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Articles: Business | World Economy & Child labour
- Mr. T.R.Sridhar Prasad. Uppalapati.
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They form an open-ended rectangular stockade to which smaller timbers are lashed horizontally. Above these, rough sawn timbers form the deck, about two to three meters from the surface of the choppy sea. A wooden shanty with a corrugated metal roof is placed upon the deck.
Nets strung below the deck are raised by hand. The fish caught in the nets are hauled into wicker baskets and dragged into the shanty. Here they are poured onto the floor, and the difficult, dangerous work of sorting valuable teri, squid, shrimp, eels, crabs and larger fish from jellyfish and poisonous sea snakes is done. The junk fish, 'hacked, crushed, and scattered,' are pushed back into the sea through cracks in the deck. The workers are left covered in shiny silver scales.
The working day begins at 4 a.m., with the hauling in of the long nets by manual equipment. The nets are lowered and raised again ten times in the day -- every two hours. The work is performed largely by children; it does not end until 11:30 p.m. or midnight -- one a.m. during the high season. The working day is 12 to 13 hours, with short breaks totaling about six hours.
KKSP (Kelompok Kerja Sosial Perkotaan, 'Working Group on Social Problems'), an Indonesian humanitarian group, conducted a five-year investigation of labor conditions on the jermals, interviewing workers on more than 140 of the platforms. They found that more than 75 percent of more than 8,000 employees in the industry are children, one-third of whom are under 14. The report puts the number at 'at least 5,400 children, and probably many more' are on the jermals. The fishing industry is openly in violation of UN and International Labor Convention on children's rights, and in violation of Indonesian law, which prohibits children under 14 from working more than four hours per day.
Conditions on the jermals are abysmal. The structures are flexible, to be able to absorb the shock of the sea during storms. Nausea is a common complaint. Not only do children haul in the nets, sort and boil fish, they must also cook their own meals. Children, the report says, 'are given little food, of poor quality' and no variety to speak of. Nearly every meal consists of rice with fish. Only once every two months are there fresh vegetables. Children are so desperate for food that they will 'submit to (homo)sexual relations with one of the older workers' for extra rations.
The working hours leave children chronically short of sleep. 'Worse than almost anything else is the misery caused by lack of sleep. Some foremen pour boiling water on children who inadvertently doze at their post or fail to wake promptly when summoned.' There are no beds for the children on the jermals -- this privilege is reserved for the foremen, often the only adults on board. Instead, children sleep on damp board floors or in makeshift shelters on the shanty roof, or on beds of brown paper.
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