Child Labor Report Latest Example of China’s Disrespect for Human, Workers’ Rights

by James Parks, May 5, 2008

Here’s one more reason that the Bush administration’s refusal to push China to respect workers’ rights is wrong. This week, Chinese police rescued 167 village children sold to work as slave laborers in a city in the booming southern province of Guangdong in the Pearl River Delta. The children all came from poor families who lived more than 600 miles away. 

The Guardian newspaper in London credits Southern Metropolis Daily, an underground Chinese newspaper, for revealing that more than 1,000 children, some as young as 7, had been sold “like cabbages” at a street market in southwestern China. Many had fake papers certifying they were adults, and more had documents saying they were in their early teens.  

Chinese officials also said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, slave-like conditions for minimal pay. 

In a series of articles last week, the Southern Metropolis Daily journalists wrote they had traveled to an area in western China, which is populated by ethnic minority groups and plagued by drugs and a lack of good jobs, to pose as recruiters and interview parents and residents. One reporter posed as a clothing factory manager and was allowed to inspect the children and agreed to pay them 3.5 yuan, about 50 cents, an hour.

The series said recruiters and labor agencies working in the area often selected and transported children south, where they were then “sold” to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province. At some coastal factories, children were lined up and selected based on their body type. The newspaper said children were paid about 42 cents an hour, far below the local minimum wage of about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.

For years, the AFL-CIO has called on several administrations to demand that China enforce international labor standards and stop using child, slave and forced labor and enforce its own labor laws. Working conditions in China continue to be abysmal, with nearly nonexistent enforcement of wage, overtime, safety and health and environmental laws. Since it is illegal to form independent unions in China, workers lack an effective voice at work as well as in the political system.  

In 2004 and in 2006, with bipartisan support from members of Congress, the AFL-CIO filed a petition alleging the Chinese government’s brutal and systematic repression of workers’ fundamental human rights constitutes an unfair trade practice under U.S. law. The Bush administration rejected both workers’ rights petitions without the courtesy of a substantive reply. 

The China Labor Bulletin, founded by labor activist Han Dangfong, a winner of the AFL-CIO’s George Meany-Lane Kirkland Human Rights Award, reports that the problem of child labor is growing as China’s economy grows. 

For years, despite official regulations banning the employment of minors (defined by Chinese law as those under 16 years of age), teenagers and even pre-adolescents from poorer regions of China have been drawn to the rapidly developing southern and coastal areas looking for work. For this army of juvenile labourers, employment is readily available in the workshops and factories (and to a lesser extent related industries, such as food service) that are at the heart of China’s economic boom.

Underage laborers are particularly vulnerable to job-related hazards resulting in injury and death, and this is because they tend to be less aware of workplace hazards than do adult workers. An adult working in a coal miner is generally aware of perilous conditions in which they work; a child working in a factory, on the other hand, is usually less aware of the dangers they face, making their situation all the more hazardous.

The AFL-CIO Solidarity Center and its partners around the world are exposing the problem of child labor wherever it exists and promoting more effective national action plans to curb this intolerable abuse of worker rights. Through programs in countries such as Egypt, Kenya, India, Pakistan, Romania and on the Internet, the Center combats child labor and teaches parents and children about the problem.     

Every day, more than 200 million children around the world—one in every six between ages 5 and 17—go to work instead of to school. According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 171 million children are engaged in hazardous work, of which 111 million are younger than 15. Some 8.4 million children are trapped in the worst forms of child labor, including slavery, trafficking, debt bondage, forced military recruitment, dangerous work, prostitution and pornography.

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