Child Exploitation.org
Most people have no idea how large the problem truly is.
Labor
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
Many children work.
Persistent poverty – in overall terms, the dominant issue is poverty. In countries with an
annual per capita income of $500 or less, the proportion of children who are working is
usually between 30% and 60%, while for countries with incomes between $500 and $1,000,
the proportion drops to between 10% and 30%.
Suzan is a girl who's 8 years old. Her father is a hard-hearted man. Once he had a quarrel
with her mother and he hit her until she fell on the floor, and now she uses a wheel chair.
Suzan was watching their usual quarrels from a distance. She felt very afraid and she
wanted to have someone to save her from this horrible situation.
I would like to narrate a story of a 12-year-old boy Nadeem. Whose
mother works at my neighbor's house. I have been yearning to write about this boy since
long. For he is an innocent little boy who is badly
beaten by his master's wife and his drug addict father.
With gaunt hands laboriously clutching at some firewood, Ambuya vaJoyce's eyebrows shot
up when she saw her two grandchildren saunter home. The clock had just struck half past
eight and the old soul was beginning to get worried that that some misfortune might have
caught up with the siblings on their way from the farm. In a moment they would fill her in
with what had happened since five in the morning till then.
Children working on the streets selling wares, scavenging, guarding/washing cars, shining
shoes are among the most vulnerable to abuse. In partnership with groups like Church
World Service, children have begun to organize in India, Brazil, Peru, the Philippines and
elsewhere to claim their rights. This Peruvian anthem of the Movement of Working Children
and Adolescents (MANTHOC) testifies to their determination:
Carpet manufacturers and the carpet export industry
The total number of children involved in the industry in South Asia is very difficult to
assess, but in India the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude estimates that between
200,000 and 300,000 children are involved, most of them in the carpet belt of Uttar
Pradesh in central India.
Similar numbers may be working in Pakistan and up to 150,000 in Nepal.For years the
industry claimed in its propaganda that the nimble fingers of children are essential to form
the intricate designs used in the carpets.
Child Labor in Agriculture
Of nearly 250 million children engaged in child labor around the world, the vast majority- 70
percent, or some 170 million-are working in agriculture. Child agricultural workers
frequently work for long hours in scorching heat, haul heavy loads of produce, are exposed
to toxic pesticides, and suffer high rates of injury from sharp knives and other dangerous
tools. Their work is grueling and harsh, and violates their rights to health, education, and
protection from work that is hazardous or exploitative.
Bonded Child Labor
Bonded labor takes place when a family receives an advance payment (sometimes as little
as U.S. $15) to hand a child-boy or girl-over to an employer. In most cases the child cannot
work off the debt, nor can the family raise enough money to buy the child back. The
workplace is often structured so that "expenses" and/or "interest" are deducted from a
child's earnings in such amounts that it is almost impossible for a child to repay the debt.
250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries-at
least 120 million on a full time basis. Sixty-one percent of these are in Asia, 32 percent in
Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America. Most working children in rural areas are found in
agriculture; many children work as domestics; urban children work in trade and services,
with fewer in manufacturing and construction.
India: child domestic workers
Asraf Ali, India Seven-year-old Ashraf Ali’s parents, unemployed due to ill-health and living
in poverty, were happy when Ashraf was offered a job as a domestic worker by a wealthy
and influential acquaintance.
India Bangles are a big business in India. Millions of bangles, made by children in the dark
rooms of Ferozabad's slums, are bought and sold each year.
Children begin work making bangles as young as 4 years old. Many children work 8-10
hours a day in dark unventilated rooms. Boys traditionally do the "jhalai" work, flattening
bangles into a level plane over gas flames and girls do "judai" joining the bangles together.
Children earn about Rs30 (50 pence) for producing on average 4,500 bangles each day.
Chocolate is to Die For
America has been trained to think that the evil of slavery has finally been abolished and
cleansed from society. However this is only what American’s want
to believe. Child slaver labor is a very real and threatening problem in the
world, especially emerging third world countries. One culprit behind this is
the main ingredient in chocolate, cocoa.
It is certainly unfortunate that slavery still exists in the world. In reality, it continues to thrive
in many foreign company locations, despite supposed strict measures taken to abolish
slavery over the years. The smallest estimations indicate that at least 27 million people toil
in the utmost desolate forced bondage conditions possible on this earth. The areas
affected by this devastation include places such as Nigeria, Indonesia, and Brazil. It is a
shame to note that other sources document the number referred to above to be as much
as 10 times larger (“In Ecuador”, 5). However, it is also imperative to note that slavery
statistics at times are particularly uncertain because there is a definite lack of information
on the precise number of those in bondage.
Fair Trade Coffee Article
Fair Trade is an innovative, market-based approach to sustainable development. Fair
Trade helps family farmers in developing countries to gain direct access to international
markets, as well as to develop the business capacity necessary to compete in the global
marketplace. By learning how to market their own harvests, Fair Trade farmers are able to
bootstrap their own businesses and receive a fair price for their products. This leads to
higher family living standards, thriving communities and more sustainable farming
practices. Fair Trade empowers farming families to take care of themselves - without
developing dependency on foreign aid.
250 Million Slaves and Counting
By: Stephanie Wiener
2005
Child slave labor exists all around the world today. Although many people are trying to
fight it, it still continues to survive. Most of the slavery takes place in developing third world
countries. It has been estimated that 250 million children between the ages of five and
fourteen work in Asia and Africa alone.
There are two forms of child slave labor, the first being forced labor. "Forced labor is when
children from poor families are forced to work by parents to gain a part of the family's
income". The second type is bonded labor, which is "labor is that occurs after a child has
been handed over to an employer".
Children, whatever part of the world they may inhabit, should be regarded as the
foundation of a nation. They are the backbone for the future supporting families, society,
and country. They must be molded in a right way to make them suitable for adulthood.
Despite this fact, about 30 million children in the developing and developed worlds are not
getting an education. Moreover, affection from their parents and elders is lacking and they
are being persuaded to do laborious work, which is mostly unsuitable for their physical and
mental capabilities.
The word "slavery" clubbed me in the face as I sat deeply in a leather chair in a bright and
fashionable Hollister store. Surrounded by ruffled, wrinkled clothes and the beautiful middle
class shoppers of the Towson mall, I read these brain shattering words in an article from
Rolling Stone: "Around the world, an estimated 27 million people are held in bondage --
more than at any other time in human history." ("In the Land of Slavery," Rolling Stone,
Sep. 2005).
These were the words of Osha Gray Davidson, a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.
Davidson's main concern focused on slavery in Brazil, but speaks to a worldwide problem.
And yes, the United States is part of that world.
Child Labour guide
Children working in Pakistan © Manos Unidas
As consumers in affluent countries, we are appalled at the thought that the fruits and
vegetables we eat, the soccer balls we buy for our kids and the carpets we put in our
homes might be the products of child labour. Strong international human rights conventions
are therefore in place to outlaw the practice. But deep-set cultural traditions and delicate
local economies do not lend themselves to interference and, reinforced by the
demographic distortions created by HIV/AIDS, child labour shows no sign of becoming
history.
Supply and Demand
There is no universally accepted, precise definition of child labour. The issue is
differentiated by reference to the age of a child, the potential impairment of health, physical
development and education, and engagement in the “worst forms of child labour” such as
trafficking, and illegal
More than 10 per cent of the world’s 2.2 billion children are engaged in child labour, the
majority of them working in agriculture, often with hazardous chemicals or machinery. About
10 million are trapped in slavery, trafficking, prostitution, and armed conflict.
Broken childhoods Throughout the world, the numbers of child workers are growing. In
Latin America, one child out of five works; in Africa, one in three; in Asia, it is every second
child. But even within the EU, there are over two million children at work. Altogether, this
makes for a global figure of 250 million. To put an end to this shameful state of affairs.
All the signs are there. Begging, mass unemployment, soup kitchens, and now the
reappearance of a social class that is living proof of how far our society has been
dehumanised by the creation of the global economy in the latter part of this century: the
child labourer.
Earlier, in the nineteenth century, worsening social inequality was reflected in the
phenomenon of rampant child labour. In 1840 Louis Villermé wrote a famous report (1) in
which he described the condition of child labourers in France, where a 14-hour working day
was the norm. He wrote of "this multitude of children, some of them barely seven years of
age, gaunt, emaciated, dressed in rags, going barefoot to the factory through rain and
mud, pale, debilitated, and with misery, suffering and defeat etched on their faces."
As Ethiopia is a very poor country, many children face abuse and exploitation. 52% of
children 5 - 17 are working (engaged in productive activities - excluding household chores),
of these the average work 33 hours per week. These children often do not have time to go
to school nor rest and play. Often the work is too difficult for them both physically and
psychologically. In urban areas, children living and working on the streets are an ever-
increasing number. These children are denied their rights to education, food, shelter and
protection. Besides this, they often face violence from other street children and adults.
Harmful tradition practices are widespread in Ethiopia. More than 73% of girls undergo
female genital mutilation. In many areas, early marriage and forced abduction are common
practices. As a result, girls have a difficult time during child birth, they are mothers too
young and can suffer severe health problems. This gender-based violence is common and
can result in children running away to the streets only to face worse abuse.
It is often vulnerable children, such as orphans and street children, who face abuse within
the legal system. Unfortunately, children who come into contact with the legal system rarely
receive fair and humane treatment because the judicial systems are weak and under
funded.
THE SMALL HANDS OF SLAVERY
With credible estimates ranging from 60 to 115 million, India has the largest number of
working children in the world. Whether they are sweating in the heat of stone quarries,
working in the fields sixteen hours a day, picking rags in city streets, or hidden away as
domestic servants, these children endure miserable and difficult lives. They earn little and
are abused much. They struggle to make enough to eat and perhaps to help feed their
families as well. They do not go to school; more than half of them will never learn the barest
skills of literacy. Many of them have been working since the age of four or five, and by the
time they reach adulthood they may be irrevocably sick or deformed-they will certainly be
exhausted, old men and women by the age of forty, likely to be dead by fifty. Most or all of
these children are working under some form of compulsion, whether from their parents,
from the expectations attached to their caste, or from simple economic necessity. At least
fifteen million of them, however, are workingas virtual slaves.3 These are the bonded child
laborers of India. This report is about them. "Bonded child labor" refers to the phenomenon
of children working in conditions of servitude in order to pay off a debt.4 The debt that
binds them to their employer is incurred not by the children themselves, but by their
relatives or guardians-usually by a parent. In India, these debts tend to be relatively
modest, ranging on average from 500 rupees to 7,500 rupees,5 depending on the industry
and the age and skill of the child. The creditors-cum-employers offer these "loans" to
destitute parents in an effort to secure the labor of a child, which is always cheap, but even
cheaper under a situation of bondage. The parents, for their part, accept the loans.
Bondage is a traditional worker-employer relationship in India, and the parents need the
money-perhaps to pay for the costs of an illness, perhaps to provide a dowry to a marrying
child, or perhaps-as is often the case-to help put food on the table. The children who are
sold to these bond masters work long hours over many years in an attempt to pay off these
debts. Due to the astronomically high rates of interest charged and the abysmally low
wages paid, they are usually unsuccessful. As they reach maturity, some of them may be
released by the employer in favor of a newly-indebted and younger child. Many others will
pass the debt on, intact or even higher, to a younger sibling, back to a parent, or on to
their own children. The past few years have seen increasing public awareness-in India
itself, but particularly in the international arena-of the high incidence of child servitude in
the carpet industry of South Asia. As a consequence, the international public has come to
associate "child servitude" with the image of small children chained to carpet looms, slaving
away over the thousands of tiny wool knots that will eventually become expensive carpets
in the homes of the wealthy.
Child labor in India is a grave and extensive problem. Children under the age of 14 are
forced to work in glass-blowing, fireworks, and most commonly, carpet-making factories.
While the Government of India reports about 20 million children laborers, other non-
governmental organizations estimate the number to be closer to 50 million. Most prevalent
in the northern part of India, the exploitation of child labor has become an accepted
practice, and is viewed by the local population as necessary to overcome the extreme
poverty in the region. Child labor is one of the main components of the carpet industry.
Factories pay children extremely low wages, for which adults refuse to work, while forcing
the youngsters to slave under perilous and unhygienic labor conditions. Many of these
children are migrant workers, the majority coming from northern India, who are sent away
by their families to earn an income sent directly home. Thus, children are forced to endure
the despicable conditions of the carpet factories, as their families depend on their wages.
The situation of the children at the factories is desperate. Most work around 12 hours a
day, with only small breaks for meals. Ill-nourished, the children are very often fed only
minimal staples. The vast majority of migrant child workers who cannot return home at night
sleep alongside of their loom, further inviting sickness and poor health. Taking aggressive
action to eliminate this problem is difficult in a nation where 75 percent of the population
lives in rural areas, most often stricken by poverty. Children are viewed as a form of
economic security in this desolate setting, necessary to help supplement their families'
income. Parents often sacrifice their children's education, as offspring are often expected
to uphold their roles as wage-earning members of their clan. The Indian Government has
taken some steps to alleviate this monumental problem. In 1989, India invoked a law that
made the employment of children under age 14 illegal, except in family-owned factories.
However, this law is rarely followed, and does not apply to the employment of family
members. Thus, factories often circumvent the law through claims of hiring distant family.
Also, in rural areas, there are few enforcement mechanisms, and punishment for factories
violating the mandate is minimal, if not nonexistent. Legal action taken against the
proliferation of child labor often produces few results. Laws against such abuses have little
effect in a nation where this abhorred practice is accepted as being necessary for poor
families to earn an income. Thus, an extensive reform process is necessary to eliminate the
proliferation of child labor abuses in India which strives to end the desperate poverty in the
nation. Changing the structure of the workforce and hiring the high number of currently
unemployed adults in greatly improved work conditions is only the first step in this lengthy
process. New labor standards and wages must be adopted and medical examinations and
minimum nutrition requirements must be established in India. Establishing schools and
eliminating the rampant illiteracy that plagues the country would work to preserve structural
changes. However, these changes cannot be accomplished immediately.
There are more than two billion children in the world today. Driven by poverty to support
themselves and their families, close to 300 million of them work.
That is more than the total number of children in all the developed nations together. More
than 250 million children in developing nations work, 60 percent of them for six or more
days a week, 40 percent for nine or more hours per day.
According to the 1997 United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) report, "The State of the
World's Children: Focus on Child Labor," a review of nine Latin American countries shows
that without the income provided by children between the ages of 13 and 17 the level of
poverty in that area alone would rise between 10 and 20 percent.
Most children work on farms and plantations or in homes - away from the prying eyes of
government inspectors and media researchers. In Indonesia a third of all domestic workers
- about 400,000 of them - are less than 15 years old. Some quarter of a million children in
Haiti are domestic workers and about 50,000 of them are between the ages of 7 and 10.
Nine out of 10 child domestic workers are girls.
Most of us would be horrified to support a business that exploits children. But lchances are
you ~ may have done just that on your last shopping trip.Perhaps you splurged on a hand-
crafted carpet, without knowing it was made by a seven-year old from India, where children
are chained to looms for 12 hours a day. Maybe you just bought a soccer ball for your son
or daughter, without realizing five-year-old hands inside a dark and silent factory in
Pakistan produced your gift. Even your more mundane purchases-a leather bag, a shirt, a
pair of jeans, or produce from the local grocery store-could be the product of child labor.
Around the world today, some 250 million boys and girls between the ages of five and 14
are exploited in hazardous working conditions, according to the International Labor
Organization. Children's rights groups estimate that the US imports more than $100 million
in goods each year which are produced by bonded and indentured children. This is
outrageous.The issue of the exploitation of child labor is not only a moral issue, but also an
economic issue that is having a profound impact on US workers. As consumers, we should
not be purchasing products made by children who are held in virtual slavery-children who
can't go to school, who work horrendous hours each week, who are beaten when they
perform poorly on the job, and who are often permanently maimed when they attempt to
escape from their slavery.But, equally important, we should not continue a trade policy that
forces US workers to compete against desperate and impoverished people in countries
such as China and Mexico, people who earn as little as 15 or 20 cents an hour-whether
those workers are children or adults.I have been working hard in the Congress to end the
scourge of abusive and exploitative child labor for a number of years. For too long, the
world has looked the other way as hundreds of millions of children have been virtually
enslaved in the pursuit of greater profit. Now, however, Vermont has a unique opportunity
to pioneer a curriculum that exposes this problem to our young people so that they will be
able to combat it. Through an effective program, we can start to show the next generation
of leaders how pervasive this problem is and what we can do to prevent it.A lot of work is
going to have to be done by SIT, Brattleboro Union High School, and other educators in
order to determine the most effective use of this important grant. My personal hope is that,
at the end of the day, we will have involved large numbers of students throughout the state
in this project, and will have done an effective job in teaching them how to play an active
role in our democracy. It's a good first step, and if we are successful in Vermont, we will
provide a model for students throughout the country to develop similar programs.Another
important initiative, signed into law in 1997, was the Sanders-Harkin Indentured Child Labor
Import Ban, prohibiting the importation into the US of products made by indentured child
servants. As documented by 60 Minutes II back in December, the US Customs Service
used this law to stem the flow of hand-rolled, unfiltered cigarettes (known as "bidis")
produced by indentured child labor in India. In India alone, there are approximately 50
million children working in factories or fields for little or no pay.Bidis are an especially
insidious product.
Problems with Current U.S. Policy
Key Problems
The U.S. lacks any clear policy direction on a comprehensive program to combat the use of
child labor in the global economy. President Clinton's call for "voluntary" codes of conduct
to get companies to stop exploitative practices is either naive or cynical.
The Clinton administration espouses trade agreements that regard boycotts and labeling
programs as unduly restricting international trade.
A fundamental aspect of any forward-looking policy is that child workers need quality
education programs that provide them with skills for the future. The U.S. government has
yet to formulate an effective, coherent, and consistent policy with regard to child labor in
the global economy. The administration has complied with congressional mandates to
conduct comprehensive studies of the use of child labor in the global economy, and these
have produced some extremely thorough and useful reports by the Department of Labor.
Yet none of the reports have led to firm policy objectives. The administration has publicly
encouraged companies to abide by "voluntary" codes of conduct. But asking companies
that have benefited from the use of exploited child labor to suddenly become guardians of
higher standards is either naive or cynical.
The new legislation prohibiting the importation of products made by forced or indentured
child labor must be implemented by the U.S. Customs Service, under the Department of the
Treasury. What remains to be seen is whether the administration will enforce the law and
devote the necessary resources to developing a more comprehensive and effective overall
policy on child labor in the global economy.
The lack of a clear U.S. policy is more problematic than mere indecisiveness or
deliberation. Trade agreements negotiated and signed by the Clinton administration
effectively preclude the U.S. from dealing effectively with extreme worker rights violations,
including the pervasive use of child labor. For example, the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT), now enforced by the World Trade Organization (WTO), would
presumably prohibit the U.S. from the importation of products made by child labor.
The WTO does not allow for social sanctions, which could be classified as impermissible
"technical barriers to trade." Likewise, even labeling schemes like RUGMARK might run
afoul of GATT provisions and could be considered technical barriers to trade. The
separate WTO Agreement on Government Procurement (AGP) would limit options for any
comprehensive selective purchasing requirement that prohibits the U.S. government from
purchasing goods made with child labor.
The Hidden Factory: Child Labour in India Have we, as consumers, ever stopped to wonder
where the trinkets, ornaments, decorative pieces that we buy, the very clothes that we wear
and the cuppa tea that starts our day, come from?
These are examples of consumer goods that are, more often than not, the products of a
hidden factory of countless children, many as young as 5 years old, toiling for tireless
hours, under harsh, hazardous, exploitative, often life threatening conditions, for extremely
low wages. A large fraction of these child labourers are working as slaves, bonded to their
“jobs”, with no means of escape or freedom, till they can repay their parents’ loans. This
often mean years of bondage or even a trickle down effect of bondage, where younger
siblings pick up from where the older ones left off – because they were either too old, too
diseased, too handicapped or too dead to be useful.
India has the largest number of working children in the world, with credible estimates
ranging from 60 —15 million. Below, we look at some industries that enslave children -
some of these are in the export business, producing the ever so attractive, yet cheap
goods that attract the attention of foreign consumers, some of them cater more to the
domestic market and others are in the service business – all profit oriented businesses,
churning the wheels of our economy, all at the cost of innocent children:
Carpet Industry
The use of bonded child labor in the production of hand knotted carpets for export is
extensive, and conditions in that industry are horrendous. While the accurate extent is
unknown, an estimated 50,000 to 1,050,000 children, as young as 6 years of age, often
work in confined, dimly-lit workshops, often chained to carpet looms, slaving away over the
thousands of tiny wool knots that will eventually become expensive carpets in the homes of
the wealthy. Bonded children in the carpet industry are often recruited by recruiting agents
or organized gangs. Their parents, low-caste, poor peasants or landless labourers, are
given a cash advance ranging from 600 to 2,800 rupees (approximately $20.00 to $90.00).
This practice is generally institutionalized in cases where children are procured by
recruiters.
The bonded children often work for up to 20 hours a day, not only weaving carpets but also
performing other jobs in their master’s homes or fields. These children suffer spinal
deformities, retarded growth, respiratory illnesses, poor eyesight (due to constant contract
with woolen fluff, working in cramped poorly lit workshops). Apart from these physiological
effects, these children live in constant fear of being beaten and tortured if they try to
escape from the looms.
Advocacy by human rights groups, repeated media exposure, and reaction to legislative
proposals advanced to ban products made by child labor have led to widespread
acknowledgment that child labor is a serious problem in the world. It is a problem that has
its roots in poverty and the lack of educational facilities for children of the poor. Around the
world, but particularly in the South, these circumstances force children into the work force-
pushing children into the streets to beg, into the fields to labor as farm hands, and into
factories. The International Labor Organization (ILO), the tripartite body representing
governments, labor and employers, estimates that more than 250 million children are at
work in the global economy. Many products, ranging from hand-knotted carpets sold in the
most exclusive stores, to soccer balls and T-shirts sold in malls, are made with child labor.
Concrete action, however, lagged behind debate over child labor. Only in 1992 when
Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which sought to
ban products made with child labor from importation to the U.S., did the action begin.
Much of the initial response from export-oriented industries amounted to aggressive denial
followed by accusations that the Harkin legislation was "protectionist" and aimed at
destroying foreign competition. Such positions may have played well in the local press, but
the business community soon realized that serious steps were necessary to avoid the law's
potential application.
Animated by the ideas and leadership of Kailash Satyarthi, Chair of the South Asian
Coalition on Child Servitude (SACCS) based in India, the RUGMARK Foundation was one
of the first and most successful efforts to create a program to deal effectively with child
labor in the notorious South Asian hand-knotted carpet industry. The RUGMARK model
confronting the problem of child labor includes two key components: Independent
monitoring and education/rehabilitation programs for the former child workers. The ultimate
goal is to break the cycle of poverty by moving children out of factories and into schools.
Efforts to implement RUGMARK were languishing, however, until a group of Indian carpet
manufacturers and exporters, concerned about losing access to the U.S. market, teamed
up with SACCS, UNICEF, and other nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to launch the
program. With offices around the world, RUGMARK provides on-site monitoring and
certifies that manufacturers are making carpets without child labor. Certified carpets
receive a RUGMARK label, assuring consumers that the carpets meet the child-labor-free
requirements.
Of this number, more than two-thirds are rural working children; 60% are exposed to either
hazardous or cruel conditions leaving them malnourished, susceptible to respiratory,
infectious, and sexually transmitted diseases, stunted intellectually and physically, and with
low self-esteem; 409,849 are children living away from home of which 47% are working
mostly in households where 65% are females. Some of the worst forms of child labor
include deep-sea fishing, trafficking, mining/quarrying, commercial plantation, and
prostitution or commercial sexual exploitation.
Government has responded to this problem by ratifying ILO Convention 138 and
strengthening its monitoring of businesses that employ children. While there have been
rescues made on children who were employed as child laborers, government has yet to
strengthen services for these children and their families.
Neglected and Abandoned Children
In a 1993 survey of households, some 16 % of households surveyed have children below
12 years old who are left unattended with no supervising adult in the house. This translates
to 1 in 6 households where children are without adult supervision. In the cities, neglected
and abandoned children find themselves in the streets fending for themselves and
vulnerable to the various evils of the urban jungle - drug addiction, crimes, commercial
sexual exploitation. Children who are neglected or abandoned are easy prey not only to
accidents but to illicit transfer, commercial sexual exploitation, drugs, crime, and unwanted
pregnancies.
The growing number of streetchildren found in urban areas have long been a concern of
government. Continuing efforts by government and non-government agencies to provide
services for both the streetchildren and their families never seem to be enough. It has
always been difficult to determine the correct population of street children because of their
vacillating and mobile nature. Previous estimates quoted by reports reflect some 250,000
streetchildren in this country. A headcount survey done in 1996 by the DSWD Program for
Streetchildren in Metro Manila and participated in by NGO partners show only some 6,300
streetchildren complete with names, age, and addresses. A more recent study
commissioned by UNICEF done by Dr. Exaltacion E. Lamberte seem to support that there
are fewer streetchildren than previously thought of. The study presented last February
2000 indicated only some 43,629 streetchildren (both warm bodies and estimates based on
a formula). These figures seem more realistic.
There are now about 350 government and non-government agencies that are responding
to streetchildren and their families. The present administration has given special focus on
helping streetchildren through the Ahon Bata sa Lansangan in cooperation with NGOs.
Funds were sources for their programs. Services include health and nutrition, educational
assistance, effective parenting sessions, livelihood and skills training, residential care,
foster and adoption.
However, for as long as there would be squatter colonies sprouting in urban areas and for
as long as there are not enough jobs, streetchildren will continue to dominate the streets.
But poverty forces children and juveniles to look for work on the orange plantations. Their
income is often necessary for the survival of their families. Because of the unjust
distribution of goods, unemployment among adults and extremely poor wages cause
poverty; this is the basis for child labour.
According to the accounting of the rich, working children offer many advantages. Their
work is much cheaper than that of adults, they are controllable and cannot fight back. No
one knows for sure how many children and juveniles work. The unions think that every third
seasonal worker is below 14 years old. Around 5 o'clock in the morning the workers begin
their day, taking a bus in order to go to the orange plantation. Sometimes it is 8 o clock in
the evening before they return home. The work of the orange pickers is very dangerous.
They are standing on top of high, shaky ladders carrying bags on their shoulders that
weigh up to 25 kilograms. For up to 10 hours a day they are handling oranges in the thorny
bushes.
As the school year began yesterday in many Western countries, the world celebrated
International Literacy Day. Organised under the auspices of UNESCO, the event had
Literacy and Gender as its main theme. According to the UN agency¡¯s own data there are
860 million illiterate adults, more than two thirds women. The number of minors not
attending school exceeds 110 million, 56 per cent girls.
Illiteracy is directly related to poverty and underdevelopment, circumstances that force
millions of children to leave school before they become fully literate and work in conditions
where they are easily exploited. The International Labour Organisation (ILO)
has estimated that throughout the world, 250 million children, aged between five and 17,
were engaged in child labour, 155 million in Asia alone.
In Asia child labour has become a virtual system that is particularly abusive of girls. Sexual
exploitation has in fact become a major social ill in many Asian societies. Many girls are
forced into prostitution in countries like Cambodia, Bangladesh, Nepal, India and
Pakistan. About one million children are lured or forced into the sex trade in Asia every
year, reports Child Workers in Asia, an organisation fighting child exploitation. A more
alarming fact is that people known to them introduce many of these children into the work, it
adds.
Children in Asia are used in different types of work: farming, making leather goods, stone-
cutting, mining, toy making, textiles, making brick in kilns, construction, dumpsites. The
problem is accentuated by western multinational companies setting up Asian branch plants
in many manufacturing sectors, especially textile.
The many wars in Asia compound child exploitation for they provide opportunities to recruit
boys into armies. Tens of thousands of them have thus been recruited and are being
recruited, often by force, by armies and paramilitary groups. Human Rights Watch reports
that many, very young children are serving as soldiers in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka,
and Cambodia. Many others have been recruited by groups such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri
Lanka and Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines.
Worse still is the situation in India where human rights activists have denounced child debt
bondage. At least 5 million children are forced to work to repay debts their parents
contracted or for the cash advances they received. According to Human Rights Watch,
very few children are ever ransomed from bondage. Asian Labour Monitor estimates that
one fifth
of India¡¯s GNP is generated by exploited minors working in the farming sector, mostly
children of landless families. With 44 million minors working, India has the unenviable world
record in child labour. [Source: ASIA News]
More than half of the girls Human Rights Watch interviewed suffered some form of sexual,
physical, or psychological abuse. Domestic workers, especially those who live on the
premises where they work, are highly vulnerable to physical violence and sexual abuse.
Under ILO’s Worst Form of Child Labor Recommendation, any work that “exposes children
to physical, psychological or sexual abuse” falls under the international prohibition on
hazardous or harmful child labor.148
Sexual Abuse and Harassment
Domestic workers are extremely vulnerable to sexual assault and abuse because they are
hidden from public scrutiny and thus are less able to seek help or have others intervene on
their behalf. Moreover, live-in domestic workers may not have safe living quarters with a
lock on the door, leaving them without protection.
Dian began working for her cousin when she was thirteen years old. Her salary, 1 million
rupiah (U.S.$111.11) a year, was paid directly to her mother. She told us:
We lived in a very small house. The husband slept in the warung [restaurant] and I slept
with the female employer. It happened three months after I started working. One day, the
husband was sick so the female employer went to the store to get medication. It was 4:00 a.
m. and I was still sleeping. He came into the room. I was forced to have sex with him. He
threatened me. He said he would hit me if I told anyone. He told me that he would throw
me out and my mother would get no money. He would come to me three times a week
whenever his wife was not home. This happened for three years. I was scared, but I
wanted to support my mother. I had no choice. I wrote my experience in my diary and one
day the wife found the diary. She was angry at me and called me a whore. The husband
and wife quarreled. The wife shouted at me. She thought I was a flirt, a provocateur. I was
desperate. I did not know what to do. The next day I was thrown out.149
For some employers, there is an assumption that sexual availability is an inherent aspect of
being a domestic worker. Suriyah, who at the time of the incident was fourteen, was
harassed by her employer’s son. She told us, “When I was washing clothes, the employer’s
son touched my bottom. I got angry and said, ‘Please don’t treat me like that.’ He laughed
and said, ‘You are only a domestic. Why should you be so clean and pure?’ I was very
upset. I left that job.”150 Similarly, Vina recalled that when she was fourteen, her
employer would say “dirty things,” calling her “a cunt,” and repeatedly invited her “for a
walk and [to] rent a room.”151
Children told us that they were sexually assaulted and inappropriately touched by male
employers or male visitors of their employers.
How do we combat Child labour?
Child labour is a complicated issue which can not be solved through legislation alone. In
fact forced legislation can move children out of monitorable forms of child labour into more
hidden and hazardous employment such as the sex trade.Sanctions like consumer boycotts
can be counter-productive unless they are supported by schemes in the developing
countries themselves.Children must be offered a feasible alternative to exploitative work.
Schemes by companies such as Levi Strauss - who offer children under 14 education
instead of fulltime factory work and which offer employment to the children once their
schooling has been completed - are long term and realistic.Primary school education which
is free, accessible and compulsory, does more than any other single factor to reduce
exploitative child labour.But as individuals, what can we do to help put an end to child
labour throughout the world?We can all help by taking small initiatives such as contacting
our local retailers and importers and asking them about their policies on child labour. This
could mean asking about the products they buy from overseas or about the use of
outworkers in Australia. Do they have any checks in place which help ensure that child
labour is not employed to make their products?If you are thinking about buying a carpet,
ask traders about the availability of Rugmark and Woolmark carpets.These labels mean
that to the best of the manufacturer’s knowledge, child labour has not been used in the
production of the carpets - there are retailers in Australia who stock the Woolmark carpets.
As consumers we should be supporting those manufacturers and brands that don’t use
exploitative child labour.We can contact consumer bodies and pressure them to bring their
trading practices into line with our consumer expectations.Consumer bodies can be
powerful allies and can help pressure manufacturers to introduce schemes like workplace
education and better employment conditions.As consumers we have the power to tell
manufacturers, traders and retailers what we expect from them. We must make it clear that
using child labour, whether inside Australia or out, is not acceptable to us.These measures
will help solve part of the problem - but eradicating exploitative child labour is something
that must be tackled on various fronts.
Sweatshops exist in countries around the world, even in the US. Why? The search for
cheap products that can be sold for greater profit is fueling a race to the bottom where we
all lose--our families, communities, farmers, workers, and the environment.
This set of FAQ's should answer many of your questions, and can serve as a resource for
your own efforts to educate others about sweatshop labor.
Q: Why are there sweatshops?
A: Corporate greed and global competition to produce goods at the lowest possible price
are the main reasons for the existence of sweatshops. It's much more cost-effective for
corporations to subcontract their manufacturing to suppliers who produce goods cheaply
by minimizing worker salaries and benefits, skimping on factory and dormitory upkeep and
standards, and demanding high levels of productivity (long hours and big quotas) from
their workers.
Developing countries desperately need foreign investment, and therefore compete with
one another to produce goods more and more cheaply, allowing US corporations to dictate
their purchase prices. As reported by the business journal Fast Company in December
2003, Wal-Mart (the country's largest retailer) actually implements a corporate policy of
requiring its vendors to continually seek ever-lower prices for its products. "[Wal-Mart] has
a clear policy for suppliers," writes Fast Company's Charles Fishman. "On basic products
that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year
after year."
As retailers compete with one another by seeking lowest-cost workers, they put pressure
on suppliers to keep their costs down, and they encourage consumers to buy more at
"discount" prices. This market for cheap goods then squeezes factory owners to pinch
even more. The result is forced overtime, low wages, punishments and fines for slow work
and mistakes, worker intimidation, child labor, and other abuses.
Q: But if the reality is that companies have to cut costs to stay competitive, aren't
sweatshops inevitable?
A: No. Low prices are only one of many factors consumers take into account when they
shop, and most consumers don't willingly purchase goods made in sweatshops or with child
labor. Since 1995, three separate research organizations have conducted surveys on
consumer attitudes toward purchasing products made under sweatshop conditions. The
surveys consistently find that the average consumer would pay up to 28 percent more for
an item if s/he knew it wasn't made in a sweatshop.
Furthermore, with staggering disparities between the pay rates of corporate executives and
the pay rates of actual workers, there's no reason that the pursuit of low prices should
demand rock-bottom wages for those least able to afford it. For example, while workers in
Saipan sewing Levi's blue jeans were making just $3.05 per hour, Levi's CEO Philip
Marineau saw his pay soar to $25.1 million (or $11,971 an hour), nearly 15 times what he
earned in 2001, according to Sweatshop Watch. The money allocated for Marineau's raise
could have accommodated a 50 percent pay increase for more than 7,500 minimum wage
workers in Saipan, helping to lift whole communities out of poverty. Alternatively, such a
large sum of money could have continued to pay the salaries to more than 600 of the
Levi's workers recently laid off in San Antonio, and Levi's could have avoided shifting even
more of its production overseas. Furthermore, even with the shift to cheaper overseas
production, such savings at the corporate level do not get passed on to consumers. If
corporations can afford such exorbitant compensation for their executives, they can afford
to pay workers a living wage while remaining competitive in the marketplace.
Q: Isn't the low-wage employment offered by sweatshops better than not being employed at
all? Don't sweatshops help poor people climb out of poverty?
A: No. Sweatshop workers and child laborers are trapped in a cycle of exploitation that
rarely improves their economic situation. Since multinational corporations are constantly
pressuring suppliers for cost-cutting measures, workers most often find conditions getting
worse instead of better. Consider the example cited in a 2003 National Labor Committee
report on a Honduran worker sewing clothing for Wal-Mart at a rate of 43 cents an hour.
After spending money on daily meals and transportation to work, the average worker is left
with around 80 cents per day for rent, bills, childcare, school costs, medicines,
emergencies, and other expenses. Not surprisingly, many workers are forced to take out
loans at high interest rates and can't even think about saving money to improve their lives
as they struggle to meet their daily needs.
Q: Isn't it time-consuming and expensive for corporations to track their goods' origins?
A: No, actually most corporations already track their goods to the subcontractor or factory
level in order to monitor the quality of their products. "In competitive industries like the
apparel industry, all companies have quality control," says Nikki Bas, executive director of
Sweatshop Watch. "If companies are able to send representatives to inspect the quality of
a garment, they can inspect the quality of their factories as well." Around the world, name-
brand retailers are investing in new technologies—information systems, international
shipping firms, quality assurance monitoring, business-to-business software, bar codes,
universal numbering systems, and more—all of which can facilitate better oversight for the
factories at products' points of origin.
Q: When companies track their goods to keep sweatshop labor out of their supply chain,
do they mark their products with a special label?
A: Unfortunately, no overarching "sweatshop-free" label exists. Some independent monitors
like Verité follow the supply chains of companies that pay a fee for that service and help
facilitate follow-up correction programs for factories found to be in violation of labor
standards. Because conditions can change rapidly at factories, Verité does not go on
record endorsing particular companies or factories. For some select industries, however,
dedication to monitoring efforts has resulted in useful labeling for a handful of products.
For example, the RUGMARK Foundation combats the existence of child labor in the woven
rug industry by certifying manufactures to agree to RUGMARK standards, and then
following up with random, unannounced inspections. Carpets made by these companies
then carry the RUGMARK label, letting consumers know that the carpet is child-labor-free
Michael Allen Lee recruited homeless men from the streets of Orlando or other
cities to work in Florida's citrus fields with promises of good wages. However,
instead of the US$35 to $50 a day that workers in the citrus industry could normally
expect, Lee's workers were rarely paid more than $10 a day despite working from
dawn to dusk.
Lee would deduct the cost of food, a place to sleep and other "expenses", such as
charges for the sacks they used to collect the fruit, from their wages. One worker
had $110 deducted from his weekly wage for food and rent alone. This despite the
fact that the official charge for the bunk or mattress where they slept was $30 a
week and that they only received between $5 and $10 a day for food. Those who
complained or tried to escape were threatened with violence.
One worker, George E. Williams, did escape and went to the police. Williams had
previously been beaten unconscious by Lee, dragged to a pick up truck and taken
to another location where he was beaten again. Lee then made Williams wipe his
own blood off the walls.
Seven months after Williams' escape he and more than a dozen other workers filed
a lawsuit, with the assistance of Florida Rural Legal Services, against Lee and the
company that hired him, Beville II Inc.
Lee cooperated with the authorities and therefore a charge of "conspiracy to injure,
oppress, threaten and intimidate" was limited to his treatment of George E.
Williams. However, in carrying out the prosecution officials also made use of the
13th Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1865 to bring an official end to
slavery, which is still used in a surprising number of US court cases. Lee was
sentenced to four years in prison and a further three years of supervised release.
An accomplice, William Oscar Smith, was sentenced to four and a half years in
prison. Beville agreed to settle in 1999, but George E. Williams died of cancer
about the time Lee was charged.
This is not an isolated case. The National Worker Exploitation Task Force, which
was set up to combat modern day slavery, cautions that the problem is more
common than people think. In 1999, a total of 10 people were convicted for using
slavery in two separate cases. In one case Mexican women and girls were forced to
work in brothels in Florida and the Carolinas. The other case involved using
Guatemalan and Mexican farm workers for forced labour in South Florida.
The Florida Rural Legal Services noted that it was difficult to bring cases of this sort
as few workers were willing to make formal complaints about their treatment.
Working children are the objects of extreme exploitation in terms of toiling for long
hours for minimal pay. Their work conditions are especially severe, often not
providing the stimulation for proper physical and mental development. Many of
these children endure lives of pure deprivation. However, there are problems with
the intuitive solution of immediately abolishing child labor to prevent such abuse.
First, there is no international agreement defining child labor, making it hard to
isolate cases of abuse, let alone abolish them. Second, many children may have to
work in order to attend school so abolishing child labor may only hinder their
education. Any plan of abolishment depends on schooling. The state could help by
making it worthwhile for a child to attend school, whether it be by providing students
with nutritional supplements or increasing the quality and usefulness of obtaining an
education. There must be an economic change in the condition of a struggling
family to free a child from the responsibility of working. Family subsidies can help
provide this support
Miriam, 13, smoothes off the top of a mud-filled brick mold. Her sister, too young to
make bricks, sits on the ground behind Miriam and holds a doll, next to their
younger brother.
Around the world, children and their families make bricks out of clay packed into
simple molds. The clay is dried, and then baked in a kiln. In three Latin American
countries -- Peru, Argentina and Ecuador -- brick factories are concentrated on the
outskirts of large cities, according to a report by the International Labor
Organization. Workers are often unskilled immigrants from rural areas. Fresh water
and electricity are scarce. Pay is low, while production quotas are high, and so
whole families work together.
Children, some as young as nine years-old, plant, cut and sort tobacco leaves and
spray pesticides and other dangerous chemicals on the tobacco plants. They work
in the hot sun and frequently suffer back pain. Other children work in tobacco
packing warehouses and grading sheds. There, they are exposed to steam, smoke,
and dust which can cause asthma. Children, working more than 10 hours per day,
have been reported to work on tobacco plantations and farms in Argentina,
Bangladesh, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, India, Indonesia, Kyrgystan, Malawi, Mexico,
Nicaragua, Pakistan, South Africa, Tanzania, Turkey, the United States and
Zimbabwe
Children plant and pick fruits and vegetables in nearly every country around the
world, including the United States. The work is physically demanding, requiring
bending, kneeling, climbing ladders, and carrying heavy bags or buckets. In
addition to these traditional chores, children also weed and cultivate the soil, fix
irrigation canals, and apply dangerous pesticides. They often use dangerous tools
and run unsafe farm machinery they don't know how to operate.
Many activities, like carrying heavy and oversized loads, result in permanent
disabilities and injuries. Fatigue is an ever-present problem because children
usually work 8-12 hours, and children as young as six years-old work in the fields
beside their parents during the harvest season. Because they are outside all day,
these children are particularly susceptible to heat exhaustion, disease carrying
insects, and unsanitary drinking water.
Cutting sugar cane is extremely dangerous work done in hot, humid climates.
Children as young as 12 wield sharp knives and machetes on sugar cane
plantations in Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, and the Cote d'Ivoire. Knife wounds
to arms, legs, and hands are routine and many lead to irreparable injuries and
deformities. Most children do not have appropriate clothing to protect them from the
machinery or the hot weather.
In addition to accidents, children also suffer from respiratory, skin, and digestive
problems due to long hours of exposure to the sun, pesticides, and fertilizer.
Younger children weed the fields, stack the cut cane, and drive carts. Sometimes
children work in the cane processing factories, feeding cane into machines that
squeeze the sugar from the stalks. Temperatures inside the factories can reach 140
degrees. There are reports of children working in the sugar industry of many
countries, including Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, Chile, Cote d'Ivoire, Dominican
Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Kenya, Nicaragua, Pakistan,
Panama, the Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, Thailand, Uganda, and the United
States
Sankar sells bottled water to train passengers in the Bhubaneswar train station,
India. Boys sell water to buy food and daily necessities for living.
The railway stations in India are home for thousands of children. Some of the
children have left their homes in villages outside the city. Other children live in
poverty-stricken homes nearby, and occasionally return to visit. Sankar, for
instance, lived nearby but in an unstable home. His father was no longer part of the
family. His mother often wasn't home. On average, photographer Brian Finke said,
the children he photographed made 50 to 100 rupees (about $2-$3) a day selling
bottles of drinking water. The money was enough for food and other bare
essentials. Sankar and other children slept wherever they could in the station -- on
the floor, on benches, on piles of luggage
Domestic service is probably the single largest employer of young girls worldwide -
and the most hidden. From country to country, 20-60% of all working children are
girls in domestic service. Girls living in rural, agricultural families sometimes work in
the fields, but more often, they are sent to work as domestic servants in someone
else's home. Their working day can begin before sunrise and continue deep into the
night.
Due to the 24 hour-a-day nature of their job, child servants spend the majority of
their time inside their employer's house. Cooking, boiling water, handling cleaning
chemicals, using sharp kitchen utensils, caring for young children and lifting heavy
items are all common tasks for most child servants. The physical stress on these
children is immense, making them very accident-prone even while carrying out even
the simplest tasks. Employers and their family members often physically abuse
child servants. These injuries affect the child's working performance, making it
harder for them to move and to concentrate. Child servants can live in such
uninterrupted cycles of violence for years
Josiméne looks at a black and white Polaroid of herself. There are no mirrors in the
two-room house where she works as live-in maid, or restavec, for a family of four.
Josiméne's family lives in a remote part of Haiti's interior, hours by car and foot from
Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital.
Josiméne, 10, works as a restavec, or live-in maid, in a two-room house outside of
Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. Josiméne's parents are small farmers in Haiti's
remote and mountainous heartland. Two years before these photographs were
taken, they asked a local woman to find a family that would take Josiméne as a
servant.
Estimated numbers of child domestic workers around the world range into the
hundreds of millions. Haiti has an estimated 300,000 restavecs -- a term that
combines the Creole for "to stay" and "with."
The line between harmless chores and child labor, according to the International
Labor Organization, is crossed when children are sold or trafficked; bonded to
repay family debt; work without pay; are exposed to safety or health hazards; work
excessive hours; suffer physical violence or sexual harassment; or are "very young."
The Maurice Sixto Foyer, a non-profit organization, offers free classes for
restavecs. On many afternoons, Josiméne's errands keep her too busy to attend.
That the shameful practice of child labor should have played an important role in the
Industrial Revolution from its outset is not to be wondered at. The displaced working
classes, from the seventeenth century on, took it for granted that a family would not
be able to support itself if the children were not employed. In Defoe's day he thought
it admirable that in the vicinity of Halifax scarcely anybody above the age of 4 was
idle. The children of the poor were forced by economic conditions to work, as
Dickens, with his family in debtor's prison, worked at age 12 in the Blacking
Factory. In 1840 perhaps only twenty percent of the children of London had any
schooling, a number which had risen by 1860, when perhaps half of the children
between 5 and 15 were in some sort of school, if only a day school (of the sort in
which Dickens's Pip finds himself in Great Expectations) or a Sunday school; the
others were working. Many of the more fortunate found employment as apprentices
to respectable trades (in the building trade workers put in 64 hours a week in
summer and 52 in winter) or as general servants -- there were over 120,000
domestic servants in London alone at mid-century, who worked 80 hour weeks for
one halfpence per hour -- but many more were not so lucky. Most prostitutes (and
there were thousands in London alone) were between 15 and 22 years of age.
Many children worked 16 hour days under atrocious conditions, as their elders did.
Ineffective parliamentary acts to regulate the work of workhouse children in factories
and cotton mills to 12 hours per day had been passed as early as 1802 and 1819.
After radical agitation, notably in 1831, when "Short Time Committees" organized
largely by Evangelicals began to demand a ten hour day, a royal commission
established by the Whig government recommended in 1833 that children aged 11-
18 be permitted to work a maximum of twelve hours per day; children 9-11 were
allowed to work 8 hour days; and children under 9 were no longer permitted to work
at all (children as young as 3 had been put to work previously). This act applied only
to the textile industry, where children were put to work at the age of 5, and not to a
host of other industries and occupations. Iron and coal mines (where children,
again, both boys and girls, began work at age 5, and generally died before they
were 25), gas works, shipyards, construction, match factories, nail factories, and
the business of chimney sweeping, for example (which Blake would use as an
emblem of the destruction of the innocent), where the exploitation of child labor was
more extensive, was to be enforced in all of England by a total of four inspectors.
After further radical agitation, another act in 1847 limited both adults and children to
ten hours of work daily.
Demand factors:
The lower cost of employing child workers and the irreplaceable skills provided by
them are often cited to explain the demand for child labour. Although there is validity
in the first argument, the second does not hold water. In all the industries that rely
heavily on child labour, most of the tasks performed by children are also performed
by adults working side by side with them. Clearly, children do not have irreplaceable
skills. The other factors, responsible for the demand for child labour, seem to be
non-economic. Employers are tempted to hire child labour because children are
much less aware of their rights and most unlikely to get organised in trade unions.
They are also more trustworthy, more willing to take orders and do monotonous
work, and less likely to be absent from work. Children's lower absentee rate is
immensely valuable to employers in the informal sector where workers are
employed on a daily basis and the employers must ensure the presence of a full
contingent of workers each day.
Children have the right to be children: "to be loved, cherished, educated, nourished,
clothed, pampered, and fostered as children when they are children" (Hasnat 1996,
quoted from Natoli 1992). Child labour is, then, a denial of the right to enjoy
childhood and achieve full physical and psychological development. Worse still,
many hundreds of children are trapped in forced labour, debt bondage, prostitution
and other kinds of jobs that cause lasting and devastating damage. Obviously the
formulation of a National Plan of Action for the elimination of child labour in the
country is a need of the hour. A critical evaluation of the nature and magnitude of the
problem should, however, precede such an exercise. This paper is intended to
serve as a humble step in that direction.
Causes of child labour in Bangladesh:
Supply factors:
Poverty is the single most important factor responsible for the prevalence of child
labour in the country. About 55 million people live below the poverty line in
Bangladesh. Poor households badly need the money that their children earn. They
commonly contribute around 20-25 percent of family income. Since poor
households spend the bulk of their income on food, the earnings of working children
are critical to their survival.
Parents' perceptions greatly influence their children's participation in the labour
force. The education system of the country in general does not provide poor,
disadvantaged children with any immediate prospects of better jobs or higher levels
of income. The curriculum, followed in schools, is hardly perceived to be capable of
meeting the practical needs of poor families. Naturally, poor parents fail to
appreciate the long-term value of education, and instead opt for the short-term
economic gains of child labour. In many cases, the male children of the household
are expected to help the father in the field and the female children the mother with
the household work. Moreover, parents consider their children's employment in
certain occupations like in the engineering workshop as a rare opportunity to learn
employable skills. To them, it is an alternative education with much more practical
value than the traditional primary education.
Even though the government launched the Compulsory Primary Education Program
all over the country since January 1993, education remains very expensive for a
poor family, which is expected to bear the costs of uniform and transportation. In
some areas of the country the expenditure on primary level students represents one-
third of the entire income of a typical poor family, though most families have more
than one child of the school-going age. Many children are, therefore, forced to work
to pay for their own education.
DIFFERENT TYPES OF CHILD LABOUR
Child workers in agriculture Child workers are omnipresent in the rural and
agricultural world : 70 to 80% of child workers, depending on the country, work in
agriculture. In certain countries, a third of the agricultural labour force is made up of
children. In this context, there are two possible work environments: either family
agricultural work (helping the family, harvests, village rice paddies?), the most
common setting or commercial efforts more or less industrialized : tea plantation,
cotton, tobacco, sisal?this type of work is particularly common in South America
and Asia. - Child workers in industry In urban zones, especially in the large cities of
developing countries (Latin America especially), children are often used for industry
in : quarries and mines, brickyards, carpet and match factories, metal works, and
the chemical industry. Child servants Child servants, generally female, are "sold" to
a family to which they are committed for a variable time period, often for life. They
do household tasks and different work in exchange for room and board. In addition,
there are innumerable other jobs that use child labour : diving (harvesting of marine
sponges, etc), collection and sale of garbage, street performing, peddling..
International trade rules are creating a crisis in Bangladesh's garment industry, and
could cost thousands of women their jobs
"I haven't received any wages for months and I don't know what to do. I don't have
any other skills."
- Shima, a garment worker in Bangladesh.
More than 1.5 million young women earn a living by stitching garments in factories
in Bangladesh. Conditions are poor and pay is desperately low - most women earn
less than US $1.50 for a day's work. But it's vital income, and the women and their
families depend on it.
In 2000 a US trade act, which gives preferential treatment to poor countries,
became law. However, even though Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest
countries, it was excluded from the act. Garment orders from US customers have
since fallen by 30-40 per cent. And things are set to get even worse when the 'Multi-
Fibre Arrangement' - which currently protects Bangladesh from competition with
bigger exporters - ends in 2005.
Rich nations could put the crisis into reverse by reducing their high import tariffs -
and giving Bangladesh its fair share of the market.
Bangladesh's garment industry was built on the back of women's labour - but the
women will be the ones who pay the price if it collapses. Up to 300,000 of them
have already lost their jobs
A 15-year old leader of the national child worker movement in Peru, Patricia
Cruzado says, "We work for the animation of children so they can find their voice.
Children have a right to be respected as persons, so we confront the abuse of
children. At a national gathering of 1,000 child workers in Peru we named four
areas of concern:
Modern Child Slavery
Many people are surprised to learn that in sheer numbers, more people around the
world are enslaved today “than were seized from Africa in 400 years of the trans-
Atlantic slave trade.” (National Geographic) [1] 246 million children in the world work
[2]; yet an estimated 120 million of these children are working full time, everyday, all
year long. With this in mind, there is clearly a blurred line between "labor" and what
must be considered modern child slavery. According to the International Labor
Organization (ILO), there are over 10.8 million children age 5-14 involved in work
that by it nature, has, or leads to, adverse effects on the child's safety, health
(physical or mental), and moral development.[3] Further, there are as many as 20.4
million children age 5-17 involved in the worst forms of child labor (forced/bonded
labor, armed conflict, prostitution and pornography, and illicit activities, which we
call slavery.[4]
In the last fifty years, the world population has tripled, with the most growth occurring
in developing countries. Significant economic and social changes have displaced
many people to urban centers and their outskirts, leaving a large unemployed,
uncertain population vulnerable to exploitation. Combined with government and
police corruption, these factors have led to the proliferation of modern day slavery.
Because of the excess of potential slaves, the cost of an enslaved person is far less
today than in the past. During the trans-Atlantic trade (15th to 19th centuries) a slave
may have cost tens of thousands of dollars (by today's standards); however, a
typical slave today can be purchased for $10 to $100. This easy affordability
encourages slave-owners to be less concerned with the health and well-being of
their workers, seeing the enslaved persons, especially children, as disposable
commodities.
Forms of Slavery
Several kinds of slavery exist today. Forced labor occurs when the laborer is
physically or mentally pressured to work involuntarily. Bonded labor, the most
common form of slavery, occurs when a person must work to pay off a debt. Often,
however, this debt is passed down for generations, and the bonded laborer has
little understanding about how much of the debt is paid off. Children are often
completely unaware of any debt that has been passed on to them from their
parents, but are still forced into labor to repay it. Furthermore, persons who have
always been enslaved become dependent on the bond owner since they have never
known anything else. Chattel slavery is a system in which the enslaved person is
born into a condition of permanent slavery, and is not treated as a human, but only
as a commodity to be sold or traded as the owner chooses. This system is often so
ingrained in a society that neither slave nor owner is likely to question its moral
correctness. Lastly, religious slavery results from traditional religious practices, and
generally involves the dedication and enslavement of children to temple gods or
priests.
Children today may be found laboring on plantations or farms, in households
performing domestic work, in factories, in mines, on fishing platforms, on
construction sites, in bars, restaurants or tourist sites, in the commercial sex
industry, on the street as beggars or street sellers, and as soldiers. The majority of
child laborers, an estimated 70%, work in agriculture.
Where Slavery Exists Today
Industries in which child slaves are used exist in all parts of the world. Children are
enslaved in the cotton fields of India, fishing industry in Ghana, charcoal production
in Brazil, gold mines in Peru, brick producing kilns of Nepal, stone quarries in south
Asia, as camel jockeys in the United Arab Emirates, and as domestic servants and
sex slaves all over the world, including in the United States and other developed
countries. Because they are more easily manipulated, children are typically given
work in the most unhealthy and dangerous conditions.
Child Slave Trafficking
The trafficking, or forced recruitment and transportation, of persons for labor,
involuntary servitude, debt bondage or slavery is a large business, generating
around $7 billion a year according to the United Nations. Because they are more
vulnerable, dependent, easily manipulated, and less aware of or able to defend their
rights, children constitute a significant number of those trafficked. The ILO estimates
that 1.2 million children were victims of trafficking globally in 2000. While developing
countries tend to be the source of those trafficked, developed countries tend to be
the destination. The U.S. Department of State conservatively estimates that as
many as 20,000 workers are trafficked into the United States annually, about 5% of
which are children.
Impact on Children
Whatever the form or circumstances of slavery, its effects are detrimental to a
child's physical, mental and intellectual development, preventing the child from
growing to his or her full human capacity. Often, children are forced to work in the
worst conditions. For example, thousands of children in India , Nepal and Pakistan
are forced to crouch in dark, crowded, narrow rows 14 hours a day weaving
carpets. This may be good business for the slave owner, but a child carpet weaver
grows up without education and often with debilitating back, leg, finger, eye, and
lung problems due to his/her work and living conditions. (RUGMARK) Aside from
the physical, mental, and emotional damage inflicted upon enslaved and exploited
children, communities and families suffer as well. The impact of child slavery on
society as a whole must be considered. By allowing millions of the world's children
to be directed towards a life of physical labor and exploitation rather than education,
growth and development, we are setting up barriers to the success of future
generations of community and family leaders. Children who are raised only learning
exploitation, violence, and slavery often perpetuate the same violence on future
generations of children in their community.
Vulnerability and Slavery
Several conditions make a country especially vulnerable to slavery. Slavery is first
and foremost an economic institution that thrives in countries suffering from extreme
poverty. Given the poverty levels, poorer segments of the population tend to have
more children as a social security measure. Thus, population pressure makes more
children vulnerable. Many children cannot attend school because families cannot
afford or do not have access to education due to financial, physical, or social
barriers; lack of a primary education is a significant factor in vulnerability. Conflicts
cause economic instability, displacement of people, dissolution of families, the
spread of weapons, and the increased vulnerability of populations in the conflict
area. Poor economic conditions also limit the ability and will of a government to
pass and enforce laws prohibiting exploitive labor and slavery. All of these
circumstances lead to the increased vulnerability of populations. A cycle of slavery
perpetuates poverty when communities allow their children to grow up with violence
and exploitation rather than with education.
Protecting Children
As child slavery comes to the forefront of global concerns, efforts to end it are
growing. Legislation is one approach, such as the United Nations Convention on
the Rights of a Child, which outlines the rights of every child. It has been ratified by
every country in the world except for Somalia and the United States of America. In
addition, the ILO Convention 182, which defines child slavery - as the worst forms of
child labor – including trafficking of children, forced/bonded labor, prostitution,
combat, etc., and deems the enslavement of children illegal, worldwide. Many
various non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as Anti-Slavery International,
Free the Slaves, Global March Against Child Labour, and YAP International, work to
increase public awareness of child slavery. Children have also started their own
organizations, like the African Movement for Working Children and Youth in Africa,
to voice their child labor concerns to the public and demand attention from their
governments. However, to make long-term progress, the poor economic conditions
of developing countries fostering slavery and universal primary education must be
addressed. In addition to government action, companies in industries where slavery
is used must be encouraged to take responsibility for their working conditions by
creating slave-free work places and monitoring systems, throughout the various
levels of their supply chain.
Washington (AsiaNews/Agencies) – The cotton industry in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan
and Turkmenistan contributes to economic stagnation and environmental
degradation, and is based on the exploitation of workers, including child labour, this
according to a recent report titled The Curse of Cotton: Central Asia's Destructive
Monoculture released by the International Crisis Group (ICS), an independent, non-
profit, multinational organisation dedicated to conflict prevention and resolution.
The cotton industry is primary for the economy of these countries. For example,
Uzbekistan is the fifth largest cotton producer in the world, and cotton brought in
almost US$ 900 million in 2003.
The report highlights how, in steppes with low productivity, “millions of the rural poor
work for little or no reward growing and harvesting the crop”. It is cheap labour,
essentially women and children. And schoolchildren have to spend up several
months in the fields, missing their classes, some falling ill or dying. No wonder that
young men try to escape the cotton farms for lack of opportunities.
What is more, farm workers do not own the land they cultivate and cannot choose
what to grow or to whom sell their produce.
This lack of manpower prompted Turkmenistan President Niyazov to announce that
coming summer soldiers will be sent to work in the cotton fields.
According to the ICS, complicity between local governments and corporations and
the lack of a free media, which is still state-controlled, have allowed this exploitation
to go on unreported.
The environmental costs of cotton growing have been devastating. The Aral Sea
has been depleted as a result of intensive irrigation needed to feed cotton
production. This, in turn, is transforming the region into a salt-covered desert.
Central Asian cotton is traded by major European and US corporations; its
production is financed by Western banks, and the final product ends up in well-
known clothes outlets in Western countries.
In March of this year we saw the tragic case of five adolescent girls who appeared
to have been poisoned by carbon monoxide smoke from a coal brazier lit in the
confines of their cramped factory sleeping quarters. Upon discovering them
unconscious, the factory manager did not call for medical assistance, but took them
to a crematorium to quickly dispose of their remains. An employee of the
crematorium noticed that the bodies of the girls were still warm and their limbs soft,
and that no medical certificate accompanied their bodies, so he refused to accept
the bodies. In an attempt to hide culpability for the girl's deaths, the panicked factory
manager ordered that the bodies be disposed of immediately. Sources say that
when the girls' families heard of the matter, they insisted on viewing their daughters'
corpses, but were refused. The factory also insisted that the families make no
further inquiries into the girls' deaths as a condition of paying each family 15,000
Yuan (less than US$2000) in compensation. However, the families still insisted on
viewing the corpses, and four days later the factory finally acceded to their request.
Upon viewing the corpses, the families were horrified to discover that at least two of
the girls, 14-year-old Wang Yajuan and 17-year-old Wang Shimian, appeared to
have been alive when they were placed in the coffins. Their faces were caked with
vomit and tears, their noses had bled and their necks were swollen. Wang Shimian
was found to have kicked through the cardboard lining of her coffin, and her body
was twisted in apparent struggle.
Millions of children worldwide are trapped in mind-numbing subsistence-level labor
of little economic value but which saps the creativity and learning potential of entire
communities of future workers. While removal of children from the worst forms of
child labor is an immediate objective, further interventions are needed to ensure
that families have meaningful, sustainable alternatives of support that keep children
from returning to hazardous and exploitive labor situations.
The United States has been a leader in the international effort to combat exploitive
child labor and promote education for former child laborers. The country is the
largest donor to the International Labor Organization's International Program on the
Elimination of Child Labor. Since 1995, the United States has provided
approximately $255 million for technical assistance projects. Capacity building is
essential to the long-term sustainability of child labor projects. By developing the
capabilities of national and local leaders and institutions, national efforts to combat
child labor will have a better chance of succeeding.
Tragically, more than 200 million children today have no hope of benefiting from the
dynamic worldwide economy because they are locked in a degrading, dead-end
subculture of child labor. Many of these children, who are between the ages of five
and 14 work under exploitive conditions including abduction by armed bands to
serve as soldiers; being trafficked into commercial sexual exploitation; and being
exposed to extreme workplace hazards and disease. Hundreds of millions of
childhoods are wasted away in mind-numbing subsistence-level labor that produces
minimal economic value while leaching away the creativity and learning potential of
entire communities of future workers.
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ROLE
Efforts to combat child labor gained momentum in 1999 with the adoption of
International Labor Organization (ILO) Convention 182 on the Worst Forms of Child
Labor. The convention identifies the worst forms of child labor, which include
bonded labor, drug trafficking, prostitution, and other work that poses serious
threats to children's health, safety, and well-being. The convention also requires that
ratifying governments take immediate and effective measures to eliminate these
forms of child labor in their countries. The U.S. government took an active role in
promoting the passage of the convention, and as of March 2005, 153 countries had
ratified it, making it the fastest ratified convention in the ILO's 82-year history.
Even before passage of Convention 182, the United States had begun taking
important steps to eradicate child labor. The U.S. Department of Labor's (USDOL)
International Child Labor Program (ICLP) was created in 1993 to investigate and
report on child labor around the world. Over the years, ICLP's expertise in global
child labor issues has expanded, and its portfolio of activities has increased
exponentially. Research and reporting on international child labor, in support of U.S.
foreign policy, trade policy, and development efforts, remain the ICLP's core
functions. Awareness-raising within the United States about global child labor has
also become an important part of the program. For example, in May 2003
Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao hosted representatives of the world community
at "Children in the Crossfire: Prevention and Reintegration of Child Soldiers," a
conference that highlighted the scandal of child soldiers in armed conflicts.
Perhaps the most dramatic results have been achieved through the USDOL's
International Technical Assistance Projects. Since 1995, ICLP has funded more
that $400 million in technical assistance projects in some 70 countries to rescue
and rehabilitate children from the worst forms of child labor and provide them
educational opportunities.
CHILD LABOR IN THE PHILIPPINE FISHING INDUSTRY
In the Philippines, which has more than 7,000 islands, fishing is a very important
part of the country's economic activity. With poverty and population rates high,
hazardous child labor in the fishing industry is common. Some children work up to
eight hours at night, diving to chase fish into nets, while others work on six- to 10-
month deep-sea fishing expeditions where they dive as deep as 15 meters without
protective gear. These child laborers are at risk of ear damage, injuries from falls,
shark attacks, snake bites, and drowning, among other hazards.
Through its Timebound Program, ILO-IPEC is working to remove children from
fishing crews and provide them with healthcare, counseling, and educational
support such as basic literacy training, non-formal education, and school supplies.
A major focus of the project is to implement sustainable child-labor monitoring
systems. The project has formed monitoring teams composed of IPEC project staff
and personnel from Philippines government agencies, such as the Bureau of
Fisheries and Aquative Resources, the Coast Guard, and the Department of Labor
and Employment. The teams have conducted random inspections on fishing
vessels and in communities where children are typically recruited for work.
Municipalities have been encouraged to take responsibility for providing law
enforcement protection to ex-child laborers and for monitoring activities. Project
staff have successfully transferred monitoring responsibilities to local agencies, and
the project has developed standard screening procedures for boat crew members
that can be used by local authorities.
Based on findings of the 2001 Philippine Survey on Children', around 4 million
children or 16.2 percent of the country's 25 million children aged 5 to 17 are
economically active (read: "working"). Out of this figure, 1.08 million were reported
to be engaged in physical work; 940,000 already had work-related injuries; 830,000
said they found their work risky/dangerous; and 750,00 said they had work-related
illness.
Today, child laborers can be found in almost every Philippine household, with 3 out
of 10 families having children aged 5 to 17 years old engaging in work.
Luzviminda Padilla, labor undersecretary for workers' protection & welfare, said in
an interview with the Inquirer recently that there are now about 2.4 million working
children who have been exposed to biological hazards like viruses, bacteria &
parasites, physical hazards (noise & extreme temperatures), as well as chemical
hazards like dust, liquid, mist and fumes. She adds that out of this number, more
than half or 1.3 million have not been attending school, while 600,000 of those
already in school are having difficulty catching up with their lessons.
Aggravating the issue further is the proliferation of various work environments where
a child's health and well-being is being put at risk to form what may now be seen as
"the 6 worst forms of child labor". These environments include, but are not limited to,
domestic labor, sugarcane plantations, deep-sea fishing, mining and quarrying,
pyrotechnic production as well as commercial sexual exploitation.
According to the Indian census of 1991, there are 11.28 million working children
under the age of fourteen years in India. Over 85% of this child labor is in the
country's rural areas, working in agricultural activities such as fanning, livestock
rearing, forestry and fisheries. This labor is outside the formal sector, and outside
industry. Moreover, nine out of ten working children work within a family setting.
Working in family-based occupations, these children also develop skills in certain
traditional crafts, thus augmenting the human capital formation of India's developing
economy.
India has all along followed a proactive policy in the matter of tackling the problem
of child labor. India has always stood for constitutional, statutory and development
measures required to eliminate child labor. The Indian Constitution has consciously
incorporated provisions to secure compulsory universal elementary education as
well as labor protection for children. Labor Commissions in India have gone into the
problems of child labor and have made extensive recommendations.
Statistics revealed that 4 million Filipino children aging from 5 to 17 are
economically active. Around 2.4 million are exposed to hazard works or child labor,
2 million children engaged in child labor who work 1 to 4 hours a day, 1.3 of the
Filipino working children work from 5 to 8 hours a day and 360,000 worked for
more than 8 hours a day.
Overview of Bonded Child Labor
A bonded child is a child working in conditions of servitude to pay off a debt.
Although the terms of their bondage vary, all bonded children have three things in
common: they are working for nominal wages, in consideration of an advance
(loan), and are not free to discontinue their work.20 The value of the bonded child's
services, as reasonably assessed, is not applied toward the debt's liquidation, and
the length of the services-how long the child has to work-is not limited or defined.
The child is, in a sense, a commodity, exchanged between his or her parents and
the employer. The parents or guardians, who receive the money, are often destitute
and have no other way to obtain credit-children most frequently told Human Rights
Watch that their parents used the loan to pay for a wedding or funeral, birth or
treatment for illness; to pay off another loan; or just to put food on the table. The
employers use the loan to secure indefinitely the cheapest form of labor possible. A
weaver with a bonded child assistant explained to Human Rights Watch: "The loan
is business security. This way the worker cannot go to another job. The loan is
renewed each year and not paid off."21
The loan keeps the child from seeking other employment and is enforced with the
threat of calling the loan due and, sometimes, with violence. Brijraj N., who is fifteen
years old and from a lower caste, said he earns Rs. 400 (U.S.$8.33) a month in sari
weaving. We asked Brijraj N. whether he could change employers and he
answered: "I took the money from the employer. The employer will sell the debt to
the next person. Even if there wasn't any debt, I still couldn't go. He'll say, `Why are
you going?' and then he'd beat me. That's what he'll do."22 We interviewed a
weaver in Kanchipuram, himself in debt to the loom owner, who worked in the
owner's home assisted by a child. He explained: "Even if there is no yarn, the
children have to be here in the loom-they can't go play. My assistant can't go out
from the loom. Weavers can't go to another loom, or we will have to pay back the
loan."23 Children's inability to leave is also enforced by the widespread belief, held
by parents and government officials, as well as employers, that the loan ought to be
repaid.24
In order to change employers, children typically find another employer who is willing
to assume their debt. When we asked eleven-year-old S. Kancha if he could stop
working as a weaver's assistant, he replied: "If I stopped working at this loom, I
would have to pay the money, but if I went to another loom, my father would do the
transaction. He would get money from one loom owner and give it to another."25
Subban P., who was fifteen, told us that his parents bonded him to a loom owner for
Rs. 10,000 (U.S.$208) when he was eight years old. He did not like the job, he said,
because he did not get enough to eat and the owner was very strict. He was able to
change employers when his current employer paid the debt to the first owner. Now
the boy owes his current employer the debt.26
In exchange for working twelve or more hours a day, six or seven days a week,
employers pay children small sums of money, sometimes just enough for
transportation or snacks. The employer/creditor dictates the rate. In the silk industry,
children reported starting off making from nothing to around 100 rupees (U.S.$2.08)
a month, which might eventually increase to as much as 400 or 500 rupees (U.
S.$8.33 to $10.42). However, the children may not actually receive this amount as
some or all may be deducted against the loan. These salaries are far below
minimum wage.27
In many industries, such as the making of beedi cigarettes, the child's labor does
not pay off the original loan at all but only serves as interest on the loan and as a
surety for its repayment. The original amount must still be paid in full. In contrast,
most children bonded in the silk industry reported that their loans were decreased
through regular deductions from their salaries. However, the children, typically
illiterate, have no way to monitor whether the repayment is being accurately
accounted for and are dependent on their employer/creditor to report how much
they still owe. "When they write Rs. 5,000 [U.S.$104] in the books and if we don't
know how to read and write, we won't know it," a twenty-year-old weaver who had
been bonded since age seven or eight told Human Rights Watch.28 "If they give us
Rs. 100 [U.S.$2.08] but write down Rs. 200 [$4.17], how will we know if we don't
read and write? They'll do it on purpose so that we'll remain bonded, and if they do
it, we'll have to keep on borrowing from them."29 Salaries, which are minute to
begin with, are further reduced for "mistakes" and expenses such as meals or
medical care. The rate of pay off is so slow and salaries so small, families are often
forced to borrow additional money in order to survive, especially if the work is
seasonal. Thus, even where the loan is allegedly structured to be paid off by the
child's labor, families usually never escape the debt.
Children may be bonded either as individuals or with their entire families. Even
where the parent technically takes the loan, the child may be put to work to help pay
it off and may inherit the debt when the parent dies. For example, Rakesh R., who
was seventeen years old when his father died, told Human Rights Watch: "I owe Rs.
1,900 [U.S.$40]. When my father died three years ago, they said this was the
amount he owed. We didn't read or write, but this is what they said. Rs. 1,000 [$21]
was an old debt, and when my father died, they declared that this was what was left.
Then we borrowed Rs. 900 [$19] more."30 Debts may also pass to a younger
sibling when a child reaches adulthood or stops working. For example, Human
Rights Watch interviewed children freed by NGOs and placed in residential schools
whose debts were passed on to another brother or sister. In some occupations,
particularly agriculture, bondage may be handed from generation to generation, with
workers considered attached to the land and transferred as part of land sales or
exchanges.
Without comprehensive birth registration or reliable nationwide surveys, it is
impossible to make better than a rough estimate of how many children are being
held in bondage in India. Human Rights Watch has found that there are credible
estimates of sixty to 115 million working children in India, of whom at least fifteen
million are bonded.31 The wide range in estimates is further evidence of the
government's failure to conduct an adequate national survey of the problem
Twisting
After reeling, individual threads are twisted into strong, multi-ply silk thread. Twisting
usually takes place in small factories with between fifty and a few hundred spindles.
These factories use bonded child labor. Children stand for long hours loading the
spindles, guiding the thread, and performing other tasks.
Children's Testimonies
P. Kattaraman's parents sent him to work when he was around six years old in
exchange for a Rs. 3,000 (U.S.$63) advance to pay for his sister's marriage.91 He
worked for five or six years at a silk twisting unit. "The conditions of working were
very difficult," he told us. "When we took too long or if the thread broke in the middle,
we would get beaten. . . . There was no rest for eating. We ate while working. We
paid Rs. 2.50 [U.S.5¢] for a meal from the hotel. This was cut from our wages."92
Yeramma S., eleven years old, was living at an NGO-run school when Human Rights
Watch interviewed her:
Before I came here I went to [a government] school, but after one year I withdrew
from school because of a problem-my sister's illness. After my sister got sick, we
took her to the hospital, but the doctor said we had to pay more money, so my
parents bonded me for Rs. 1,700 [U.S.$35]. I was seven or eight years old.
I did winding [unwinding the cocoons]. I didn't like to work, but I was forced to by my
parents. They said I couldn't go to school but had to work. . . .
At 4:00 a.m. I got up and did silk winding. . . . I only went home once a week. I slept
in the factory with two or three other children. We prepared our food there and slept
in the space between the machines. The owner provided the rice and cut it from our
wages-he would deduct the price. We cooked the rice ourselves. We worked twelve
hours a day with one hour for rest. If I made a mistake-if I cut the thread-he would
beat me. Sometimes [the owner] used vulgar language. Then he would give me
more work
Before I came to the school, I worked in the silk unit. I worked with thread and then
sometimes cleaning and sweeping. When I first started working, older children were
there, and they taught me how to do the work. I started work when I was about seven
years old.
I got a Rs. 2,000 [U.S.$42] advance-it was less because I had no experience. I
didn't get any wages because I was young. Later my wages went straight to my
parents, and I don't know how much it was. Once a week I got Rs. 10 [U.S.21¢] from
my parents for pocket money. I spent it on small balls, snacks-chickpeas and
chocolate, sweets. . . .
I wanted to play with children, and sometimes I was unhappy. I would see the
neighbors' children going to school, and I would think, "What am I doing here?"
Sometimes I thought about running away. Once I escaped from the silk unit and
went home. The owner came to my house, and my parents convinced me not to
leave again without their permission, so I went back with the owner.94
Karuthakannan N., age fourteen and Dalit, had been living at an NGO residential
school for two months when we interviewed him. Before that he worked in a silk
reeling operation along with two other children. He attended formal school in
addition to working, and because he was not working full-time, he could not get a
loan from the owner. At the persuasion of an NGO volunteer, he came to the school
to live because, he explained, "my parents wanted to take an advance [loan] and
send me to work full time. The owner kept demanding this. Even now when I stay
here, the owner comes and tries to take me to the silk unit. . . . I originally went
because my parents forced me to go and do this thing. Otherwise I wouldn't have
done this work."95
S. R. Kollur, twelve years old, told Human Rights Watch:
I had a Rs. 2,000 [U.S.$42] advance, but my sister paid the debt [when I came to
the residential school]. She is eighteen years old and working on the same unit. I
earned Rs. 200 [$4.17] a week. I stayed in the twisting unit all week. I worked from 6:
00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m. Then I had breakfast and worked until 1:30 p.m. when I had
lunch. Then I worked until 9:00 p.m. I would go to my house on Sunday and come
back early Monday morning. I slept in a small room at the twisting unit. My sister had
to cook for both of us. In the morning we had rice and in the afternoon, millet. If I got
sick, my sister had to borrow ten or twenty rupees from the owner to go to the
doctor, and then I would go back and sleep in the room. I was not allowed to go
outside. At 9:00 p.m. we would just have dinner and go to sleep. There were two
other children there about the same age.96
Structure of the Bondage in Silk Reeling and Twisting
Bonds range from around Rs. 1,000 to 5,000 (U.S.$21 to $104). There is usually no
written document, although employers typically keep record books. As with silk
weaving, children reported seeing the books, but many were illiterate and relied on
the employer to tell them what was written, rendering them even more vulnerable to
exploitation. Children reported being paid from Rs. 0 to around Rs. 400 (U.S.$8.33)
per month, part or all of which is deducted against the debt.
Human Rights Watch visited a silk twisting factory in Bangalore Rural District in
March 2002. The factory was notified shortly before we arrived, and we saw only six
workers there, all of whom said they were adults. However, the factory supervisor
told us that twenty-six people worked in the factory, some only part time, and that
they were paid according to the amount of work they did.97 The total amount spent
for their wages each month, he said, was about Rs. 5,000 (U.S.$104).98 Even if all
of the workers were half time, each earned on average Rs. 192 (U.S.$4.00) a
month, the equivalent of Rs. 384 (U.S.$8.00) a month for full time work, far below the
minimum wage.
Children typically reported working ten to fourteen hours a day, with breaks to eat,
six days a week. Children will work for even longer when the demand for thread
increases; for example, before a festival when women purchase new saris,
factories will sometimes operate twenty-four hours a day. The supervisor at a silk
twisting factory told Human Rights Watch, "Outside employers are taking business
away. We have to work very fast-day and night."99 Thirteen-year-old D.G. Sagar,
who was Dalit, said that when he worked at night, "I didn't like working in the
morning, but the owner would insist. He demanded that I come in the morning
because