Child slave labor revelations sweeping China

[DuaneBidoux]

Source: International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI: Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year in February when they disappeared.

Cheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the final leg of their journey home, they were taken in by a woman who offered them warm shelter and a meal on a cold winter night, and then later a chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.

The next thing they knew they were being loaded onto a minibus with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, the boy, who is 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home, enabling his father to rescue his 18-year-old sister a few days later.



Read more: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/15/news/china.php

---

Between poisoned dog food, fake toothpaste, and child slavery maybe American's will start to understand the price the Chinese are paying for "$2.99 Tube Socks."

China needs some unions real bad!

[fasttense]

1. That's what happens when you deal with a Communist country. n/t

[ret5hd]

2. Yeah! I'm glad that never happened here!

[fasttense]

16. We have had horrible labor practices like slavery in our country

but until Raygun and the bushes took control of the US, it seemed we had learned from our mistakes. So called "Communist" countries (more likely thinly veiled dictatorships or Oligarchies) seem to relish in repeating those labor and trade abuses.

We all know China is not a true Communist country and is ruled by an elite and ruthless group in power. Then when we trade with them, we seemed surprised that they use slave labor, prison labor and unfair labor practices. Americans are shocked to find contaminated products sold to us by this oppressive regimes. They don't hesitate to abuse their own citizens, why are we surprised when they abuse labor and trade practices too. Well duh, when you dance with the devil.....

[ohio2007]

3. America prepares for 'cyber war' with China

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/15/wcyber115.xml

This is what happens since Bill Gates cut a deal on allowing China to control the internet.

[Nomad559]

6. How many iPods has Apple

sold that were made In China?

iPod maker admits breaking Chinese labor laws; says Apple approved sweatshop labor

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=32644

:eyes:

[candice]

9. Not true. It wasn't Apple, but the company that Apple contracts with that

assembles the iPods. Having all of these contractual relationship does remove American companies from responsibility. Moving our manufacturing to China where the environmental controls are nil adds a lot more pollution to the Earth and increases the carbon in the atmosphere. The EPA estimates that 1/4 of the pollution over L.A. (our most polluted region) floats over from China.

[MADem]

18. So Apple went with the cheapest bidder, and didn't ask any pesky questions

I can't absolve them. Their contract should have labor standards in it, to include penalties for non-compliance.

Just because they weren't the immediate brokers doesn't give them clean hands.

[NMDemDist2]

5. i'm not sure what communism has to do with it

China has a long long history of corruption and feudal power structures

read a biography of Empress Wu and you'll see things really haven't changed to much in 1500 years.

[Old and In the Way]

8. Actually, it's capitalism, baby!

The Chinese have been capitalists a hell of a lot longer than they were communists. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who wants to go back to the good old days of communism. They are world class consumers who pretty much want the same stuff we do.

This story is indicative of what's going on in China. There are labor shortages growing in China's coastal provinces where the export production is happening, believe it or not. Wages are going up as the labor pool supply slows, thus increasing demand. Many enlightened factories are recognizing that better wages and living conditions makes for a more stable labor force, one that returns after Chinese New Year. The majority of workers want jobs in these factories....meaning that there are growing labor shortages with basic domestic industries (like factories making bricks and tile and products for the domestic market) that can't compete with the export factories.

[aquart]

15. That's what happens when you deal with a totalitarian country.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

4. Communism is just what they call it today.

What it is, in fact, the same feudal system they have had for many years, with a few twists that allows some upward mobility for the right people with the right connections and who pay vigorish to the right people.

The leaders can, in fact, be considered the latest permutations of the warlord class.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Child Labor in Latin America

Child Labor in Latin America


Child labor in Latin America is a big problem. There are an estimated 250 million child workers between the ages of 5 and 14 years old. Eighteen million of those child laborers are between the ages of 10 and 14. Out of all of the children in Latin America, an estimated 26% are forced to work. Children there often work long hours. Many work in agriculture. They often harvest and cultivate coffee. Some harvest bananas, sugar cane, sisal, tobacco, oranges, and other fruits and vegetables. Child labor is problem that continues to grow.

In Colombia, an estimated 2.5 million children are forced to work to support their families. Only 60% of all the children in Colombia leave school with a primary school diploma. On average, child laborers work six to seven hours a day. Each day, they work about nine hours. Their wages are pitifully low and most of them receive no health or unemployment benefits.

Five thousand children between the ages of 6 and 14 were found in secret and illegal workshops in the capital region of Guatemala. They were making fireworks and other explosives. Their work was exposing them to toxic, flammable, and explosive materials. The workshop was also lacking hygiene and safety measures. Nine children have died from being injured while working in the industry. Four children survived their injuries. It is suspected that there are hundreds of sweatshops in the capital region of Guatemala.

http://library.thinkquest.org/03oct/01908/800/latinamerica.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cut flowers are Colombia's new miracle export, hailed as an alternative to cocaine. Fifty percent of the flowers sold in the U.S. were grown in the Savanna region near Bogotá, Colombia. Colombia mainly exports roses, carnations and lilies, but there are many other flowers grown on their plantations. The children that work on these plantations start at dawn and continuously work until 10:00 pm. in order to reach shipping quotas. Leading up to Valentine’s Day, when the sale of roses is at its height in the United States, laborers in Ecuador begin working at 7:00 am and may not leave until 3:00 am the next day, putting in a twenty hour day only to be fired once the holiday passes and the demand from the US decreases to a more normal level.

A recent study revealed that many children assume positions in this industry because of their parents. In Columbia, child laborers tasks include digging flower beds, weeding, pruning, and cutting stems. The children work in the cultivation areas, cold rooms, and the packaging areas. Children also plant, place guiding wires, cut and rubber band stems, classify and package the flowers, and load the trucks. With advancements in technology, computers are used to monitor each worker's production rate. Because many of the Columbian laws are not heavily enforced, children don’t receive the minimum wage of 118,000 pesos a month, they only earn 66,000 pesos. The actual number of children workers in these countries is uncertain because the industries do not usually admit to using child labor. Generally, the children work around forty-five hours a week.

Luis, a child working in Columbia, says that the farms like to employ children because they have small hands and can work fast. Though he is exposed to pesticides, some of which are banned in the United States and Europe, and becomes sick from them, he continues to endure the plantation labor because his family needs the money. These toxins can cause miscarriages, mutations of the fetus, disruption of the central nervous system leading to paralysis or epilepsy, and cancer. Other reactions to the pesticides include vomiting, dizziness, and loss of vision. Many women, who are now sick from working on these plantations and no longer able to work, watch their children continue to work in the flower trade and are powerless to stop it. Most patients in Columbian hospitals work in the flower industry. Two-thirds of Colombian and Ecuadorian flower workers reportedly suffer from work-related health problems, including headaches, nausea, impaired vision, conjunctivitis, rashes, asthma, stillbirths, miscarriages, congenital malformations and respiratory and neurological problems. When the children become sick they don’t receive sick pay or medical care because most are employed on temporary contracts, which do not include benefits. In addition, run-off from the farms contaminates the water supply with pesticides.

Because of the economy and weak laws in these countries, children are unable to overcome the conditions that bound them to their fate. Many children were living the streets until they were hired into this industry. They are so thrilled to be working that they are unable to see the effects of the pesticides until many years later when the damage has already been done. “It’s a time bomb,” says Dr. Gabriel Rueda, who is working with Cactus, an independent social-welfare group in Bogota. When they are eight or nine, we see children mixing pesticides in the tanks without gloves, masks, or any protection. We may not see the effects until five to twenty years later when they can no longer move their hands. Many farms use very dangerous organ chlorides, which are prohibited in many countries. Mercedes Sosa, a fifteen year old Columbian laborer, says: "In your country, flowers are a symbol of love. Here they are a symbol of suffering."
(snip/...)

http://ihscslnews.org/view_article.php?id=179

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

U.S. Dept of Labor Bureau of International Labor Affairs

INCIDENCE AND NATURE OF CHILD LABOR - Children are involved in commercial sexual exploitation in Colombia. Commercial sexual exploitation of children is found especially in urban centers and in areas where there are large numbers of men who are separated from families due to work. Children are involved in commercial sexual exploitation either on the streets or in private establishments such as bars, brothels, or massage parlors, and tend to range in age from 13 to 17 years. Colombia is a source and transit country for girls trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Bur of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor - Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - 2005

SECTION 6 WORKER RIGHTS – Although there were no reports of forced child labor in the formal economy, several thousand children were forced to serve as paramilitary or guerrilla combatants, prostitutes, or coca pickers.

Concluding Observations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) - 2000

<67> While noting with appreciation the revisions to the State party's Penal Code and the establishment of a national plan of action to combat and prevent the sexual exploitation of children, the Committee remains concerned at the insufficient awareness among the population of these issues.

ECPAT: Fifth Report on implementation of the Agenda for Action

COUNTRY UPDATES – COLOMBIA – The National Plan of Action against the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Colombia (Plan de Acción en favor de los Derechos de la Infancia Explotada Sexualmente y contra la Explotación Sexual Infantil) is not being implemented. According to the ICBF, which had main responsibility for the plan, it has been developed in an isolated manner and according to the competencies of each institution involved. As a consequence, the ICBF says it has not been possible to measure its impact. The Inter-institutional Committee to fight the trafficking of women, girls and boys is putting into practice a plan for the prevention and protection of victims and to stop the trafficking of persons.

Combating Child Prostitution in Colombia

Many parents send their children out into the streets to help support the family by stealing, selling chewing gum and cigarettes, or worse, selling themselves. It is estimated that there are 35,000 children working as prostitutes in Colombia with between 5,000 and 10,000 of them on the streets of Bogotá.
(snip/...)

http://www.gvnet.com/childprostitution/Colombia.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Far, far more available on Colombia's child slave labor. I have posted articles here on the children working in Lima, every day, looking for recycling materials in the trash dumps.

Of course they are only two of many. They are two which enjoy _Bush's approval.

[Judi Lynn]

10. Child labor revelations not sweeping the United States:

FINGERS TO THE BONE:
UNITED STATES FAILURE TO PROTECT CHILD FARMWORKERS

Summary

Damaris A., now nineteen, started working in the broccoli and lettuce fields when she was thirteen years old and continued until she was nearly eighteen.1 During the five months of peak season, she usually worked fourteen hours a day, with two fifteen-minute breaks and a half-hour for lunch. She often worked eighty-five or ninety hours a week. For months on end she suffered daily nosebleeds; several times her blood pressure plummeted and she nearly passed out. She was exposed to pesticide drift and fell ill, yet was required to keep working. "I just endured it," she said, of her time in the fields. "It was very difficult."

Mark H. was twelve the summer he first worked in the cotton fields of central Arizona, getting up at 3:00 a.m. and finishing work at 2:00 p.m. His parents, aunts, and uncles had all worked in the fields for years. "My dad started when he was ten years old, and he didn't finish `til he was twenty-two," Mark H. said. Like his father, Mark H. missed a lot of school and eventually dropped out. Now nineteen years old, he is struggling to catch up on his education. "A lot of my friends worked the fields, and a lot dropped out. I was supposed to graduate last year and I didn't . . . I would tell kids just to finish school. You can't get a good job without a diploma. With a diploma you can go to college. You get more options."

Two years ago, when he was fifteen, Benjamin C. cut his finger badly with a broccoli-harvesting knife. "That knife was so sharp," he said, showing a three-inch long scar running the length of his finger. Instead of taking Benjamin C. to a local hospital or clinic, the field supervisor sent him home to his parents' house in Mexico; from there, his parents took him to a Mexican hospital. This delayed by two or three hours his medical care, and also circumvented the employer's responsibility under workers' compensation law. According to advocates, this is typical in the border region. "The foremen send them off with thirty bucks to Mexico," said one.

In the fields, the United States is like a developing country.2

Agricultural work is the most hazardous and grueling area of employment open to children in the United States.3 It is also the least protected.

Hundreds of thousands of children and teens labor each year in fields, orchards, and packing sheds across the United States. They pick lettuce and cantaloupe, weed cotton fields, and bag produce. They climb rickety ladders into cherry orchards, stoop low over chili plants, and "pitch" heavy watermelons for hours on end. Many begin their work days-either in the fields or en route to the fields-in the middle of the night. Twelve-hour workdays are common.

These hardworking youth labor under more dangerous conditions than their contemporaries working in nonagricultural settings. They are routinely exposed to dangerous pesticides, sometimes working in fields still wet with poison, often given no opportunity to wash their hands before eating lunch. They risk heat exhaustion and dehydration, as their employers fail to provide enough water, or any at all. They suffer injuries from sharp knives, accidents with heavy equipment, falls from ladders. Repetitive motions in awkward and punishing poses can interfere with the proper growth of their bodies. Lack of sleep-because they are working too many hours-interferes with their schooling and increases their chances of injury. Depression affects them more often than other minors, a reflection of the cumulative stresses and burdens in their young lives. Only 55 percent of them will graduate from high school.
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/frmwrkr/

[MADem]

19. This is disgraceful, and Congress has been slow to act

They've been trying to tighten child labor law for the agricultural sector for two decades. This year, they're ginning up yet another bill...we will see if Big Ag beats them down again. http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2007/6/emw533094.htm

But even with these excesses, it's not the same as SLAVERY. The kid CAN say "I quit." He is paid a lousy wage. Now, his parents may not want him to quit, he may be fearful of changing his lot, but it's not the "No Way Out" system we are seeing in China. No one is chained to a post.

That said, I'm not going to play a "which is worse" game. It's all terrible.

[barb162]

11. From Chinese Americans I know who go back and forth a lot

to China there's a lot of child and adult slave labor and it's been going on for years and it's been publicized for years. For some reason, poeple don't pay much attention.

[Judi Lynn]

12. Same here, now that you broach adult slave labor!

From the March 2007 Idaho Observer:

Government, industry, toxic waste and prison slave labor

It sounds like something the Bush Administration would proclaim: A Human Rights violation suffered in Chinese prisons—at least before China began financing the U.S. dollar and opened the doors to foreign investment.

To make money for campaign contributors, a company named UNICOR was created to work prisoners in federal penitentiaries. It would recycle electronic waste found in obsolete computers, TVs, and other electronic devices. Paying inmates between 23 cents and $1.15 per hour, UNICOR declared a profit of $64.5 million in 2005.

The federal prison at Marianna, Florida, was the first facility to exploit for profit what is essentially a source of slave labor. The waste prisoners were handling contained mercury, arsenic, selenium, lead, beryllium, and dioxins. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regard all of this material as extremely hazardous or as outright poisons. A single computer contains hundreds of chemicals, many known to cause cancer, and up to eight pounds of lead.

In 2002, convicts at Atwater Federal Prison, Merced, CA, also recycling computer components, began to report slow healing wounds, severe headaches, fatigue, burning skin, sinus problems, and disorders of the eyes, nose, and throat. A health and safety manager, Leroy Smith, ran an air quality test. This revealed highly elevated toxin levels. Smith was especially concerned because the kitchen, which prepared food for the entire prison, sat only a few feet away from the UNICOR facility which was clearly generating deadly airborne poisons. He shut the facility down.
(snip/...)

http://www.proliberty.com/observer/20070320.htm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Modern-Day 'Slave Farms' in Florida
by Carrie Kahn

Morning Edition, July 14, 2005 · Florida lawmakers are looking into allegations that several of the state's farm labor camps are running what one U.S. attorney calls modern-day slave operations.

For the most part, the workers are U.S. citizens, and many are homeless African-American men recruited from shelters and soup kitchens. Lured by promises of work, they hop into vans, only to find themselves in fenced farm camps, forced into debt by their bosses and sometimes paid with drugs instead of money.

Law enforcement officials insist tracking down and punishing the camp owners is a priority -- but follow-up raids are rare, and many of the camps are extremely remote. Charities try to help those that want to flee the farms, taking food and clothes to workers in the field.
(snip/...)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4753236

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Slavery in Florida on Jeb's Watch: Ignoring Published Reports, He Permits it to Continue:

Federal agents raided a migrant farm labor camp where homeless men and women were kept in what labor officials called a version of modern-day slavery.
Four people, including the camp's owner, Ronald Evans, face federal charges in a case that officials said is likely to grow. Investigators are looking into alleged environmental violations and drugs found at the camp in Friday's raid.

"The word is out that we are concerned about human trafficking, and we will leave no stone or camp unturned," said Steve Cole, a spokesman for Jacksonville U.S. attorney Paul I. Perez.

Officials said homeless people were recruited to the Evans Labor Camp through offers of room and board, along with alcohol, tobacco and drugs, which they bought on credit. But they never made enough in the field to pay it off, according to an investigative summary.
(snip)
~~~~~ AND ~~~~~

For instance, columnist Bill Maxwell in the St. Petersburg Times reported on it in 2002, specifically ending his column with a shout-out to Jeb for help:

With more regularity, federal officials who monitor farm labor issues are digging out the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Written in 1865, it officially ended slavery in America. Again, the 13th Amendment "officially" ended slavery.
In reality, 136 years later, "modern-day slavery" is alive and well in the nation's agricultural states, and Florida is a leader in the exploitation of human chattel, with five slavery cases having gone through the courts in as many years.

. . . . . . Under this system, growers hire contractors, who then hire the pickers, keep track of them, house them and pay them. Everyone, including the governor and his emissary, knows that this egregious loophole lets farmers off the hook. Sure, Lee is behind bars, and the Ramoses may be on their way there. But rest assured, the farmers who hired them have replaced them with crew leaders.

Laura Germino, a representative of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, identifies the root of the problem: "It's time now that the agriculture industry take a look at itself and decide that it's not going to operate under the rules of the past and continue beating and holding workers by force."
(snip)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/5/14284/58499

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Also, much has been written, and a "60 Minutes" documentary aired on hideous slave conditions for the Cuban-American sugar cane workers in South Florida. Here's material from a good article:

Every November for nearly 50 years–from 1944 to 1993–about 10,000 workers arrived in South Florida from the Caribbean to harvest the cane. The season lasted until March, and the work was so dangerous that one in every three missed a day or more of work due to an injury. Some lost fingers and eyes. The mucky ground made machine-harvesting impractical, and until the last year of the program there were no time clocks in the fields. Under a formula that was supposed to comply with minimum-wage standards, the workers were paid not by the hour but by the task–or the amount of cane they cut on a row. Each day the price was determined by the foreman, who insisted that pricing the rows was highly subjective, and that it depended on how thick the cane was, how wet the ground was, how the cane grew in the field.
(snip)

Big Sugar’s dark history of labor controversy has been investigated by congressional committees, by documentary-film makers such as Stephanie Black in H-2 Worker in 1990, and most vividly by Alec Wilkinson in Big Sugar, which first ran as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1989. In the 1940s, the government brought charges against U.S. Sugar, accusing it of violating "the right and privilege of ... citizens to be free from slavery"–an allegation not often made since the Civil War. The charges were dropped when a judge ruled that the jury had been illegally selected. Soon after that, sugar companies in Florida were given permission to import "guest workers" from the Caribbean for the cutting season. In 1973, Solomon Sugarman, then a Department of Labor wage-and-hour analyst, led a team investigating working conditions in the fields. He discovered, he tells me, "a pattern of flagrant labor violations."
(snip)

When Cleveland saw Harvest of Shame, she says, "I was amazed at how similar the conditions were. If anything, it was worse, because Murrow filmed white American farmworkers, and now Belle Glade had immigrants who could be deported with no access to lawyers."

Touring the workers’ barracks back then with her boss, Greg Schell, Cleveland saw signs posted: BEWARE OF LEGAL SERVICES. THEY ARE NOT YOUR FRIENDS. Schell was circulating a newsletter explaining the workers’ right to have lawyers. "Most of the workers were scared to take it," Cleveland recalls. "They refused to make eye contact." She was horrified by the squalor.
(snip/...)

http://www.mariebrenner.com/articles/bigsugar/fan1.html

[KurtNYC]

13. this story sites a 16YO and a 18YO - hardly children

this story seems to be more about abduction and slavery than about child labor per se.

If they really wanted to find some abusive child labor practices they could have. And not just in China.

[brentspeak]

14. Most Favored Nation status, eh?

[MADem]

17. China needs some humanitarian standards and rules of law.

Between the organ harvesting, the slavery the pet poisoning and the pet eating, it's just not on my top ten list as a place I'd want to live. I've visited, that's more than enough....