The Agenda - Social Justice

Freeplay's manufacturing facilities are a 20-minute drive north of headquarters. The verdant route, lined with South African pines, winds past the University of Cape Town and the Groote Schuur Hospital, where Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first heart transplant. The ride offers a scenic view of Table Mountain and lush hills covered in soft green bush that the Afrikaners call fynbros. It is an unusual plant -- as are the plants in which Freeplay builds its radios and flashlights. In one, a third of the 125 workers are blind, deaf, paraplegic, or otherwise handicapped. In the other, half of the 125 workers are ex-convicts or battered women. With the exception of the occasional wheelchair, it's impossible to tell the disabled from the able-bodied, the criminals from the victims.

Freeplay executives shrug at the idea that they are conducting a bold social experiment inside their factories. When the assembly lines opened two years ago, 125 people produced 500 radios per day. Today the same number of people make 2,000 radios per day. The output per person is the same in the factory with handicapped workers as it is in the factory without them. Both factories have defect rates of less than 1%.

Given the specialized, labor-intensive nature of its assembly process, it's tough to benchmark Freeplay's productivity against that of other factories with processes that are more automated. But it's easy to gauge the commitment of the workers. "Our factory is across a four-lane highway from the bus stop where many of the workers get off," explains Derek Sturgess, 51, Freeplay's manufacturing director. "A couple of months into our first production run, I got a call from a local traffic cop who told me about two of our blind employees who were stuck without a sighted person to help them cross the road. The bus pulled away, and the two men just took off across the street. A five-car pileup resulted! When I asked the men about the incident, they said they were determined to be on time."

Maxwell Khosana, 28, has been working at Freeplay for seven months, installing motors in the radios. Khosana flunked his high school exams in 1991, and, shortly after that, his mother lost her job. Faced with no job prospects and a younger brother to feed, Khosana was easily recruited by some friends to break into houses. During an attempted robbery, one of Khosana's cohorts assaulted a worker who had been painting the house targeted for the break-in. The worker later died, and Khosana spent five years in prison. Afterward he worked for a short time in a bakery and in a restaurant, both of which eventually went broke. Then he heard about NICRO, which led him to a job at Freeplay.

"When I arrived here, I was shocked," Khosana says. "In my previous jobs, you had to call the boss 'mister' or 'sir.' Here, I am told there is no boss, that I am in charge of me. I stopped feeling like I was going to die. This job gave me back my dignity. Even people in my community -- they look at me now, and they respect me. They don't see a criminal. They see someone who made a mistake. Freeplay made me feel like a person when I felt less than that."

Hylton Applebaum, the person who envisioned the factories as they are today, couldn't be more satisfied with the results. "I get goose bumps," he says. "I took a friend of mine who is disabled to see the plant. His first thought was, 'It's a sheltered environment where people are patronized and given special treatment.' But he saw that it wasn't like that at all. At the end of the day, we were standing outside the factory next to stacks of boxes labeled, 'Made in South Africa.' And his eyes filled with tears. You can't imagine how significant and inspiring the work done in the factory is."

To Staines, the factories are flesh-and-blood examples of the value system that drives his company -- but they are merely a part of the social impact that he wants Freeplay to make. "Our larger vision involves how the products are used, not just how they're made," he says. "When we employ several hundred workers in South Africa, we touch some lives. But when we ship 5,000 radios into a community -- and then the radios get used to teach about health care, AIDS, agriculture -- we are giving thousands of people a chance to better themselves. That's what keeps me going."

Adds Rory Stear: "I don't want to preach to anybody about how to do things. I just do what makes sense for me as a person and for our business. But when I come to the Unites States, I am overwhelmed by its abundance and by how isolated Americans are from the rest of the world. I just don't believe that talented people can pursue wealth in a vacuum. There's no reason why U.S. companies can't be doing things similar to what we're doing -- even inside the United States. Sure we want above-average financial returns, but we also want to feel good about what we are doing."