A heavy price

Of all factory jobs in mainland China, the role of western mannequin maker is one of the most sought after. But while, by local standards, the pay may be reasonable, some workers risk their lives just to clock on, as Simon Parry discovered.

Coated in an eerie white dust, the workers look like restless ghosts as they shuffle between rows of lifeless torsos, shelves of disembodied heads with staring blank eyes, and untidy piles of arms and legs. When they speak, their talk, too, is of ghosts.

"At night, they come to life," whispers one woman worker with a nervous giggle as she sands down the shiny bald head of a male mannequin that will one day soon gaze out of the window of a store in a shopping mall. "Some of my colleagues swear they've seen their heads move and their eyes follow them across the room."

All of the workers in the factory have heard the sinister stories about the western mannequins they make. In this corner of southern China, where most of the world's shop window dummies are produced, belief in ghostly spirits is commonplace and westerners are referred to as "white devils".

Peasants from some of the poorest parts of China pour into the mannequin factories in Guangdong to do the work. Many have never seen a foreigner before and suddenly find themselves living in concrete complexes where blind legions of pale, alien-like men and women tower silently over them.

Some workers are fearful to stay in the factories after nightfall. Others are overwhelmed with embarrassment and disgust when they first have to handle a bare mannequin. Most, however, overcome their superstitions to do a job that - with pay of up to 100 yuan ($A15) a day - is one of the best paid factory jobs in China.

Those wages come at a heavy price, however - because the truly sinister element of the mannequin industry supplying fashion chains in Hong Kong and the west is not the ghost stories circulating the factory floors but the shocking health risks that making the mannequins inflicts upon the migrant workers.

In crowded factory workshops across Guangdong, workers breathe in lungfuls of carcinogenic fibreglass particles, choking polyester resin and paint fumes as they work around the clock with no masks or proper ventilation to fulfil orders for the mannequins that will take their place shop windows everywhere.

We gained access to some of the hundreds of small factories supplying fibreglass mannequins for fashion chains around the world and found workers toiling in dust-choked workshops that even factory managers cannot bear to stay in for long.

"It's only in China that you can get workers to do jobs like this," Max, the 35-year-old Taiwanese co-owner of one of the province's biggest mannequin factories told as he led us around his complex in Dongguan City. "These Chinese workers don't care about the pollution and they don't care about their health. They only care about making money.

"My workers are among the highest paid factory workers in China - they can earn more than 2,500 yuan a month even though their education is very poor. Most of them wouldn't even recognise words if you showed them to them on a page. That is why the end up doing these kind of jobs."

Posing as buyers for a new European High Street fashion chain, we were taken through the workshops where migrant workers, who live on site in grim dormitory blocks, work with bare hands and no masks despite an eye-watering stench as they handle fibreglass and powerful resin to piece the mannequins together.

"Workers do get bad coughs, especially in the winter," Max admitted. "I used to work on the factory floor but I had to stop because I could feel the effect on my health. I can't go inside the workshops for long now. The smell is too overpowering. You can feel the harm it does to you.

"We give the workers masks to wear and tell them to put them on, but they just laugh and throw them to one side. Sometimes clients visit and insist that workers wear masks. The workers say 'Okay' and put them on, but then take them off as soon as they visitors have left.

"This isn't a job that anyone with an education would do. If you do this job for long enough, you will get cancer. If our employees work flat out for two months without a break they will get sick - it might kill them. We let them retire to their rooms and take days off at a time when they need to."

There are no health safeguards and no health insurance for workers in China's mannequin factories. There is no proper protective clothing for workers even though it is now 20 years since a World Health Organisation agency listed fibreglass as a probable human carcinogen, or since several overseas studies have found significantly higher rates of lung cancer among workers exposed to fibreglass. In China, the compensation for doing a job that might kill you is simply a higher salary.

Max's factory, which has 200 workers and produces 7,000 mannequins a month, is one of 10 major factories and dozens of smaller ones that supplies leading fashion chains in Hong Kong, Asia, Europe and the US. In busy clothes stores, mannequins need replacing at least every two years, so demand is constant.

Mannequins are made to order from supplied measurements - along with photographs of the look they want to achieve. "If you send us the details, we can usually supply the mannequins in a matter of a days," Max said.

Metal-framed moulds are prepared according to the specifications of each order and thousands of mannequins will be produced piece by piece from the moulds. It is a remarkably labour-intensive process with no machinery in sight as workers crouch over the scattered body parts on a concrete factory floor.

An order usually comprises a minimum of around 5,000. "Of course we can make exact replicas of people if that is what they want," said Max, proudly showing off a waxwork-like replica of a famous Taiwanese actor who once visited his Guangdong factory. "But this is just an expensive one-off."

The western shopping malls where the latest fashions are hung on the imported mannequins are thousands of miles away from Dongguan in every sense. Chain stores rarely order mannequins direct from the manufacturer in China, instead buying from distribution companies based in Singapore or Europe which buy in bulk from Chinese factories, re-label the mannequins and then sell them on.

As a result, few of the shop chains ever get to see the factories where they are made or the conditions of the workers who labour on the most prominent items in their shop window displays. "It is very unusual for anyone to buy direct," the general manager of one factory told us. "This is the first time a westerner has been inside our workshop." Secrecy shrouds the supply route with factories strictly barred from revealing the names of the distributors they sell on to.

Inside the factories, each mannequin takes two to three days to make and costs between 60 and 80 US dollars, depending on the quality and the finish. The mannequins at Max's factory are considered to be among the highest quality on the market and he claims they are used in a number of high fashion stores. "I have seen my mannequins in luxury brand name shops when I go to Hong Kong and it makes me very happy," he said.

There is no glamour to the life of migrant worker Zhou Binsheng, 37, who has worked at Max's factory for two years to support a wife and child in western Sichuan province. If he works hard, he says, he can earn 2,000 yuan a month but the cost to his health is harder to calculate.

"You can't do a job like this for too long because it is terrible for your health," he said as he ladled fibreglass resin along the side joints of a pink torso. "I cough all the time now. This work destroys your lungs and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

"Our bosses tell us to wear masks but what is the point?" he asks, gesturing around him at the dusty first-floor workshop, ventilated by a handful of standing fans and open windows. "If we do, we just get too hot to bear, and what can a cloth mask to do protect us from all this dust and stink in any case?"

Given the underlying fears about the effects the work has on their health, it is hardly surprising that here too, sinister stories about the mannequins circulate among workers. "Workers do sometimes get scared at night," said Max. "They think that the mannequins come alive or that their eyes move.

"It's especially unnerving for people who are new to the factory. They just see row after row of heads, just staring at them. They get very jittery if the wind blows through the workshop at night and moves the mannequins around a bit. All sorts of stories go around."

There is a fascination too among the dark-skinned, small-framed workers for what seem like impossibly large shapes of the mannequins they make for western markets. "Asian mannequins have an 85 cm bust but the European ones have a bust of around 97 cm," said Max. "Asian mannequins are usually around 176 cm while European ones are around 182 cms."

Making mannequins is an education in the different dimensions even of women in the same region, Max has found. "Mannequins of women that go to France and Italy are petite. Mannequins of English women are petite too, but not quite so petite as the French and Italian ones," he said.

"Mannequins of German women on the other hand are much bigger - and then mannequins of women from Sweden and Finland are the biggest of all the Europeans. Then we have had some special orders for mannequins of women with very big curves and breasts like footballs - they were for shops in the US selling sexy clothing. The workers were very bemused by the shapes they had to create."

In the eight years he has run the Dongguan factory, Max said he had noticed the size of European orders getting larger. It is not something that is lost on the factory floor workers. "Westerners must be very big to have mannequins this size," said Piao Shunji, 25. "Maybe it is your genes, or maybe it is the food you eat. Perhaps we should change our diet in China to be more like you."

Her colleague Zhou Zuming said: "Before I came to work here I didn't understand. Now I can see why Chinese teams always get beaten at football by teams from Europe. You westerners are like giants compared to us."
Two hours away in a cramped and untidy one-storey brick factory coated in fine white dust in Panyu, Guangdong, workers at another factory are struggling to keep up with an overflowing order book that includes more than 100 mannequins for models in stores in the US.

It is so hot in the workshop that workers tend to opt for the night shift, starting at 8pm and running until dawn, to avoid the stifling daytime heat of the summer months. Here 100 workers produce some 3,000 mannequins a month, earning salaries ranging from 1,400 to 3,000 yuan ($A213 to $A457) a month.

Among the ranks of plastic replicas lining the walls of the shoddy tin-roofed factory building is a giant seven-foot high fat man, known to workers as "The Monster" and produced for a chain of stores selling clothes for oversized men and women in the Middle East.

Sucking hard on a cigarette as he takes a break outside the factory, Qian Shouning, 45, who earns up to 85 yuan a day spray painting mannequins, said: "It is a tough job and it is definitely harmful to my health. But when you are poor, survival is the most important thing. It is only the rich people who can afford to fret about their health.

"I have a family to support in Sichuan and I have no other skills. I'm too old to start a new job. The salary here is good enough for me to support my wife and my son. I could not afford to pay for his education if I was working back in the fields in my home village."

One of the very earliest mannequin factories in China is a Hong Kong-owned plant in Zhongshan, close to the southern tip of Guangdong province at the mouth of the Pearl River. "We were among the very first," said the company's general manager Qin. "A lot of mannequins used to be made in Japan and we made very few here. Now they are all made in China because the process is very labour intensive - and labour is cheaper here."

The plant's 100 workers make 80 mannequins a day and Qin is fully aware of the effects that the process has on their health. "When we are very busy, there is a lot of dust and pollution in the air," he said. "We tell our workers to wear masks but they always take them off. They complain it is too hot to wear them.

"We know it is dangerous to their health and we take what counter measures we can. We use strong electric fans to take the dirty air out. We give them a subsidy in their wages for their health. How much they get depends on how long they have been here."

Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the Hong Kong-based pressure group China Labour Bulletin, said: "We would urge employers to take full responsibility for the workers and the working conditions of their factories rather than just paying higher wages. They should provide adequate medical insurance that covers all workplace injuries and illnesses related to working in these factories. That is what any responsible employer would do.

"Employers should ensure their workers operate in safe conditions and are provided with proper protective clothing and masks so they don't breathe in fibreglass fibres. They should also make sure the factories are properly insulated and provide regular health checks for workers."

He added: We are very keen to make Hong Kong companies and Hong Kong consumers aware of the human cost of the products they consume. The most effective pressure consumers can exert is by not purchasing products where they feel workers are being forced to work in unsafe conditions."

Back at his factory in Dongguan, Max is clearly troubled by the effect of his business on the health of his workers. He says he wants one day to invest in a plant and develop the technology to make more expensive but less harmful plastic-mould mannequins which avoid the use of fibreglass and powerful resins.

With so much competition on price from High Street stores in Europe and the US, he knows it will be an uphill struggle. "I want to close this factory and get out of the pollution business," he said. "I just don't want to do it anymore. But to get rid of fibreglass mannequins, people will have to be prepared to pay more, and I'm not sure if they will." He pauses for a minute before adding: "In fact, I'm certain they won't."

While he waits, the industry continues to grow, sucking in more migrant workers to work for high salaries and correspondingly low life expectancies in small factories across southern China. Many are older, unskilled workers who would struggle to find work in any of the region's more hi-tech factories. Others though, are surprisingly young.

As he applied a coat of resin to the inside leg of a female mannequin, 24 year-old Zhong Guilin looked cheerful for a man doing a job that may make a ghost of him before his time. "I come from a coal mining town in Henan province," he said with a shrug. "It might be dangerous here but it's not as dangerous as working down the mines - and that's where most of my friends from school are now."

By Simon Parry