December 24, 2019

It’s Time for Santa’s Elves to Unionize

They’re making more than 100,000 toys an hour—for no pay. Enough.

Deagreez/Getty

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It’s the most wonderful time of year: catchy songs, warm drinks, family time, and of course, presents. Every Christmas, kids all over the world hope they make the cut on Santa’s Nice List in order to receive presents under the tree, lovingly delivered by Santa himself with the help of eight reindeer. But while Santa gets all the credit, it’s actually the elves who are toiling in a factory at the North Pole making all the toys—for free. After centuries of unpaid labor, it’s time: Santa’s elves need a union.

Each year, 2 billion people celebrate Christmas. For argument’s sake, let’s say 500 million of those people are children, and they each receive two toys. The elves would have to make approximately 2.74 million toys every single day, assuming they take Christmas Day off. That’s more than 114,000 toys per hour, provided they don’t eat or sleep at all. At that rate of production, the elves will have to begin work again on December 26; otherwise, they won’t have enough time to make all of the gifts for the next year.

Santa’s workshop? More like Santa’s sweatshop.

And let’s not even start with Elf on the Shelf, the elves who have been dispatched to keep an eye on children to make sure they don’t misbehave. Isn’t Santa supposed to be monitoring behavior? Why has he outsourced this to the criminally overworked elves?

Although Santa, like any good factory owner, is pretty secretive about daily life at the North Pole, the data is clear: This is slave labor.

Luckily, the elves have a way to make this grueling job a little more pleasant. Unions have been proven to increase pay for individual workers (and their decline has been one reason for the mass income inequality we see today.) If the elves organize, they can put an end to this gross miscarriage of justice and fight for better pay, ensure the North Pole has safe working conditions, and guarantee benefits (like more than one day a year to rest). 

Every year, the elves make toys for the children of the world while Santa gets rewarded with milk and cookies and cute songs. It’s time the elves get recognized too.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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