Story first appeared on NYTimes.com.
Ikea has long been famous for its inexpensive, some-assembly-required furniture. On Friday the company admitted that political prisoners in the former East Germany provided some of the labor that helped it keep its prices so low.
A report by auditors at Ernst & Young concluded that Ikea, a Swedish
company, knowingly benefited from forced labor in the former East
Germany to manufacture some of its products in the 1980s. Ikea had
commissioned the report in May as a result of accusations that both
political and criminal prisoners were involved in making components of
Ikea furniture and that some Ikea employees knew about it.
Even though Ikea Group took steps to secure that prisoners were not
used in production, it is now clear that these measures were not
effective enough.
The use of political prisoners as forced labor, even decades ago, is a
publicity disaster for a company that with its familiar blue and yellow
logo seems at times like a cultural ambassador for Sweden. Inexpensive
Ikea furnishings have filled countless student apartments and the homes
of millions of young families around the world.
Accusations against Ikea started to appear about a year ago in news
media reports in Germany and Sweden. Ikea’s admission has given new
impetus to efforts by victims’ groups to receive compensation for work
they were forced to perform under the Communist government in East
Germany, an issue that has long been overshadowed here by the large and
deadly slave-labor program under the Nazis.
“There’s little recognition,” said the chairman of the
Association of Victims of Stalinism, himself a former forced laborer,
after a news conference here a short walk from the former Checkpoint
Charlie border crossing, in a building that stands along the path of the Berlin Wall.
Ikea is not the only company that has been linked to forced labor in the
former East Germany by purchasing goods from suppliers there, though
the actual number may never be known.
The prisoner said that after an attempt to escape from East Germany, he
was forced to make steel pipes for the firms Klöckner & Company and
Mannesmann.
At least two well-known mail-order companies in the former West Germany,
Neckermann and Quelle, which have since run into financial trouble,
have also been accused of using forced labor.
Christian Sachse, a Berlin historian, said forced labor permeated
institutions across East Germany, and that it would take years of
research to properly understand the field.
The prisoner said that more needs to be done for the victims, many of
whom today live under worse circumstances than their former tormentors.
Ikea’s announcement received a mixed response. There was praise that the
company had made an effort to uncover unpleasant facts about its past,
but also criticism that it had not been transparent enough with the
results. Rather than releasing the entire report, the company made only a
four-page summary available, citing privacy concerns.
Investigators examined 20,000 pages of internal Ikea records, as well as
80,000 pages of documents from federal and state archives. They
interviewed about 90 people, including current and former Ikea workers
and witnesses from East Germany.
A political prisoner in Naumburg, about an hour’s drive from Leipzig,
told investigators that he was sent to VEB Metallwaren Naumburg, one of
East Germany’s state-owned enterprises. He was put to work placing metal
pegs in chair legs and furniture rollers, and remembered seeing boxes
with the Ikea logo.
A purchaser for the company said that the use of prison labor was not
an official Ikea strategy, but that there was an awareness within the
company about the issue.
The G.D.R. did not differentiate between political and criminal
prisoners, andduring this time period, many innocent individuals were sent to
prison. Ikea repeatedly raised concerns about the possible use of
forced labor at the time but no action was taken, the report said.
It was
well known at the time that East Germany was using prisoners to work in
factories but that West Germany encouraged the production of goods in
the East because it allowed the East to reduce its debt. At the same
time, companies liked to move production to East Germany because costs
were lower.
Companies like Ikea would still have paid for the
work in East Germany but that the pay never reached the workers. It was
pocketed by the G.D.R.
Ikea employees did visit the production sites in East Germany, but rules
governing such visits were strict, that way reducing the effectiveness
of site inspections. Any visit had to be registered and approved in
advance and could take place only in selected parts of the plants, and a
representative of the East German government had to be there.
Ikea said Friday it was sorry about the episodes and pledged to donate
money to research on forced labor in the former East Germany.
