Child Slaves

Peter Lee-Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781849710411
• eBook ISBN: 9781134067855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

In Portugal, 12-year-olds manufacture clothes destined for British chain-stores. In Brazil, children work more than nine hours a day glueing shoes for sale in the West. This book, based on research done with the co-operation of the Anti-Slavery Society for a recent major BBC television documentary, exposes the scandalous exploitation of children's labour and services throughout the world - a system from which the national economies of Europe and the USA profit.

What is eaten, worn and used every day in Western homes is all too often produced at the expense of poor children's welfare. Sugar and shoes from Brazil, tea and textiles from Bangladesh, carpets and brassware from India, vegetables from Mexico, furniture from the Philippines - such goods and commodities may well depend upon the labour of children who are the victims of an inequitable economic order. The other side of the coin is that as travel to the Third World increases - in Bangkok, Manila, Rio -.juveniles are forced to sell their bodies to Western tourists who can provide easy income to those in the lower reaches of poverty.
Peter Lee-Wright graphically shows in words and photographs that the shameful exploitation of children is not confined to any one culture or industry. It is a problem that involves us all.

Originally published in 1990

1: An Intolerable Evil: The Working Child as a Global Problem

At about the age when most European children start full-time schooling, hundreds of thousands of their contemporaries start a lifetime of drudgery in the factories and fields of the Third World. By the hour at which the average European adult climbs out of bed, thinking of the eight-hour day ahead, many of those child labourers in the Third World will already have put in several of their 12 to 16 daily hours. For them there is no overtime payment, no weekend off, no holiday and no future to speak of. These are not children doing a part-time paper-round to earn pocket money before going to school. They are the poor of the world; they work to save themselves and their families from starvation, and their number is increasing. While the consumer revolution floods the Western world with surplus food, inessential goods and labour-saving devices, the poorest parts of the world are getting poorer, not least where their leaders have been lured into a desire for the trade and trappings of the West.

The late Ferdinand Marcos was one toppled dictator who faced charges of fraud for just a fraction of the countless millions of dollars he and his wife siphoned out of the Philippine economy, much of it earned by the sweated labour of children. He would have been unable to do so had he not long enjoyed the protection of the same United States of America that in the end so self-righteously tried to bring him to book. The corruption of Marcos and his crony-system were no secret during his 14 years of US-supported martial law, even if the discovery of thousands of pairs of Imelda Marcos’s shoes was a surprise to the liberators of the Malacanang Palace. But the downtrodden have been unable to rise from the mire in which they were left, and the children still work to help pay off the rising debts which President Aquino inherited. The failure of the so-called “Snap Revolution” to improve the lot of the Filipinos and their continued reliance on the client-relationship with the United States, which has direct and damaging effect on some children, is the subject of Chapter 9. But the crushing of hope is a common theme throughout.

Without much hope

Hope is not a familiar feature among the working children of the world. When battling for survival, the mind excludes all irrelevant thought, concentrating on the mechanics of movement from one moment to the next and the primary concern of where food is coming from. The rates of pay are frequently no better than will just stave off starvation. In some cases, the only pay is the rice which keeps them alive, and the shelter of the workplace which is also their prison. This is true of the bonded child labourers in India’s carpet industry, featured in Chapter 2, and of the children sold into slavery in Thailand’s sweatshops, covered in Chapter 6. In more developed economies, like Brazil or Turkey, they may be working in a modern industrial factory with a works canteen providing an adequate meal. But even here, they are probably working for a fraction of the minimum wage deemed necessary to survive in their particular society, and they are doing so because their family cannot earn enough to live without them. This is not a state of affairs peculiar to the Third World.

Poverty still exists in virtually every country on earth, and is actually on the increase in the United Kingdom and the United States. Both countries are disunited by policies which have made the rich richer and the poor poorer; some 30 million people in the USA and 15 million in the UK are living on or beneath the poverty line, although the British government has officially banned poverty by refusing to admit it exists. What constitutes poverty in these countries would be considered wealth in the poorer countries of the world, but it depends on the measure used. Economists use the fiscal earnings of a country divided by its population, the Gross National Product (GNP). But GNP is never spread equally among a population; and since exchange rates are arbitrary, reflecting the abstract considerations of international bankers’ views of the desirability of a nation’s currency, the size of its capital reserves and the stability of its economy, such figures have little bearing on the local buying power of an individual’s income. The weekly income of a Bangladeshi child would just buy one loaf of bread in Britain but is enough to feed that child for a week in Dhaka. The more “developed” a country is, the more money an individual needs to exist on. Housing costs escalate as a proportion of income, so that they account for over half the income of many people in the south-east of England. In such societies, taxes are unavoidable, as are the high prices charged for everything from water and sewage to electricity and transport. The costs – of civilization – are now so heavy that growing numbers of British people are not eating properly, and diseases associated with poverty and malnutrition are making a come-back. There are sizeable numbers of children working in direct defiance of the law – particularly in the poor immigrant areas of the big conurbations – and an expanding army of homeless sleeping rough on the streets of London. The wealth of the society as a whole can still afford a health and welfare safety net for most of its people (though this is now contracting) but this is not true in every country, even in the European Economic Community (EEC). In parts of Portugal, the perinatal mortality rate is as high as it is in the Third World, and the health care and education not much better. The hope is that industrialization will help cure this backwardness, but much of their current factory expansion, particularly in the north of the country, is fuelled by child labour (see Chapter 7). Turkey, which also aspires to EEC membership, is much more dependent upon child labour in every kind of job from field to factory (Chapter 8).

Child labour is inextricably linked with poverty. It is not the product of particular cultures or stages of development. It is endemic in the world, an inevitable product of the world’s inequitable economic order. Governments tend to deny or ignore the problem; individuals privately argue that anything which helps economies grow is inherently good, that “hard work never hurt anyone”, and that “at least it keeps them off the streets”. Of course, in many countries it keeps them on the streets, often hawking and hustling late into the night to make the crust they need to survive. In the formal sectors of employment, child workers help keep the wage rates low and adults out of the jobs they need, thereby exacerbating poverty and unemployment. And in every area of work, children are more susceptible than adults to accident, injury and industrial disease. Small, weak and inexperienced workers are more at risk from dangerous machinery and materials, heavy weights and the heat of industrial processes; and more prone to chemical poisoning and respiratory complaints caused by the many air-borne hazards. The accepted definition of child labour I am using is of work undertaken in such a hazardous and inescapable economic context. The British paper-boy and American hamburger-stall help may be poor, but are unlikely to be included in this definition. The child labourer who is a proper cause for international concern is engaged in full-time work, at detriment to his or her health and education, physical and mental development. That work is necessary to their survival, and, as a result, many child labourers are effectively unable to escape that work. On this basis, the London-based Anti-Slavery Society considers these children to be correctly called Child Slaves.

Slave trade

The Anti-Slavery Society believes that there are some 200 million people in the world today who are living and working in conditions that can be described as slavery, many more than when most countries abolished it in the second half of the nineteenth century. Only some are the traditional form of chattel slave, bought and sold like cattle on the open market, but the continued existence of such inhumanity at the end of the twentieth century still comes as a surprise to many people. In Mauritania, the Arab people of the north purchase the nomadic Haratin people of the south to tend their fields for them. In the Sudan, famine and civil war have combined to drive the Dinka tribes from their land in the south, leading to many being sold into slavery. So cheap and plentiful is human life here that the price of a slave has dropped. In 1987, a girl was released for £45; in April 1988 a boy was reportedly sold for just £10, one-sixth of the price of a rifle in the Sudan.

Elsewhere in the world, whole communities have never escaped the plantations where their ancestors were slaves, still living in the same rudimentary housing conditions and doing the same back-breaking work as a hundred years ago. The sugar plantations of north-east Brazil and of Negros Occidental in the Philippines employ hundreds of thousands in conditions indistinguishable from slavery. A slump in world sugar prices has worsened their lot during the 1980s and increased their reliance on every member of the family working so that they all might eat. The major difference from slavery times – and the reason that many slave owners were willing to accede to abolition – is that people are not now maintained when they are uneconomic. Then the children were not units of production but were still fed. Today, people are only paid when they work, and do not work (or eat) when they are not needed. This is equally true for the Dumagats, a tribe living in the hills just ninety miles east of the Philippine capital, Manila. Whole families cut rattan for furniture-making, working all day in difficult jungle conditions for just two kilos of rice. That is all they get, for they are owned by a tabong, a slave master who will have inherited them via a “debt” carried over from their forefathers. They earn no money, so can never pay off these largely illusory debts. Children are born into this slavery and whole families are routinely traded for as little as 2,000 pesos (£60). The rattan they cut is made into furniture currently fashionable in the West, by factories largely staffed with under-age children. The container-loads that arrive to stock the department stores of London and New York contain the sweat and tears of hundreds of children.

Ethnic crafts are a booming export trade for many countries, and a natural area for child exploitation. Originally cottage crafts learnt in the home, industrial units have sprung up in town and country taking in this ready and able labour force to satisfy the growing overseas demand. India’s many regional crafts, from woodwork to brassware, have grown to meet this market, taking on whole towns’ child populations like an industrial Pied Piper of Hamelin. Other industries cannot satisfy their labour needs locally, so spread their net far and wide, paying gullible parents advances for taking the children away from their poor farming villages to “learn a trade” in another state. That is how thousands of the children of Bihar are sold into bondage in the carpet industry of Uttar Pradesh; and hundreds of thousands are sold into slavery in the sweatshops and brothels of Bangkok. Some escape or are released, but many never see their parents again. Debt bondage is reckoned by the Anti-Slavery Society to be the fastest growing form of slavery in the world, from India to Peru. They also say that the cruel abuse of child labour is as prevalent in the world today as it was when the British Parliament passed the Employment of Women, Young Persons and Children Act in 1920, forbidding children aged under 14 to be employed in any “industrial undertaking”:

No country, no society is free from child labour. In Europe, Italy, and particularly Naples, has been described as the Continent’s black spot, where boys labour in “workshops in conditions similar to their Egyptian counterparts”. The director of the Rome-based World Children’s Institute, Bruno Mameli, has said:

“Whether it is cementing shoe uppers to the soles (of shoes), or going round collecting for street musicians, these unfortunate kids are making a lot of money for those exploiting them.”

In Germany a member of the Anti-Slavery Society, while conducting his own research into working children, found 10,000 children working in bars and laundries, 20,000 in industry and 30,000 in commerce. A 13-year-old was found driving a forklift truck, a 14-year-old on a building site and an 11-year-old working in a brewery for a few pennies and free beer. One of them was given hospital treatment for alcoholic poisoning.¹

In Britain, over a hundred years after most child labour was abolished, many British children work illegally and the situation appears to be deteriorating. A 1985 survey by the Low Pay Unit showed that two in five children between the age of 11 and 16 (the British school-leaving age) worked during school terms, 80 per cent of them at hours or in conditions which are illegal – that’s two and a half million children. By law, with a few exceptions, no British child should work even part-time until the age of 13, and then only for two hours a day, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., until 16. In practice, a quarter of a million British children hold down two jobs, with inevitably dire consequences for their education, if they do find time to go to school, which they are legally obliged to attend until they are 16.

Since the year 1388, child work has been regulated by law in Britain, albeit that the medieval laws were framed to keep the young yoked to the plough. But for over a hundred years there have been laws like the 1871 Pedlars Act, which forbids any child under 17 to sell goods from door to door, except fruit and vegetables. In 1973, the British Parliament passed the Employment of Children Act, to regularize the mess of laws and by-laws which then existed and to give government ministers more powers to regulate child work. The Act has never come into force, and the powers never taken up, because the Conservative government since 1979 has been dedicated to the repeal of employment protection legislation, for instance letting lapse the 92-year-old Fair Wages Resolution in 1983. Far from protecting the poor from being exploited as cheap labour, their hard-line monetarist policies actually encourage it. Children are still technically protected by law, but factory inspections have been cut by half, and, in the traditionally ungovernable industries such as fishing and agriculture, working children escape the notice of the authorities. In the 1970s, British government departments were investigating and concerned about the growing number of children working. In the 1980s, the new masters have warned them off and the changing political climate has infected even former socialist commentators, like Keith Waterhouse. He wrote a column in the daily tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, supporting a reactionary commentator on the Low Pay Unit report on working children in Britain.

He sees the fact that two and a half million schoolchildren are holding down part-time jobs as good news – good for the economy, good for the customer, and, above all, good for the pint-sized entrepreneurs themselves.…

Of course children are a source of cheap labour. That is as it should be. What spoiled little brats they would be if they were a source of expensive labour.²

Certainly child working in the West is not as hard and as life-threatening as it is elsewhere in the world, but this underdeveloped view does not augur well for the children working far from the purview of such journalistic commentators. These neanderthal attitudes also gained currency in the United States of America during the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, where reports indicate that as many as 800,000 children are illegally employed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• New Copyright Page
• Old Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. An Intolerable Evil: The Working Child as a Global Problem
• 2. Where There’s Brass There’s Muck: India’s Industrious Infants
• 3. The Sun Never Set: The Legacy of Empire in Bangladesh
• 4. Planters’ Punch: The Knock-on Effects in Malaysia
• 5. Slaves in All but Name: Farm, Factory and Favours in Brazil
• 6. The Thais that Bind: Tales of Torment in Bangkok
• 7. A Storm in any Port: Portugal Fails European Standards
• 8. Gateway to the West: Turkey Stands at the Crossroads
• 9. Still Crazy After All These Years: A Dominated Philippines
• 10. Under the Eagle’s Wing: Mexico’s Uneasy Accommodation with the USA
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Index