Brick-walled, tin-roofed and windowless, there’s nothing remarkable about the large, rundown shack squatting in a rural field outside the city of Patna in northeast India. It’s an ugly building, but what’s inside is uglier still.
In fetid darkness, the air stifling and thick with the stench of unwashed bodies, 13 boys labour 18 hours a day making carpets for a daily wage of 11 cents, which they never see. They are told the money goes to their families, but none can confirm it. They haven’t seen their families since the day they were taken away; sold into slavery by their impoverished parents.
If you’ve been carpet shopping, you might have admired the handiwork of these boys. The carpets produced in that shack will ultimately be sold in North America by two of India’s biggest carpet exporters.
Sadly, this story doesn’t shock us. We have stood in too many such shacks, meeting the hopeless gaze of too many enslaved children. What shocks us is that, despite decades of increasing global awareness of child labour and the forced labour of children and adults, we are still far from stamping it out. Two academic studies released this year should have the world asking why we have not made more progress.
“My sense is the trend line is not a good one. There have not been significant decreases in child and forced labour in the 14 years I have been looking at this issue,” said Siddarth Kara, a researcher at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights. Kara’s research team discovered Patna’s enslaved boys while studying India’s carpet industry. In his final report, released in January, Kara found that nearly half of India’s billion-dollar carpet market still runs on forced labour, and 20 per cent of production uses child labour.
Kara was quick to point out the carpet industry is not an anomaly. He has documented exploitation of workers in carpets, sporting goods, apparel, agriculture, seafood, cocoa and coffee. “I’ve seen children in mines in the Congo, made to work at gunpoint.”
Nor is Kara’s report the only recent academic study to present alarming statistics. In May, the International Labour Organization published Profits and Poverty: The Economics of Forced Labour. Using complex economic modelling, the ILO determined that forced labour reaps at least $150 billion in annual profits for businesses around the world. That’s three times higher than previous estimates, says study author Beate Andrees.
Hans van de Glind, an ILO child labour expert, told us the number of children involved in the worst forms of child labour — hazardous work, such as mining, that threatens their health and safety — fell to 85 million in 2012 from 171 million in 2000. Progress, yes, but far from eliminating the worst forms of child labour by 2016, a goal set by 80 countries at the 2010 Hague Global Child Labour Conference.
“Child labour is going down, but it’s not going down fast enough,” said van de Glind. So why not?
Kara and van de Glind said the grinding poverty that makes people vulnerable to child and forced labour isn’t going away, while other factors, such as statelessness, are rising. Without the legal protections of citizenship, desperate refugees are at higher risk of exploitation.
In April, the ILO noted the rate of child labour had doubled in Lebanon since the influx of refugees from Syria. “Their misery transpires into the products we buy every day,” Kara said.
This points to the second problem. As the ILO study proved, labour exploitation is profitable. Despite increased global awareness, van de Glind said western consumers do not ask enough questions about where products came from. Nor do corporations. Businesses may demand ethical sourcing from primary suppliers, van de Glind said, but few bother to examine the subcontractors or secondary suppliers in their supply chains.
While much of the onus lies on individual nations to strengthen their laws and enforcement against labour exploitation, van de Glind says Canadians can do our part, too.
And if exploitation continues because it is profitable, we as consumers can make it less so. Before buying, do your research. Check websites to read what companies say about their sourcing. If the information isn’t easily available, write the company and ask. The more pressure companies feel from customers, the more attention they will pay to ethical sourcing. We can demand our governments enact ethical sourcing guidelines for government procurement, as the Ontario government has done.
Fortunately, there is hope for the boys of Patna. Kara’s team reported the shack to a local labour organization, which is working to rescue the boys.
Craig and Marc Kielburger are co-founders of international charity and educational partner, Free The Children. For information, visit weday.com.
