Richard Gottlieb

New York Times Magazine: “A Toy Maker’s Conscience”

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured an article, "A Toy Maker's Conscience," by Jonathan Dee ostensibly on the efforts of one man, Prakash Sethi and his International Center for Corporate Accountability to bring a more civilized workplace to China’s toy workers.  Specifically, to those who work for Mattel.

So, let’s get this out of the way first.  Who is Prakash Sethi and what is the International Center for Corporate Accountability? 

According to the article, for the last ten years, Sethi, a Professor of Management at Baruch’s Ziklin School of Business, has been working for Mattel as a monitor for its company owned factory working conditions.  He has also been monitoring conditions in factories that do O.E.M. for Mattel.

It appears from the article that Sethi has prior to this, and since, been scolding multinational companies to, and I quote, “…raise the pathetically low wages of their factory employees [and] also pay them restitution for years past.”

The author, Dee, rightfully credits Mattel with the boldness of hiring Sethi and “…going further than any other company to be a good corporate citizen with regard to its Chinese operations.” 

Sethi and his “International Center for Corporate Accountability’s job is to “…monitor Mattel’s adherence to its own ‘global manufacturing principles.’”  They follow a 75 page checklist in making sure that Mattel is living up to its principles.

So far so good.  Mattel has been pretty battered lately so it’s good and it’s fair to see some balancing in coverage of its ethics. 

Then the article starts to go off a cliff.  Let me give you two quotes:

[T]he International Council of Toy Industries has a code of conduct called CARE — a clumsy acronym (“Caring, Awareness, Responsible, Ethical”) that reeks of P.R. consciousness. The code is similar to Mattel’s but is not nearly as tough, largely because, says Sethi, it lacks what he considers the most crucial element — a strong, transparent, third-party monitoring program. 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.

And then this:

And his [Sethi’s] caustic tone when he discusses Hasbro in particular suggests something deeper than a simple analysis of two rival businesses: in a word, loyalty. His unwillingness to criticize Mattel — or, at most, to couch criticism of it in terms of multinational corporations generally — is almost touching. In fact, in an essay in this month’s issue of Ethical Corporation, Sethi goes so far as to blame other toy companies for Mattel’s recent recall woes, saying that if every company employing a given vendor demanded the same level of transparency that Mattel does, the vendor never would have tried to cut corners to begin with, for fear of going out of business entirely.

Wow!  You mean it’s everyone else’s fault that Mattel had recalls?  You mean ICTI is just after P.R. and Alan Hassenfeld is “tin-eared,” but that Sethi, an ethicist, is just being loyal when he doesn’t hold his employer up to the same criticism he aims at others?  In fact it is to be seen as “touching?” 

Look!  The toy industry has a lot of blame to go around.  When something good happens, it’s important to spread that around as well. 

The ICTI C.A.R.E. process is a noble and seemingly workable attempt to bring a consensus for working conditions to a wide array of companies.  It is to be praised.

Mattel is to be praised as well.  They did a great job of raising the bar for monitoring working conditions.  They deserve praise.  The author and Sethi just don’t need to make it come at the expense of the rest of the industry.

Posted by Richard Gottlieb on December 24, 2007 | Comments (0)