Wal-Mart's Sweatshop Monitoring Fails to Catch Violations: The Story of Toys Made in China for Wal-Mart

Field research by Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) conducted in 2007 shows that Wal-Mart consistently fails to catch and stop serious labor violations in its Chinese supplier factories. Indeed, the working conditions in Wal-Mart’s Chinese supplier factories are increasingly falling below the International Labor Organization’s defined minimum standard for socially acceptable work. Interviews conducted between June 2005 and December 2006 with eighty-two workers at five Wal-Mart toy supplier factories in the industrial zones of Shenzhen and Zhuhai in Guangdong province uncovered widespread illegal and unethical labor practices that previously eluded Wal-Mart auditors.