GLENN PERUSEK is a professor of political science at Albion College. He would like to thank Michael Bastian, Nancy Forsythe, Libby Garland and Richard Purcell for their critical suggestions and sources.
A WORLD AWAY FROM US, IN THE STRAITS OF MALACCA, between Indonesian Sumatra and Malaysia, approximately 2,000 fishing platforms, known as jermals, operate miles from shore. Fewer 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. 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.
The report found that the following are common: injuries
caused by exhaustion; malaria; high blood pressure due to excessive
sodium intake; vitamin deficiencies; respiratory and skin problems caused
by continuous exposure to damp conditions and salt water; and jellyfish
stings. Sanitary facilities on the platforms are nonexistent. Lack of clean
water for showers left most children with skin irritations. Exposure to the
elements, including strong seasonal winds, and long working hours, left
most with coughs, dizziness, nausea.
First aid is rudimentary and insufficient, consisting only of
"iodine tincture for cuts, battery acid for stings and a poultice soaked in
diesel [fuel] for stomach ache." There is no emergency equipment, not even
a boat. In effect, children have no way to escape the platforms, so it is not
surprising that KKSP has recorded accounts of physical, verbal and sexual
abuse. Investigators found that "most of the children lived in fear of
drowning as they were not able to swim." Some had been bitten by sea
snakes accidentally caught in the nets; others had been injured by the
equipment used to lift the nets. Isolation from families led to the use of
tobacco, alcohol or hashish. In addition to the physical strain and hardship
caused by work on the platforms, children suffer incalculable psychological
damage from isolation, separation from their families and abuse at the
hands of foremen and older fishermen.
Children are sought after as jermal workers
because they are more "manageable." They are less likely to protest against
low wages and long working hours or the isolated conditions. Since the
operations are illegal, operators use illegal labor brokers who seek out poor
families. The brokers receive an average of 8,000 to 15,000 rupiahs for
each child recruited. They promise children wages of 3,000 rupiahs per day
-- 38 cents per day -- plus all the food they can eat. These are wages much
higher than street children or farm laborers can earn. Yet, tellingly, the
recruiters do not seek child laborers in coastal fishing villages, where
conditions on the jermals are well known. Instead, children
are typically migrants from inland villages or street children recruited from
the bus terminal in Medan City. Investigators found that while parents
sometimes knew that employment on the jermals would be
hazardous to the health of their children, they seldom knew the extent of
these hazards. Abject poverty and promises from the recruiters led them to
let their children go. Recruiting agents promise the young boys good wages
for working hard, an appealing prospect for those living in impoverished
peasant families. According to Pardoen's survey, seventy percent of the
boys had fathers working as plantation laborers or tenant farmers, with an
average income of 37,000 rupiahs per week.1
The labor system on the jermals requires that the
boys stay for three months at least, as they are paid only quarterly by
operators. They are allowed to leave the jermal only if the
operator has found a substitute. Wages are paid only after a substitute has
been found. Most jermal children interviewed in Pardoen's
study (74 percent) received only 10,000 rupiahs per week, or 120,000 for
the three month period, the equivalent of about 17 cents per day. But there
are no written contracts and a dozen conditions and exceptions that reduce
even this meager sum. As much as two-thirds of the wage can be deducted
for food and supplies while the child laborer is on the platform.
Children are not paid until they return to dry land, and are not paid in full
unless they agree to return to the jermal. Some children Higgs spoke with
had worked on Sinchiacuan jermal for 18 months without a
break. One 14-year-old had worked there for three years with only five
months on land. Since the jermals are mostly unregistered,
there are no official channels through which to press for improved working
conditions, benefits, food and holidays.
When a nongovernmental organization sued jermal
owners and governmental bodies for violating labor legislation in
1993, an agreement was reached between several governmental bodies, the
All-Indonesia Fishermen's Association, and the All-Indonesian Workers'
Union, that jermals would hire only workers over 18. But the
agreement was ignored. KKSP started a pilot project to eliminate child labor
on fishing platforms in 1994. Receiving funding from the International Labor
Organization's International Program to Eliminate Child Labor, they sought
to raise public awareness and to rescue 100 children from the platforms,
especially those under 13. KKSP has unsuccessfully attempted to press legal
cases against the jermal owners for kidnapping and child
abuse. Jermal owners are supposed to pay the fishing
authorities and the Indonesian Navy for their permits, but there appears to
be no record of their doing so. Thus, KKSP suspects, the jermal
owners are paying "protection money" to the Navy and "corruption at
the highest level," as Taufan Damanile, founder and chair of KKSP, puts it,
allows these conditions to continue to exist.2
THE JERMAL fishing boys are hardly an isolated case. In impoverished northeastern Brazil, children work ten hours a day, cutting, piling and carrying sisal, the raw material for rugs, rope and handbags for export. Children and their parents regularly have eyeballs punctured or fingers chopped off by the sharp blades of processing machines. "I saw a boy lose his hand," relates one child worker. "He had it one minute, and then he didn't have it the next. He was working with the [sisal shredder]. He was crying a lot, and he was bleeding -- on his clothes, on the ground."
In northeastern Brazil, the paucity of decent-paying jobs for
parents compels children to work early. Jose Francisco de Jesus, a man with
eight children, lives in a tiny brick house without electricity, indoor
plumbing or a telephone. Owning no livestock, he typically cannot afford
pharmaceuticals for his children. Since his wages are only $7.50 per week,
it is necessary for the children to work, as well. They each earn up to $1.50
per week.
For the family, under present circumstances, child labor is
necessary for survival. De Jesus is grateful to the sisal farm owner. "If my
children didn't work," he says, "we would have to go hungry." In de Jesus'
village, Povoado de Jose Valerio, many families live from meal to meal. In
Bahia state, annual per capita income is about $140, compared to the
Brazilian national average of $4,800. Unemployment exceeds 60 percent --
illiteracy 70 percent.
For much of the 1990s, Povoado de Jose Valerio's school was
closed because the Teofilandia administration failed to pay teachers.
Today, even many children who do attend school must do so intermittently,
as their parents must put them back to work when money is scarce. Under
such conditions, all of economic and cultural life is centered on survival.
"The problem is lack of jobs," says the mayor of Teofilandia. "If you have
industry, you can have jobs, and if people have jobs, they're able to
survive."
Even though Brazil has had laws against child labor since 1891,
these are regularly ignored by states, corporations and parents. In 1996,
3.3 million children, aged 7 to 14, worked. But also in that year, a new
government program that pays families $12.50 to $25 a month per child
who attends school regularly came into effect. The program had only 3,710
participants in 1996, but 362,000 by 2000. The program's success has
helped reduce to 2.5 million the number of child workers in Brazil. Still, the
director of Brazil's anti-child labor programs, Glaubert Santos, admits, "It's
not a solution. We still have to make sure families have a way to earn
steady income -- and that means creating jobs."3
THE SCOPE OF THE PROBLEM of child labor is staggering. Behind the stories of particular groups of child workers are the macrostatistics. The International Labor Organization (ILO), in concert with some governments and firms, labor organizations and nongovernmental organizations, has been engaged for more than a decade in a campaign against what they term the worst forms of child labor. Their recent report, A Future Without Child Labor, should be required reading for anyone interested in globalization and labor conditions.4 The ILO carefully distinguishes "economically active" children from those engaged in "child labor." Economic activity by children that is appropriate to age, safe and consonant with a child's education, is perfectly acceptable. Once school and homework are completed, light age-appropriate work may even help children "learn to take responsibility." The ILO has no interest in abolishing "household chores, work in family undertakings" or "work undertaken as part of education." Light, part-time work, could begin at age 12 and, in general, non-hazardous work should begin no earlier than age 15, although "national social and economic circumstances" will lead different countries to establish different standards; developing countries today might set 14 as a minimum age standard. The ILO hopes to establish 16 as "the general minimum age to which countries should aspire," with hazardous work restricted to those 18 and older.
According to the ILO's definition of economic activity, some 211
million children aged 5-14 are at work. For all children under 18,352 million
are economically active. But most of these children are not performing
ordinary, acceptable work. Instead, fully 186 million child laborers aged 5-
14 and another 59 million aged 15-17 are classed as child laborers. This
means that on a world scale, one child in six is a child laborer. In the "worst
forms," toil 180 million children, one in eight. Furthermore, most of the
children engaged in hazardous work, 111 million, are under 15 years old.
Another 59 million are 15-17. Even in the most developed economies, a
significant minority of children aged 10-14 is economically active. Especially
where there are large pockets of poor families in developed countries, child
labor becomes part of an overall family survival strategy.
What does the ILO want to abolish? They define child labor in
three general categories:
Not surprisingly, the ILO estimates 70 percent of child laborers
are in agriculture, often (but not always) on family farms. A significant
number work in commercial agriculture. Because it involves long hours, the
use of poisonous chemicals and/or dangerous equipment, the work is
hazardous. In manufacturing, children tend to work in "supply chains
producing for the domestic market" rather than directly for export-oriented
industry. Still, the poverty of workers in such industries contributes directly
to the need for families to send small children to work. Even a five- or six-
year-old child is an economic asset who can help the family survive until
next week or next month when parents' wages are too low to support
children and send them to school. While the very worst forms of child labor,
such as prostitution or forced recruitment into military service, are
significant, they comprise relatively small numbers of the children who are
at risk. The estimated 300,000 child soldiers and 1.8 million sex industry
workers comprise a minority of the 8.4 million in the "unconditional worst
forms of child labor," most of whom, 5.7 million, are in forced labor.
THE ILO SPEAKS OF POVERTY as "inextricably linked to child labor." But the report's authors insist that other factors play a role in giving us a full portrait of the causes for child labor. "Inadequate social protection coupled with under-resourced, poor-quality education systems play a large part in perpetuating child labor."
That's pretty clear: Poverty, bad schools and a lack of social
protection lead the most vulnerable, children, into work -- whether in
agriculture, fishing or other primary industries -- or in manufacturing or
"service" industries, a particularly pernicious category when we are
speaking of children, as it includes domestic work but also illegal activities
such as drug trafficking or prostitution. A poverty cycle exists, where
children born into abysmal poverty are forced by circumstances to work too
young, which is directly detrimental to their health but indirectly also leads
to inferior education -- which only condemns the next generation to more or
less the same situation. "It is abundantly clear that the poverty conundrum
at the very heart of this problem -- where poverty breeds the worst forms of
child labor and the worst forms of child labor breed poverty -- must be
tackled head on," the report explains.
What can break this cycle? The ILO report calls for higher living
standards, improved schools and effective mechanisms for monitoring child
labor. That child labor is linked to poverty is "widely acknowledged and
undeniable." Labor force participation rates for children 10-14 is 30-60
percent in countries with annual per capita income of $500 (US) or less [in
1987 prices]. When income rises to 501-1000 dollars, participation drops to
10-30 percent.5
"No one would argue with the general proposition that child labor is both a
result and a cause of poverty. Household poverty pushes children into the
labor market to earn money to supplement family income or even to
survive. Evidence is also clear that, by lowering human capital
accumulation, child labor perpetuates household poverty across generations
and thereby slows national economic growth and social
development."6
IF THE GLOBAL PHENOMENON of child labor appears today as a ubiquitous feature of economic life, it is hardly a recent development. Some of the most moving passages in Karl Marx's Capital concern the length of the working day and the conditions of child laborers. We get a real sense of the nature of industrial work, of the ceaseless conflict between rapacious factory owners and generally powerless laborers, in the work's concrete and descriptively empirical chapter on the working day. Marx, we might say, sublimates his outrage at the conditions of laborers to create the systematic and rigorous understanding of the laws of motion of capitalist development.
Marx marshals myriad sources, including the observations of
men of the cloth and government inspectors, in describing the
manufacturing employer's "werewolf-like hunger for surplus labor." The
capitalist in basic manufacturing is endlessly enterprising in extending the
length of the working day.7 Even slave-owning conquistadors
were no more cruel.8 Marx relies heavily upon ordinary
newspaper reports and official government investigatory documents. In the
lace trade, in Nottingham, England,
children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o'clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate...The system, as the Rev. Montagu Valpy describes it, is one of unmitigated slavery, socially, physically, morally and spiritually.9
Marx goes on to cite depositions given by children themselves,
reported in documents of parliamentary inquiries. "William Wood, 9 years
old, 'was 7 years 10 months old when he began to work.' He 'ran moulds'
(carried ready-molded articles into the drying-room, afterwards bringing
back the empty mould) from the very beginning. He came to work every
day in the week at 6 a.m., and left off at about 9 p.m." Fifteen hours of
work per day, six days a week, at the age of seven. Laborers in this
industry, children and adults, suffered a high rate of pulmonary illnesses
and short life expectancy. The hand manufacture of matches led to a form
of tetanus peculiar to workers in the industry. "The manufacture of
matches, on account of its unhealthiness and unpleasantness, has such a
bad reputation that only the most miserable part of the working class, half-
starved widows and so forth, deliver up their children to it, their 'ragged,
half-starved, untaught children'." Some workers in this industry were as
young as six. The working day extended from twelve to fifteen hours,
including "night-labor, irregular meal-times and meals mostly taken in the
workrooms themselves, pestilent with phosphorus."10
In The Making of the English Working Class, a
classic of labor history, E. P. Thompson lends support to Marx's analysis.
Thompson takes pains to distinguish the work of children in industrial
settings from agricultural labor conducted under the supervision of parents.
The apologists for child labor are indeed correct that it was not a new
phenomenon associated only with industrialization. "The child was an
intrinsic part of the agricultural and industrial economy before 1780, and
remained so until rescued by the school." Climbing boys and ship's boys
were subjected to very bad conditions. But most child laborers before the
industrial revolution worked at "home or within the family economy."
Fetching and carrying by very small children or work alongside parents in
cotton spinning were common. "So deeply-rooted was child labor in the
textile industries that these were often held up to the envy of laborers in
other occupations where children could not find employment and add to the
family earnings..."
Thompson acknowledges that conditions in farm labor, even
under family supervision, could be very poor. "In agriculture, children --
often ill-clothed -- would work in all weathers in the fields or about the
farm." But this is very different from the factory system, emphasizes
Thompson. "There was some variety of employment (and monotony is
peculiarly cruel to the child)." Work was "intermittent: it would follow a
cycle of tasks, and even regular jobs like winding bobbins would not be
required all day unless in special circumstances..." Children were
gradually introduced to work, and any manufacturing work
they did was "interspersed with running messages, blackberrying, fuel-
gathering or play. Above all, the work was within the family economy and
under parental care." It was not only the development of the factory
system, but two other factors, one material, the other ideological, that
contributed to the rise of child labor: First, the growth of specialization, "the
increasing differentiation of economic roles," and the "break-up of the
family economy"; and secondly, the "breakdown of late eighteenth century
humanitarianism."11
The breakdown of the family, and the erosion of extended
kinship ties, had been underway since at least the fifteenth century. The
demise of kinship networks made way for the nuclear family ideal in the
heyday of industrial capitalism. Today, the unfettered market has eroded
the family even further, as it has eroded all other institutions of social
protection.12
Under the piece rate system children came to be employed in "monotonous
application for ten, twelve or more hours" per day. "The crime of the factory
system was to inherit the worst features of the domestic system in a
context which had none of the domestic compensations: 'it systematized
child labor, pauper and free, and exploited it with persistent brutality...'"13 Common
was a working day of 12 to 16 hours for children, "in the last hours of which
children were crying or falling asleep on their feet, their hands bleeding
from the friction of the yarn in 'piecing', even their parents cuffing them to
keep them awake, while the overlookers patrolled with the strap. In the
country mills dependent upon waterpower, night work or days of fourteen
and sixteen hours were common when they were 'thronged'."
Under circumstances of great poverty, working class parents, then as now, had to view their children as economic resources. Many industrialists surely saw them that way. "The mixture of terror and of fatalism of the children comes through in the laconic reports. An eight-year-old girl, employed for thirteen hours a 'day' to open and close traps: 'I have to trap without a light, and I'm scared...Sometimes I sing when I've light, but not in the dark; I dare not sing then.'"
CONFLICTS OVER CHILD LABOR were necessarily played out in the churches. Some owners were reputed hypocritically to insist that masters and laborers alike attend church, even after the week-long abuse of child laborers, which might end only "five minutes before midnight on the Saturday" and attendance at Sunday school was enforced. While some clergy apologized for the factory system, others joined the ten-hour movement. One "old Methodist lay preacher" preached consistently against the factory, and was repaid for his efforts when "the local Methodist mill-owner at Mytholmroyd always locked the chapel when it was his turn to preach."14
Under the growing capitalist economy, labor power was being
transformed into a commodity for sale in the marketplace. Land, too,
became commodified. In the view of Karl Polanyi, to the extent that
markets are free to dispose of humans and the natural surroundings, this
entails nothing less than the "demolition of society." Labor power cannot be
stored, used indiscriminately, or left idle without profoundly affecting the
people attached to it.
Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.
Industrialization, the application of increasingly complicated machines to the production process, drew land, labor and money inexorably into the market system. The factory system above all else transformed human society because it intensified the process of commodification of labor. "All along the line, human society had become an accessory of the economic system." Polanyi argues persuasively that the creation of a labor market in England necessitated the "wholesale destruction of the traditional fabric of society."15
It also immediately called into existence countermovements for
self-protection. Indeed, the freeing of the labor market, through the Poor
Law Reform of 1834, turned intellectuals and social reformers to the
question of the condition of the community. As the nineteenth century
progressed, two great social movements contended. One was the forward
momentum of the principle of economic liberalism, seeking to establish the
self-regulating market. This was countered by movements for social
protection, seeking to preserve humanity and nature, and productive
organization itself from the vagaries of the market, through the
establishment of protective legislation, restrictive associations and other
interventions.
CHILD LABOR LEADS TO A continuing cycle of poverty, even in countries undergoing a process of economic development. At an adequate income level, parents hardly wish to hold children back from education and advancement. It is abject poverty that forces parents to view their children as economic resources in the struggle for survival. But children who labor full-time (or more) for subsistence wages are permanently closed out of the possibility of educating themselves for skilled work. Thus poverty continues generation after generation.
|
Economic Activity and Child Labor, 2000
SOURCES: ILO estimates for 2000 and World Population Prospects: The Sex and | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The social movements which succeeded in placing such issues
on national and international agendas for change have taken a long time to
gestate. They are often politically confused, complicated webs drawing
together a myriad of different interests, aiming at unattained goals but
achieving results nevertheless. The experience of today's developed
countries, as they were developing, contains lessons for social movements,
antiglobalization activists and children's advocates. In the United States, for
instance, child labor was uncontroversial in the colonial period, as children
worked on family farms or would enter into trade apprenticeships between
ages 10 and 14. The rise of the factory system in the nineteenth century led
to widespread employment of children as cheap laborers. Educational
reformers in the mid-nineteenth century pressed for legislation that would
establish wage minimums and school attendance requirements. These
efforts at the social protection of children were stymied by the influx of
southern and eastern European immigrants, the patchwork quality of
American state legislation and the powerful interests who sought, for
economic reasons, to confine the protective legislation. Child labor grew
such that by 1900, 18 percent of 10-15 year olds -- the official figure of
1.75 million -- were employed. One-quarter of southern cotton mill
employees were under 15; half of these children were under 12.
The National Child Labor Committee was organized in 1904 to
address the problem. Along with numerous state child labor groups, the
movement "pioneered the techniques of mass political action, including
investigations by experts, the widespread use of photography to dramatize
the poor conditions of children at work, pamphlets, leaflets and mass
mailings to reach the public, and sophisticated lobbying." Still, the political
mood was such that little progress could be made. When Congress passed
federal child labor laws in 1916 and 1918, they were declared
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Child labor opponents managed to
press for Congressional passage of a constitutional amendment authorizing
federal child labor legislation in 1924; church groups and farm organizations
prevented ratification.
Only under the New Deal was lasting progress finally achieved.
The codes of the National Industrial Recovery Act sought to reduce child
labor, but the codes as a whole were struck down as unconstitutional. The
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for the first time established national
minimum wage and maximum hour standards, and established limitations
on child labor. Now children under 16 were effectively prohibited from
manufacturing and mining employment.16 The political mood had of course
changed, now making such legislation possible. The technical-economic
situation had changed, as well -- the mechanization of jobs diminished the
usefulness of unskilled child laborers. But the decades-long work of
children's advocates was indispensable to the passage of any protective
legislation at all.
The jermal children and their millions of brothers
and sisters toil daily under the weight of grinding poverty. Their futures are
bleak so long as subsistence is bought at the price of foregone education.
Activists against poverty, globalization and sweatshops are working to
awaken world consciousness to their plight. While this movement has been
temporarily sidelined by the political reaction to September 11, perseverant
and patient activism is indicated. In the coming decades, world-level labor
standards, including a global minimum wage, comparable to the national
legislation that elevated children out of sweatshop work in the early
twentieth century, can be made central to the global social justice
agenda.
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