A new story of bonded child labor in an expose by the UK newspaper The Observer came out early yesterday, prompting indignant and horrified commentary on the blogosphere.
The investigation highlighted the plight of several children essentially ‘sold into servitude’ by their families:
Amitosh, a 10 year old pushed into embroidering toddler blouses says:
‘I was bought from my parents’ village in [the northern state of] Bihar and taken to New Delhi by train,’ he says. ‘The men came looking for us in July. They had loudspeakers in the back of a car and told my parents that, if they sent me to work in the city, they won’t have to work in the farms. My father was paid a fee for me and I was brought down with 40 other children. The journey took 30 hours and we weren’t fed. I’ve been told I have to work off the fee the owner paid for me so I can go home, but I am working for free. I am a shaagird [a pupil]. The supervisor has told me because I am learning I don’t get paid. It has been like this for four months.’
This isn’t the first case of such bonded labor coming to light, and won’t be the last either. Child labor is the not-so-secret dirty underbelly of the labor scene in India and will continue to remain so, so long as unscrupulous business people try to deliver cut-rate goods.
Gap has promptly reacted to try and repair the damage done to its image by ordering an investigation into how this practice escaped the eagle eyes of its oversight employees, issuing a press statement reiterating its commitment to non-employment of underage workers:
As soon as we were alerted to this situation, we stopped the work order and prevented the product from being sold in stores. While violations of our strict prohibition on child labor in factories that produce product for the company are extremely rare, we have called an urgent meeting with our suppliers in the region to reinforce our policies.
So, the cycle begins again. Gap will clean up its list of subcontractors, and those discarded by it will find another eager customer to take Gap’s place and the cycle of abuse will continue, perpetuated in equal parts by poverty, ignorance and corruption.
Here’s an illuminating discussion on an Indian court victory in 2006 on a petition filed to free bonded child laborers. There are tireless groups of NGOs that fight for the rights of these voiceless laborers, who despite their age, contribute upto 20% of the GNP of India (as per a UN study).
The powers-that-be in India worry about the effect of this report on the perception and marketing of Indian goods and rightly so, as this article from time.com would indicate.
The Indian government tried to downplay the issue and none of the ministries in whose domain it has arisen has commented. It was left to Commerce Minister Kamal Nath to react to the report. According to the Times of India, Nath said the allegations would be probed, while warning developed countries against using allegations of child labor as a pretext for taking protectionist tariff measures. Children’s rights activists, however, see the latest allegations as typical of the problems associated with India’s economic rise, where growth is prioritized over social equity. Pradeep Narayan of the non-profit Child Rights and You says, "Policies on liberalization, privatization, trade, export-import, et cetera get implemented very fast and very effectively. But the policies on the social sector, like health or child labor, never do."
The ugly fact remains that while the West has generally been able to eradicate the scourge of child labor in its territories, they have merely outsourced the small hands that labored in their factories once upon a time to India, China and other countries.
Accidental Blogger 
4 responses to “Gap Flap (Sujatha)”
“Child labor is the not-so-secret dirty underbelly of the labor scene in India and will continue to remain so, so long as unscrupulous business people try to deliver cut-rate goods.”
I’m afraid in my opinion this gets the whole causation upside down. Child labour will exist so long as people are poor enough to need their little children to bring in money, and as long as education systems are bad enough that returns to schooling children are uncertain, if any. Misguided ideas about the root lying with “unscrupulous” employers (or worse still, “uncaring” and “greedy” parents) are precisely what has led to poor policy prescriptions such as bans and boycotts, which only serve to make the families even more destitute, and since they send child labour into illegal and hence unregulated realms, end up often lowering the wages paid to children and worsening the conditions in which they end up working.
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Hemanshu,
I do mention further down in the commentary about “the cycle of abuse will continue, perpetuated in equal parts by poverty, ignorance and corruption.”
I hope you had a chance to read in detail the link that I provided to various NGOs talking among themselves about the root causes of child labor and bonded labor and how to tackle the issue, maybe borrowing from the playbooks of labor in countries where it has been banned successfully. One article by Sam Vaknin quoted from ‘The Conservative Voice’ in the comments would probably meet with wholehearted agreement from you.
Unscrupulous employers, desperate parents (‘uncaring’ and ‘greedy’ is your choice of words, not mine), multinationals who are too willing to be ‘deceived’ and make a big show only when caught- these are all part of the picture. Boycotts and bans are a knee jerk response, not being particularly effective in the long run. But what will have effect is the hard work put in by those who work routinely to shore up the legal code and penal system to make it harder for such things to happen.
I’m sure that slave-masters in the South could have argued that they were providing food/skill training and safe living quarters to the slaves that they housed. That does not make their treatment of the slaves less reprehensible.
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Another instance of exploitation made easy by desperation and poverty is the plight of domestic workers and laborers from south and east Asia in the oil rich countries of the middle east – specifically, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Emirates. At least there some of the workers have stood up for their rights.
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The construction workers had a Hobson’s choice, deportation if they went on strike, or inadequate wages/work conditions if they didn’t. Plus, they were adults who knew how to organize and channel their frustration, so they evidently used the sole weapon that they were left with. Their plight, bad as it is, is still better than the domestic workers who work in isolation and have little to no means of getting their stories out and redress from ill-treatment by their employers.
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