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Articles: Business | World Economy & Child labour
- Mr. T.R.Sridhar Prasad. Uppalapati.
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As a chief justice of the Supreme Court of India has testified, the carpet children are often disciplined by being beaten up, branded with red hot iron rods, and even hung from trees upside down. It is the fear of such punishment that keeps children as young as six working long hours every day six or seven days a week.Children are also innocent and cannot form into “unions” for a collective bargaining.
The global economy should offer little children an escape from lives of forced labor. Instead, it is drawing more and more of them into various types of servitude. The trend is a 'human tragedy,' says a recent U.S. Labor Department report titled 'By the Sweat and Toil of Children: the Use of Child Labor in American Imports.' The report lists 19 countries across the world with industries involved in this tragedy--eight in Asia (Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Thailand), six in Africa (Egypt, the Ivory Coast, Lesotho, Morocco, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe), four in Latin America (Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, and Mexico), and one in Europe (Portugal).
Like slavery in former times, today's system of forced labor by the young has articulate defenders of the indefensible. 'They need the work,'. No matter that, even after years on the job, they usually remain poor, malnourished, and illiterate, and that their work leads to the unemployment of adults, including their older sisters and brothers. Still, the argument that poor children 'need the work' has a powerful appeal. But it also has highly dangerous implications. Every continent, even North America, has many millions of poor families with young children who are not gainfully employed.
These girls and boys form huge pools of labor that could be tapped to do unskilled and semi-skilled work now performed by adults. In permissive environments, pre-teen recruits would need strong disciplining to acquire the necessary work habits, but experience in Bangladesh and India shows that the young can perform many productive tasks, and that it is possible to overcome short attention spans and to redirect the child's desire to have fun.
So the supply of potential workers is there. So is the market. In the present competitive international economy, both businesses and consumers are seeking cheaper and cheaper sources of goods, no matter who makes them. The dynamics of this trend are sweeping much of Asia, and the logic that underpins it can thrust millions more of children elsewhere into the global labor force, doing work now performed by their elders.
The scenario sounds grim, even exaggerated. But the process is simply the law of supply and demand in action globally. One tragic consequence of holding that economic principle sacred is to squelch proposals for international rules to prohibit trade in goods made by children. The U.S. government now ignores that 'law' in many ways, for example, by enforcing bans on trade in goods such as elephant tusks and pirated Hollywood films. It should do likewise for goods made by children.
A WORLD AWAY FROM U.S., IN THE STRAITS OF MALACCA:
Between Indonesian Sumatra and Malaysia, approximately 2,000 fishing platforms, known as jermals, operate miles from shore. Ever than 400 are officially registered with the Indonesian government; the rest operate illegally. These small fishing platforms are built from giant logs that are sharpened like stakes and dropped from barges into the sea floor in water up to twenty meters deep.
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