and 60 co-workers -- most young women, some as young as 15 -- voted for a new union. In April, they say, they were locked out and lost jobs that paid little more than $5 a day.
Mattel and Rubie's deny allegations of verbal abuse, forced overtime, making workers buy equipment and the consistent use of child labor, and they say the workers were not dismissed but walked off the job.
''They said we chained people to sewing machines,'' Marc Beige, president of Rubie's, one of the world's largest costume companies, said by telephone from New York. ''That's outlandish. There's nobody being locked in the factory.''
An audit last month by Mattel of the Rubie's plant found several violations of its code of conduct, including one worker who was 15, said Lisa Marie Bongiovanni, a spokeswoman at Mattel's headquarters in El Segundo, Calif. ''Child labor is a zero-tolerance issue for us,'' she said.
The auditors did not speak to the workers picketing outside, she said.
The dispute has revived charges of abuses in Mexico's export assembly plants, known as maquiladoras, and of obstacles to independent unions.
Mexico's toy and garment industries have been hard hit in recent years as many maquiladoras have left for China in search of cheaper labor, creating more pressures on workers. The plants that remain are mostly in the interior, like the one in Tepeji del Rio, a hardscrabble town 60 miles north of Mexico City, where wages are lower than on the border.
''China has served as a pretext to diminish labor conditions,'' said Salim Kalkach Navarro, secretary general of the Labor Vanguard Federation of Workers, the union that Rubie's workers voted to join. It is known by its abbreviation in Spanish, F.T.V.O.
At the same time, organizations that a decade ago fought poor working conditions in garment plants around the world say the toy industry has escaped similar scrutiny.
Stephen Coats, executive director of the US/Labor Education in Americas Project, a Chicago labor advocacy group, charged that Mattel had not responded aggressively to the workers' complaints. ''I'm just kind of stunned they are behind the curve,'' he said.
He said labor advocates would continue to pressure Mattel to correct any abuses at the plant and require Rubie's to allow the workers to choose their own union. ''As long as the union is pressing forward its collective demand, Mattel is frankly a juicy target,'' Mr. Coats said.
Mattel's code may in fact make it more vulnerable to pressure.
Lance Compa, of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, said, ''Mattel actually does have a fairly advanced code of conduct and there is some evidence that they try to have it implemented in their licensees.''
American labor activists and the F.T.V.O. charge that eight workers at Rubie's were younger than 16, including several who were 14 when they were hired. Mexican law permits 14- and 15-year-olds to work only a reduced day, which the union says did not happen.
Mattel requires workers to be at least 16, and Mattel and Rubies acknowledge that the audit turned up one 15-year-old.
Ms. Giovanni, the Mattel spokeswoman, said that as a result of Mattel's audit, Rubie's has promised to hire only employees older than 16 and set up a system to identify forged documents. It has also committed to paying overtime correctly and on time.
Until the dispute is settled, Mr. Beige, Rubie's president, said the plant was accepting fewer orders. It has not made the Barbie costumes since January for reasons unrelated to the dispute, he said. He acknowledged increasing competition from China but said the plant intended to stay in Mexico.
This week, Teresita de Jesus Hernandez, 15, joined the workers protesting outside the plant. Until she lost her job, she said, she was the sole support for her mother, who suffers from a heart condition and diabetes.
At 12, she left school and began working in another garment plant nearby. At 14, she was hired at Rubie's and was told that her age was no problem. The plant manager altered her birth certificate, she said.
''It was O.K. at first,'' she said. But then, she said, workers were required to carry heavy loads. ''They gave us special belts and asked us to pay $45 for them.''
Rubie's says that no worker was ever required to pay for equipment.
Three other underage workers were also protesting at the plant. The union says another four, including a 13-year-old boy, have remained at home for fear of reprisals.
The dispute has followed what has become almost a standard script in maquiladora labor conflicts over the past decade. Workers try to form their own union, only to find that they have been represented -- often without their knowledge -- by a union that is part of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, the old-line federation that was a pillar of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years.
Labor analysts and activists here and in the United States hoped that the election of President Vicente Fox in 2000 would loosen the old federation's grip on labor. But nothing has changed, many say.
''It's clear that the old-line labor groupings have worked out a modus vivendi with the Fox government, and they've basically gone back to business as usual,'' said Mr. Compa of Cornell.
Harley Shaiken, director of the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in a separate interview, agreed. ''You can count the number of independent unions in maquiladoras on one hand and still have fingers left over,'' he said.
Mr. Kalkach, the F.T.V.O.'s secretary general, said Rubie's initially agreed to sign a contract, which was filed and accepted with the national labor board. He produced a copy of the board's decision.
But a few days later, the board rejected the contract, on the grounds that a contract already existed with another union from the Confederation of Mexican Workers.
The long wait is taking its toll. About 50 of the workers accepted severance payments from Rubie's on Monday.
The union is also appealing the national labor board's rejection of the contract. Suspicious of the monitoring Mattel says it has done so far, the union has asked Mattel to set up an independent monitoring system for its licensee plants in Mexico. Mr. Kalkach said, ''That's a moral demand, not a legal demand.''