Mexican Workers, the People who sell their wares

The ghetto families on 10p an hour making party gifts for Kate's mum's £30million business empire

• The Middleton's business Party Pieces is among companies who sell pinatas made by workers who are paid as little as 10p an hour
• The business said they would urgently investigate the conditions
• Monica Villegas works 10 hours a day, seven days a week and gets her daughter, 5, and son, 18 to help her

Darkness has descended on the murderous Mexican border city of Tijuana, and the drug cartels and people traffickers are furtively plying their trade.
And in a hillside ghetto, a five-year-old girl toils with her mother in another, more subtly exploitative industry.
Stumbling through the pot-holed front yard of their wooden hovel in Tijuana, I find Monica Villegas and her daughter Stephanie in a dimly-lit kitchen crammed with all manner of craft materials: boxes of tinsel and coloured tissue paper, star-shaped cartons, saucepans filled with white sticky paste.

Ghetto families: Stephanie Villegas, aged five, holds a pinata bought on the Middleton's Party Pieces website. She helps her mother Monica who must work ten hours a day, seven days a week to meet her quota

 

Stephanie works in a dimly-lit kitchen crammed with all manner of craft materials: boxes of tinsel and coloured tissue paper, star-shaped cartons, saucepans filled with white sticky paste

Mother and daughter are making pinatas — those colourful cardboard figures filled with sweets which cascade out when their cardboard casing is broken with a stick. They have become a popular source of amusement at middle-class birthday parties, weddings and other celebratory events in Britain.
Among the companies that sell them in sizeable quantities is Party Pieces, the Berkshire-based business run by the Duchess of Cambridge’s family, which offers more than 40 types on its website, in all manner of designs, from lions and castles to Minnie Mouse.
Since Carole and Michael Middleton have never been slow to cash in on their royal connection (last year they launched a range of regally-themed trinkets to coincide with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee), they now include giant pinatas in party packs called Little Prince and Little Princess: blue for a boy, pink for a girl.

Monica Villegas with her daughter Stephanie Villegas, holding a pinata bought on the Party Pieces website

Monica Villegas with her daughter Stephanie Villegas and son Jonathan, holding a pinata star, which is the design they're making for Amscan at the moment, pictured in front of their tiny home

General views of the very poor neighbourhoods in Tijuana where the pinata production takes place

Can it be pure coincidence that their daughter is expecting her own little prince or princess?

 

Such matters are of small concern to 38-year-old Monica Villegas and her daughter. Each week, she must make a set number of pinatas, which varies according to how big they are and how intricate the design.
They are among the many thousands shipped to Britain via a chain of distributors and sold to retailers including Party Pieces.
To meet her target, Monica invariably works ten hours a day, seven days a week — and even then she needs the help of her 18-year-old son, Jonathan, and little Stephanie, who assists her after nursery school by sticking on the bar-codes and labels.
While the Middletons sell their pinatas for £12.99 each, Monica sometimes earns as little as 10p an hour.

Buy in sizeable quantities: Carole and Michael Middleton run Party Pieces, which sells their pinatas for £12.99 each. Monica sometimes earns as little as 10p an hour

Omar, 4, stands by his mother Maria Villegas as she makes pinatas

Maria Villegas and son Omar, 4, on the roof of their home overlooking the slums of Tijuana

Like many Mexicans, this careworn mother excitedly watched the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on her grainy TV, never for a moment imagining that the bride’s parents run a lucrative business selling the very product made by her family and hundreds more in the slums of Tijuana.
Yet, as I have discovered during a lengthy investigation, the Middletons — whose company is estimated to be worth more than £30 million — are, albeit inadvertently, profiting from the labours of poor, overseas workers such as these.
‘We are nothing more than slaves!’ Monica exclaimed when she learned how much Party Pieces charges for the pinatas she churns out from her shambolic kitchen.
‘It is so unfair! So much work, so little money!’
When I show her the pink Little Princess pinata, which I purchased online from Party Pieces and have brought with me from London, she sighs, recalling how she earned just 95p for each one, even though the fiddly design took hours to complete.
Why, then, did she make pinatas?
‘I need any money I can earn,’ she tells me. ‘My husband is a building labourer and there isn’t much work. Anyway, if I complain they will just find someone else.’ 
Before marrying Prince William, Kate Middleton was employed as a part-time buyer for Party Pieces — a job that in some companies entails travelling to meet suppliers and checking their factories.
However, she and her parents surely cannot have been aware of the pinata makers’ abysmal pay and conditions; otherwise they would have been moved to take action.
Indeed, when I told the company of the poignant scenes I had witnessed, they promised an urgent inquiry.
‘As a responsible retailer, we take the allegations made by the Daily Mail very seriously, and we will work with our suppliers to carry out investigations into these claims,’ said a spokesman.

Making millions: Kate with mother Carole Middleton, whose company is estimated to be worth more than £30 million and, albeit inadvertently, is profiting from the labours of poor, overseas workers

The story behind Party Pieces has attracted considerable interest since Kate and William’s romance began, not least because the company is registered as a private partnership, meaning it is not required to file its accounts at Companies House, where they would be open to public scrutiny.
Party Pieces was founded in 1981 by Carole Middleton, then aged 26, who was unable to continue working as a British Airways stewardess because she was heavily pregnant with Kate.
She built up the firm with her husband, Michael, and financial analysts have been surprised by its phenomenal success.
Party Pieces now employs more than 30 people (including daughter Pippa, who edits its online magazine The Party Times) and has made the family fabulously wealthy.
Their three children were educated at Marlborough College, where fees are £27,000 a year. Before Kate was married, her parents bought her a £780,000 flat in Chelsea; and their regular holiday haunt is the paradise island of Mustique, from which they and Prince William have just returned.
In many ways, their amazing ascent of the social ladder is to be admired — the reward for Carole Middleton’s enterprise and endeavour.

'It is unfair! So much work, so little money!'

Yet as with so many companies competing in today’s global market, they must trade with goods manufactured in countries where working conditions fall well below acceptable Western standards.
And with its cheap trinkets, plastic and paper tableware, and assorted novelties, the party supplies industry relies heavily on factories in poorer parts of Asia and the Americas.
Among the dozens of items I purchased from Party Pieces, the majority were supplied by the giant American party goods company Amscan, and many were made cheaply in China.

They included ‘fun wigs’, plastic serving bowls and cutlery, a baby’s high-chair decorating kit, paper lanterns, ‘Woolly Zoo’ animals, paper flags, and — ironically — a Mexican fancy dress outfit.

Despite extensive inquiries, it has proved impossible to trace the precise factories where these items were produced, but according to one Chinese labour-watch organisation, the working environments — and certainly the rates of pay — will inevitably compare unfavourably with those in Britain.

In Mexico, as I saw this week, they are quite simply shocking.

Amscan’s labels carry a folksy message playing on the pinata’s 400-year history in Mexico, and evoking images of sombrero-clad villagers perpetuating the ‘authentic’ handicraft of their ‘artisan’ forebears.

The truth is very different. The joyless workers I met cared little for tradition, and were clearly in thrall to the burly, long-haired Mexican who runs the entire operation, Javier Perez Quintero, locally known as the ‘Pinata King’.

Quintero told me he is an Amscan executive and uses the company’s email address — but the hundreds of home-based craftsmen and women are supplied with materials by a Tijuana firm he runs, called Baja Pacific Paper. It is not clear whether this is an Amscan subsidiary or an independent outfit.

Cashing in: The Middletons have never been slow to cash in on their royal connection - last year they launched a range of regally-themed trinkets to coincide with the Queen's Diamond Jubilee including a Union Jack headband (left) and party cups (right)

At all events, Quintero, who boasts of controlling ‘virtually all’ the pinata industry in Tijuana (and threatened that ‘things could get tricky’ for me when he learned I was inquiring into his business) is a tough task-master.
As the pinata makers are freelance, they are not subject to Mexico’s minimum wage laws, which would require them to be paid at least 49p an hour. Worse, their meagre earnings are further diminished because he deducts a fee — amounting to about £10 a week — for their craft materials.
The pinatas supplied to Party Pieces (and its British competitors, including supermarkets such as Tesco) arrive via the American company’s depot in Milton Keynes.
When I asked Quintero whether he knew they were sold by members of the extended British Royal Family, he shrugged, saying: ‘I have many important clients around the world.’
He also claimed to have pioneered an ingenious production system, which he said he could not let me see for fear it would be copied, though in truth it seems that he simply profits from the toil of his army of ghetto workers.
Amscan vice-president Joseph Zepf told us that the company ‘endeavours to comply with all laws and regulations, especially those relating to wage requirements and working conditions, and categorically denies any inference or allegation to the contrary’.
In its annual report in 2011, the company acknowledged that many of its products were made outside America, ‘which may increase the risk that the labour, manufacturing, safety and other practices followed by the manufacturers of these products may differ from those generally accepted in the U.S.’.
While the report expressed fears that public exposure of these standards could ‘damage our brand image’ and cause products to lose their licence or be boycotted by consumers, it did not state how the company proposed to address these concerns.
The only step referred to in its report is getting manufacturers to confirm that accepted labour practices are adhered to.
Monica Villegas would dearly like to know. So, too, would her next-door neighbour Maria Villegas (no relation), who makes pinatas so she can feed her children, aged four and one.
She lives with eight family members, and though they all help her, the daily grind is never-ending. Each week, she explains, her local company representative drops off a batch of cardboard shapes and a template for the required design.
When I called, it was a 3ft-high rocket decorated with red and blue stars — just the sort of thing that would go down a storm at a smart children’s birthday party in the Home Counties.

Will investigate: Party Pieces, which employs more than 30 people (including Carole Middleton's daughter Pippa, who edits its online magazine The Party Times), promised an urgent inquiry when told of the working conditions

Maria and her family then smooth the card and stick it with glue made from flour paste to make a hollow carton, before covering it with coloured tissue paper and tinsel, cut to fit the pattern.
It might sound easy enough, but watching them work, one sees how much patience and skill it takes. It is physically arduous, too.
‘Look, I no longer have any identity!’ says Maria’s father, Julio Avarez, 67, holding up his hands to show how his fingerprints have been worn away by years of pressing and folding thick cardboard. His daughter complains that the work is ‘exhausting and repetitive’, and fetches an invoice slip to show how little they earn.
Last week, because pinata rockets are so big and difficult to make, she and her relatives worked for 12 hours every day but completed just ten of them — earning a gross income of £25.80: or just £2.58 for each one.

'I hope the Princess of England may do something for us'

But they had to pay the company rep £4.86 for the cardboard and spent a similar amount on coloured paper — leaving them with £15.88 for their 84 hours’ toil.
That is just under 19p an hour between them. And to think the Middletons’ daughter has recently been staying in a villa which costs 100,000 times as much as that figure to rent for a single week.
Moreover, as Maria reminds me, because they are self-employed, Mr Quintero doesn’t have to pay them when they fall sick.
Still, she says sardonically, at least he provided prizes for the annual Christmas draw — just two turkeys, raffled among some 500 workers.
The families who helped me with this investigation are only too aware of the risks they face for crossing the ‘pinata king’, but they bravely went public because they desperately want to end this exploitation.
‘I hope you can speak to the Princess of England so she might do something for us,’ said Monica.
Her plea was poignantly naïve, yet perhaps — just perhaps — the Duchess of Cambridge and her family might hear it, and use their influence to improve the plight of the Mexican ‘slave’ workers who are helping to make them rich.