Slave Labor in the Asias
by Kristen Ligowitz
December 2006
Child slave labor is a worldwide issue that we face today. Although we don’t witness it in the United States, in countries throughout Asia and South and Central America it has become very prevalent. Children as young as four years old are being held captive and forced to do work that the average American would find inconceivable. Worldwide, there is an estimated 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen working in developing countries around the globe. Of these children, sixty-one percent are in Asia which brings me to what I want to discuss in my paper.
One Asian country in particular that is a major offender is the People’s Republic of China. The exact number of child slaves cannot be determined but we do know it is very large. We also don’t know how or if laws are enforced against violators within the country. However, we do know that the Chinese Ministry of Labor has admitted that the situation regarding child slave labor is very serious throughout the country. It has also been reported that the number of child slave laborers under the age of 16 is somewhere around four to five million.
The Chinese slave labor camps were set up first under Mao in the 1950s and are known as Laogai. The largest offender in the Laogai system is the toy making industry which China makes up about 75 percent of worldwide. The average age of a worker in these toy factories is between 12 and 15 years old. The typical wage of the workers ranges from as little as 6 cents an hour to 40 cents an hour. The typical number of hours worked in a day during busy periods is up to 19 and the number of days per week 6. Young workers work all day in 104-degree heat handling toxic glues, paints, and solvents. Workers that are weakened by the severe conditions, by illness, or pregnant workers who are supposed to have legal protection are forced to quit. Also, according to Washington File, the workers are often punished cruelly. Many are brutally tortured or raped by their employers. This unfortunately does not even account for all the atrocities being committed by the Chinese to their own every day. It also doesn’t help that American corporations such as Wal-Mart are major offenders of this horrible practice.
The second Asian country that is a major offender is India. It is estimated that somewhere between 60 to 115 million children are working as slaves. They are unable to escape work that will leave them poor, illiterate, and sometimes crippled as they become adults. They are bound to their employers in exchange for a loan and cannot leave until they are out of debt but they earn so little that they may not ever be free of it. Even more horrible is that the Indian government is aware of the situation of these children and has the ability to free them but because of corruption of the system many officials deny that the children exist at all. When interviewing Indian government officials, Human Rights Watch found that almost all of them denied that children were bonded. For example, the Ministry of Labor’s joint secretary for child labor stated, “I haven’t heard too much that this is a problem- I have heard of bonding of older people but not any kids.”.
Although officials won’t acknowledge it, it is most definitely a huge issue. These poor children are forced into the most laborious and unrewarding work imaginable, mostly in agriculture, but also picking rags, making bricks, polishing gemstones, rolling beedi cigarettes, packaging firecrackers, working as domestics, weaving silk saris and carpets. One child interviewed by Human Rights Watch gave their particular account of working as a bonded laborer. Yeramma S., an eleven-year-old who was brought into slavery at seven, described waking up at 4:00 a.m. to do the silk winding and said that she only went home once a week. “I slept in the factory with two or three other children. We prepared the 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 of rest. If I made a mistake-if I cut the thread-he would beat me. Sometimes he used vulgar language. Then he would give me more work”.
Since investigation into India’s child slave labor began in 1996, the government has taken some positive steps to address this major issue but these efforts have also had some bad effects on child slave labor. In the last ten years, child slaves have been driven out of factories and into households which has made the offenders much harder to prosecute. In 1996, Human Rights Watch published The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor in India which was a report that concluded that the Indian government had failed to enforce its own laws and try to combat child labor. The results of the report however left much to be desired. A very small amount of employers actually went to prison and were prosecuted to the fullest. Even today, the Ministry of Labor does not advocate prosecuting employers but instead believe in “awareness raising” and attempting to convince parents that it is not right to send their child into a life of labor but rather to send them to school instead. One group that has been particularly helpful is the NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) in trying to really put an end to this and in some areas that they have focused on children have been freed and rehabilitated. However, its resources and power are limited because it is not a law enforcement agency.
Rehabilitation of these child laborers is the key to actually putting an end to this growing problem. Without it, children who are freed will probably become bonded again. Programs for legally mandated rehabilitation are promising
but limited. However, money is not the main barrier that is holding these programs back, some remains unspent each year; the problem is political will. The schools that have been able to open and run have been a big help in getting child workers back into formal schooling but only in the specific areas that they operate in. But of course, these programs are not receiving the proper support that they need from the government. Without protection from the government children cannot leave the factories to go to school and even in areas where they are able to they face harassment and pressure to return to their work because their debts are left unsettled and the family may be forced to send another child in their place.
What are the causes of all this corruption and torture? Well, one of the main causes of child slave labor in India is poverty; however, it is not the only one. Others include a lack of a social welfare scheme to guard against hunger
and illness; inaccessible, low quality, and discriminatory schools; the lack of employment and living wages for adults; corruption and apathy among government officials; and historical economic relationships based on the hierarchy of caste. Also, bonded children are most likely going to be poor as adults and will probably bond their own children to survive. Whether all of what has been described about Indian child slave labor will be dealt with or not the fact still remains: Both Indian and international law prohibit the use of bonded child labor. India is obliged to prohibit all forms of slavery, including debt bondage, child servitude, and forced labor, as well as affirmatively protect children from economic exploitation and dangerous work. India also has obligations according to international law to make primary and secondary education available and accessible to every child.
Other countries that are less severe violators of slave labor laws are Indonesia, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Vietnam all of which have set deadlines to eliminate the worst kinds of child slave labor. To meet these deadlines they have been using similar tactics to those of India’s such as increasing efforts to combat poverty and expand education, allocating more money to combat child labor, and paying attention to vulnerable groups such as minorities and migrants. Based on Labor Force Surveys conducted last year, statistics say 8.4 percent of the Philippine’s 25 million children are working and that more than half (1.2 million) are 15-17 years old. Indonesia, however, has made great strides in eliminating the worst forms of child labor through intensified education programs and economic policies to alleviate poverty and they hope to completely eliminate these horrible forms by 2016 which is four years before the world target of 2020. The government of Indonesia is working hard to allocate 20 percent of the state budget to education and to enforce the compulsory nine-year elementary education system. All these efforts will hopefully enable children to stay in school longer and receive more education. Like India, a
major hurdle that is faced by Indonesia is the corruption which needs to be eliminated in order for the programs to work properly. Overall, however, Indonesia has made a lot of progress in recent years.
In conclusion, child slave labor is a worldwide issue that we face today.However, it is good to see that efforts are being made to eradicate it but of course more can always be done. Awareness among countries like the United States definitely needs to be raised because I admit that I myself was unaware of the severity of the situation until researching the topic and found it very disturbing that employers continue to get away with it on a daily basis. I do believe that with the right amount of effort and support that it can be stopped in the near future but much work will need to be done in the mean time.
Sources Used:
http://services.inq7.net/print/print.php?article_id=18707
http://www.hrw.org/children/labor.htm
http://www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/sweat/china.htm
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=16577
http://www.thejakartapost.com/misc/PrinterFriendly.asp
http://usembassy-australia.state.gov/hyper/2000/0519/epf507.htm
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2003/india/India0103.htm
Mariko Curran