Today the same toy is made not just for lower wages, but also under significantly harsher working conditions. But efforts to keep its selling price below $10 on shelves at Wal-Mart and Toys ''R'' Us forced the company to move production to China three years ago. But he said he intended to visit China soon to ''make sure they understand what we expect.''Įtch A Sketch is the same child's drawing toy today that it was in 1960, when Ohio Art first produced it in Bryan, Ohio. Killgallon, the chief executive of Ohio Art Company, the owner of Etch A Sketch, said that he considered Kin Ki executives honest and that he had no knowledge of labor problems there. He said that the memos might have reflected attempts by factory managers to deceive inspectors, but that such behavior ''did not have the support of senior management.'' The company's crib sheet recommends if inspectors press to see such documents, workers should ''intentionally waste time and then say they can't find them,'' according to company memos provided to The New York Times by employees.Īfter first saying that Kin Ki strictly abides by all Chinese labor laws, Johnson Tao, a senior executive with the privately owned company, acknowledged that Kin Ki's wages and benefits fell short of legal levels and vowed to address the issue soon. Most do not have pensions, medical insurance or work contracts. They staged two strikes recently demanding they get paid closer to the legal minimum wage.
Real-world Kin Ki employees, mostly teenage migrants from internal provinces, say they work many more hours and earn about 40 percent less than the company claims.
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