Danger! Children at work - child labor a global problem

Commonweal, August 19, 1994 by Robert A. Senser

They can't say they weren't warned. Four years ago, I told a group of leading employers in Bangladesh that they'd be in trouble if the children working in their garment factories were shown on television in the United States, the principal market for Bangladesh's garment exports.

At first they flatly. denied that they employed girls and boys as young as ten or eleven. Any worker who looked that young, they said, was simply a malnourished adult. They backed down, however, when they realized I knew better. In Western eyes, it's true, Asians often look younger than they are. But I already knew from Bangladeshi sources, including a factory manager in Dhaka, that many garment workers are younger than fourteen, the minimum age for factory work under Bangladeshi law. And in visits to factories I had myself seen unmistakably underage children at work; I even had pictures of them.

Hoping to prod the employers into initiating reforms, I pointed out that, with miniaturized video technology, it would be a snap to document how girls and boys work far into the night making clothes for American and other foreign consumers. I recalled that CBS's "60 Minutes," using a hidden camera, had captured scenes of prisoners in China producing goods for export to the U.S.

A year later, my warning came true. A "Dateline NBC" camera crew visiting Dhaka didn't even need a hidden camera. Posing as American buyers shopping for a new source, they toured two garment factories and readily got permission to use a home video camera. As a result, a U.S. network audience in nearly 14 million households saw vivid examples of how Bangladesh's booming garment industry employs underage children, mostly girls, by the tens of thousands. The children, who were busy helping make shirts for U.S. stores, said that they earned $12 to $20 a month, or 5 to 8 cents an hour, and were locked into the plants until the day's production quota was met, sometimes well past midnight. One nine-year-old girl, who had been working for six months, pleaded with the crew's interpreter: "I don't want to stay here any more. Will you take me out with you?"

Revelations of such exploitation have long been a staple in the print media. But in an era when problems need television validation to be considered important, the "Dateline" expose and other TV productions like it provided the most powerful evidence of an alarming trend: millions of girls and boys in developing countries are making clothes, shoes, carpets, dolls, soccer balls, cutlery, fireworks, and many other products for consumers in the United States and other developed countries. They are at work even in jobs that would seem far too demanding for them. In Pakistan, for example, pre-teen children held in bondage grind and sand some of the $33 million worth of surgical equipment exported to the United States every year.

According to a United Nations agency, the International Labor Organization [ILO], the number of children at jobs instead of in school is increasing throughout the world, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the world's children. Most toil in agriculture, where youngsters have traditionally helped their parents and relatives. Now, however, this ancient agricultural custom has spilled over into the modern sectors of some developing countries, particularly in industries now prospering through mass production for export. Competitive pressures lead individual countries to ignore their own laws on the minimum working age even in hazardous industries, such as those manufacturing fireworks and glassware. In short, the global economy is clearly promoting child labor.

Sometimes (more likely: often), working conditions are brutal. In some Asian developing countries, there are no laws prohibiting physical punishment of children, so that such abuses are rarely documented. One exception was a 1985 survey conducted by the Commission for Justice and Peace of the Catholic Bishops of Bangladesh. Of 1,000 female garment workers interviewed--children and young women--101 said that they had suffered corporal punishment at work.

Children remain the most frequent victims of on-the-job physical abuse. Male supervisors discipline them for making "mistakes," such as miscounts in packing, by striking them on the head or forcing them to kneel on the floor or stand on their head for ten to thirty minutes, as well as threatening them with bums from hot irons or scalding from hot water. In Indonesia and some other Asian countries, such violence is common enough to spark periodic protests against Korean, Taiwanese, and Hong Kong managers of factories in export industries.

Slowly, the realization is dawning that something is out of whack in the global economic modernization process, and that consumers in the developed countries bear some responsibility for bringing about reform. After hearing a radio broadcast on child labor in Asia while he was on a road trip, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) put his staff to work researching the subject. In August 1992 he introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act to prohibit importing into the United States any manufactured or mined product made in whole or in part by children under fifteen. A similar bill offered in 1989 by then Congressman Donald J. Pease of Ohio had been sidetracked when the Bush administration successfully argued that any such U.S. initiative should be negotiated in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]. Under congressional mandate, U.S. delegates at that time did propose a GATT "social clause," which would include a ban on child labor. But GATT officials--an in-group of trade-oriented specialists, for whom any linkage between international trade and human fights is an abomination--summarily blocked even a discussion of the issue.