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Little Hands Do Neat Work
By Joanne McEwan
11/06/2001
This summer, like any other, millions of children will embark on an exodus to the fields. Children as young as eight will spend most of the long hot summer days tilling, planting, and harvesting for pathetic wages, in even more pathetic conditions.
But child labor is not confined to seasonal farm work. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 250 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 constitute a significant part of the workforce in the developing world. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), almost 120 million of these children are full time laborers.
But child labor can also be seen as essential to development. Often children help out on the family farm or business, learning the skills that they will need if they are to fulfil the family legacy. Sometimes parents send their children to work as household domestics, where they are almost "reared" by their employers and in some situations offered a better economic standard of living. Very often the parents receive the monetary component of the salary and the child earns his/her food, clothing and shelter. Although the parental nurturing aspect may be missing from his/her life, the child discovers life at his own pace.
But in other cases, children's basic human rights to freedom from exploitation, abuse and exposure from harmful substances are often violated when they are forced to work in manufacturing, construction, and farm services during labor-intensive seasons. In these conditions, children often lose their right to education and receive inadequate pay for long work hours, where they often suffer from physical and psychological stress. In India, children as young as four have been tied to rug looms to prevent them from escaping.
Child labor can also be more clandestine in nature. An eight-year-old boy recently confessed in a Cairo court that his uncle, who used him to 'carry' drugs to a buyer, duped him. Drug related transactions involving the use of children are common occurrences in both rich and poor countries.
Then there is bonded labor or debt bondage, which is tantamount to slavery. According to HRW, 15 million children work as bonded laborers in India alone. This happens when the family receives advanced payment for the child's employment. The debt has to be worked off and in many cases…never is. Sometimes there are 'generational' labor agreements, with the child being promised years or decades previously. Often, families are obliged to provide the employer with a child worker every generation. As for slavery, this ranges from children being sold for a pittance to banana and coffee plantations in Latin America (Casa Alianza) to the trafficking of young Nepalese girls to brothels in India (HRW).
It is estimated that around 1.2 million children swarm the Egyptian cotton fields in early summer (Schemm, p.8). Most of them are below 12 years of age and work up to 11 hours each day, thus impeaching Egypt's laws that state that a child of 12 (the minimum working age) can only participate in a six hour work day of seasonal agricultural work. Children not only toil under the hot sun, but are beaten by the foreman and forced to work in fields that have been sprayed with pesticides only pesticides only 24 - 48 hours earlier. Yet these children play an important role in the labor intensive cotton fields…being ideal in height and plentiful in number.
Situations such as the above, clearly breach the obligations set by the Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed by 191 countries (only two abstained). Individual countries are allowed to stipulate their own laws and regulations on child labor. But agriculture seems to be the least regulated. The problems not only lie in the flexibility of hours and age limit, but also on the diffulties that arise from enforcing the laws that are to designed protect the children from pesticide poisoning and abuse.
Organizations, like Human Rights Watch, that report on substandard environments and practices for working children recommend that governments fully implement the laws set by the international community. But even some organizations are unable to keep track of those they are charged with protecting. For example, the International Organization for Migration claims that thousands of street children in Latin America slip through the safety net (Casa Alianza).
Authoritative taskforces set up by governments to curb child labor often do so under threats of economic boycotts by the international community. These boycotts can be effective,but more often than not they either miss the point or are counterproductive. Once governments tighten the screws on their own cooperatives or businesses, child labor is pushed to the informal sector. In Egypt, officially, a child will earn 3 L.E. (less than a dollar) a day on the cotton fields, but if he is sent to work on a private farm for a family member, he may earn nothing. As it is illegal to employ children under 12, they are kept hidden, making it it is more difficult for organizations to save them from exploitation.
Enforced laws cannot erase the culture of child labor. In many traditional societies it is quite acceptable for families to have their children working throughout the day. In some ways it keeps them out of trouble. Parents would know, for example, that their daughter is in the home of a well-to-do family being kept busy - her multi-dimensional job description is of no consequence - and under the watchful eye of other elders.
Then there is the case of employers physically abusing the children - this is a factor we must admit affects children throughout both the Muslim world and the international community. Value systems of some societies consider the corporal punishment of children, outside of the parental circle or schooling, as acceptable. Parents often accept the beating of their children by siblings, neighbors, distant relatives, employers or village elders. Employers however, can misconstrue parental inaction as tacit approval. But, this does not mean that all or most parents support or ignore abuse. It is normally from the lack of education on better parenting practices and the pressures of poverty and societal norms that allow such abuses to continue.
In some societies, a child is seen as an investment or one who brings 'rizq' (provision) to the family, especially where birth rates are high and incomes are low. By investment, this can mean that while he is devoid of immediate economic value, he is seen as a fruitful entity in and of himself whereby his mere existence will bring
"rizq." He can also be regarded as having economic value that will later flourish for the benefit of him and his family.
For the poor, one child working outside of the home is one less mouth to feed. The United Nationas Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimates that many of these working children constitute 20-25% of the family's income, however the working conditions are not always what the parents would have hoped for.
Child labor and the abuse of child labor laws are not new trends attributed only to the less developed countries of our epoch. When industrializing Europe saw (hopefully) the last of child labor, the people experienced a rise in the standard of living and a change in social values and traditions, as well as revolutionary new laws. Now the developing world faces a demand in labor that out-strips the supply of adult workers. One might say, "Perceived necessity overcomes legality" (Fernea, p.227).
As already mentioned, child labor constitutes a number of categories - some worse than others. Bonded and forced labor have the most devastating impact on children and are the targets of movements and organizations that seek to outlaw child labor worldwide. But, many poor countries are skeptical of rich countries that publicize their child's rights abuses. Core countries initiate boycotts of goods when there are reports of child labor violations. But the countires on the periphery regard this pracitce as the core's means of reducing competition in world trade.
Last year, a shipment of textiles from Egypt, worth $13 million, was held at U.S. customs for weeks before it could pass. It was stopped under allegations that the products were made by using child labor. Ahmed Abdallah, head of Al-Jeel, a non-government organization which aims to combat child labor, doubts that such action are purely due to the issue of forced labor. He says, "In many cases we know that the issue is trade competition. Some governments want to apply sanctions not for the noble cause of respecting child rights, but for the selfish cause of having economic leverage and promoting their own trade interests in international markets"(Abdelaty, 2001).
The American boycott fever seems all too hypocritical as it ignores events on its own soil. "Fingers to the Bone - United States Failure to Protect Child Farmworkers" (Human Rights Watch, June 2000) states that children in the U.S., as young as twelve, staff farms on 12-hour shifts, six or seven days a week, earning as little as $2 per day. They are exposed to pesticides and suffer serious illnesses including: cancer, brain damage and have fatalities five times higher than the rate of children working in other jobs.
Child labor laws in the U.S treat children in the agricultural sector differently than children in other forms of employment. They were first drafted in 1938, when children worked on their parents' farms and most of the work was manual. Farming in the U.S. is now mechanized with heavy usage of artificial fertilizers and pesticides. In spite of the change in circumstances children twelve and over can work unlimited hours as long as they do not work during school hours. It is estimated that one million child labor violations occur in the American agricultural sector every year.
Taking the issue of core country or core economy violations further, we find that big names like Nike, Gap, Walmart and Kathie Lee have been involved in furthering the child labor exploitation, although conveniently not in their home country.
The corporation, Price Waterhouse, is supposedly working in the interests of developing countries. It monitored factory pay, conditions and employment in export processing zones, or Marquillas, in Honduras. Their findings, however, clearly include girls aged 10 - 14 as part and parcel of the workforce. This assessment was funded and supported by USAID (NLC).
Solutions to child labor comprise of intense strategic planning involving governments and governmental organizations, NGO's, workers cooperatives, consumer bodies and the families themselves.
In the campaign to end the exploitation of child labor, UNICEF fosters positive methods toward reducing the need to employ children in the workplace. The "Urban Hard to Reach Programme" in Bangladesh works with more than 350,000 children deployed in 3390 leading centers. Instead of hiring children, they offer vacated posts to members of the children's families and ensure that no child under the age of 14 is forced to work.
In India, UNICEF uses education as a form of nurturing for working children, as well as a way for others to avoid early employment. This technique is implemented in the Andhra Pradesh State, where they run a program of volunteers who bond with families and encourage them to send their children to school. No economic incentives are given. Schools function in the mornings and evenings for young children while older children attend residential camps. This policy has allowed families to maintain their incomes while introducing their offspring to better opportunities.
Poverty and government policies have to be tackled in order to alleviate the injustices of child exploitation and abuse in the work force. Remedying poverty will reduce the need for children to work.
In the meantime, raising awareness among the less educated and the poor is of paramount importance in scaling down this problem. Adults need to understand the essence and advantages of children's 'right to play' and 'right to education'. Do they really perceive these principles as part of children's necessities for living or do they merely consider them as luxuries?
If we, as consumers, want to demonstrate our rejection of child labor, should we go for the blind boycott of a country's produce because that country has a bad reputation in child labor? Or, should we boycott or direct our concerns towards those corporations where safe working practices, decent hours and wages, and adult-only employment policies are obsolete?
The next time we see a product marked "Handmade in China" or "Handpicked on the Banks of the Nile" we might think of those nimble little fingers that worked and toiled to make them. And, we can certainly ask Allah to bless them and give them a brighter future.
Sources
Abdelaty, Soha. "A Family Affair." Al-Ahram Weekly. Cairo: (3.5.2001) 11.
Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. "Children in the Muslim Middle East". Children and Work. The American University in Cairo. Cairo: 1995, page 227.
Human Rights Watch (HRW). "Failure to Protect Child
Farmworkers". p 1 - 5.
Human Rights Watch. "Child
Labor." p. 1 - 6.
"Migration." Casa Alianza. 19/6/2000.
National Labor Council (NLC). Pricewater Report.
"News: Address by Carol Bellamy, UNICEF Executive Director." 26.2.2001 (p. 1 - 5).
Schemm, Paul."Little Field Hands." Cairo Times. 4.47 (8.2.2001) 8.
"Sweatshops." Corpwatch.
UNICEF. "Child Protection."
UNICEF. "News: Education for All." 6.4.2000 (p. 1 - 2).
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