HONG KONG McDonald's said recently that it has sent an inspection team to China to check allegations that child labor is used in a factory that makes toys for its restaurants.
The move followed claims in a newspaper that children as young as 14 are employed in sweatshop conditions in a factory in Shenzhen in southern China, packing Hello Kitty, Winnie the Pooh and other McDonald's toys.
The children earn $3 for each 16-hour workday and make up about 20 percent of city toys' 2,000-member workforce, the South China Morning Post reported.
In a statement, McDonald's said: "We take the current allegations seriously and are taking immediate action to get all the facts.
"Our suppliers know how seriously we take these issues. If they do not comply with our code of conduct and its labor standards, they can lose our business." The fast-food chain said it was sending the monitoring team "to ensure that the allegations are untrue and that we and our supplier, Simon Marketing, are doing everything possible to have the right practices in place".
McDonald's said the Shenzhen Factory had been given a clean bill of health when it was audited in October by Geneva-based SGS International Certification Services, which has been conducting checks on McDonald's subcontractors for more than a year.
The report in Sunday's post showed pictures of children on wooden bunk beds at the living quarters within the Shenzhen factory, which a Hong Kong businessman owns.
In interviews, they admitted using fake identity cards to get work but said only rudimentary checks were made to establish whether they were old enough to work.
They described working seven days a week and being given one or two days off a month.
Pressure groups on Sunday staged the first of a planned series of protests outside branches of McDonald's in Hong Kong in response to the child labor allegations.
A recent report by the International Labor Organization estimated that 13.3 million children from ages 10 to 16 work in China.
(DPA)