Nude Barbie Dolls on strike!

Labor dispute grows at Barbie gown plant
Advocates are pressuring Mattel over a subcontractor that employees say has employed children and fought unionization at a Mexico facility.

BY ELISABETH MALKIN/New York Times News ServiceJune 14, 2005


There was not much that Guadalupe Ávila Jiménez 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 Ávila, 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 move to focus on the u.s. toy giant Mattel, which licenses the Barbie label to the plant’s owner, Rubie’s Costume Co., based in Richmond Hill, N.Y. 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, Ávila 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 US5 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.