Child Labor; a different perspective
The term “hand-knotted rugs” can evoke different images. We think of magical “flying carpets” and stories from “A Thousand and One Arabian Nights“ – but the term may also evoke images of dark, dreary rooms filled with little children hunched over their looms.
Child labor is a subject sure to carry a lot of emotion. We do not pretend to have all the answers to this age-old problem, but would like to share some of our thoughts and experiences.
First, some black and white facts:
Fact: many situations are inherently bad. Anything involving abduction, slavery, forced removal of children from their parents, sexual exploitation, or indentured servitude is just evil.
Fact: About one-fifth of the world’s 6 billion people live in abject, absolute poverty. It is hard for us to comprehend the grinding poverty and helplessness that leads parents to put their children to work in horrible conditions, but the reality is these families rely upon child labor in order to just survive the day. A few years ago, we were travelling by bicycle through Bhutan and rode by a group Indian families working on the sides of the roads. By “working”, I mean every member of the family was breaking down rocks into smaller rocks for road gravel. Children barely able to walk sat next to their parents; clutching “hammers” (larger rocks) pounding the ground. What haunts me the most is not the children’s lifeless eyes and gaunt features, but the complete silence as they sat pounding away. Having just come from visiting a Bhutanese school where the sounds were of healthy children laughing and chattering, the difference was startling. We eventually rode by their collection of shacks that you wouldn’t use to house your farm animals. One can’t imagine a worse environment for a child to grow up – knowing that this was as good as it got – you had to work to stay alive, but that’s all you could hope for.
Fact: child labor is still a problem in many rug producing countries. The exact number is impossible to find, but this is an industry with a long history of child labor issues.
Now, for the grey areas:
We were travelling through Egypt a while back and visited a rug weaving center (as tourists, not buyers). What we saw were healthy looking school aged girls, sitting at a loom chattering away with each other. Aside from the loom, they could have been children anywhere – their book bags were piled against a wall and they giggled as we mangled hello in Arabic. We were suspicious of the explanation that they only worked for a few hours after school, but when we unexpectedly drove by a couple hours later, we saw them walking down the street towards the village with their book bags, like a gaggle of girls in any US town. This wasn’t “child labor” as I thought of it and as we witnessed in Bhutan. If their labor brought in enough money so their parents could send them to school and hope for the future, was this wrong?
While it’s easy for us in the West to state that child labor is an absolute wrong, it is arrogant to make such statements without at least gaining some appreciation of what we are talking about. Child labor is an easy rallying cry for politicians trying to make a name for themselves or NGOs trying to raise funds. These politicians and social activists often call for the banning of products from countries accused of propagating child labor. All this does is hurt the very people they are allegedly trying to help by increasing poverty – which ultimately is root of child labor.
There have been many examples of well intentioned, but poorly thought through “solutions”. One well known example is a factory in China that was shut down due to Western pressure having been repeatedly found to have illegally employed children. The Western politicians and NGOs cheered. A year later, a visitor discovered what happened to the children who had been employed at the now closed factory – they were now thieves, beggars, or prostitutes – a large percentage of them having since contracted AIDS.
This is why we must take the time to be thoughtful and look at why child labor occurs, how to address the root causes, understand the cultural differences, and take lessons from our own sordid history with child labor.
Laws against child labor without addressing the underpinning root cause of poverty do not work. Let’s look at our own history. Child labor was rife in the US in the late 1800s and early 1900s with children working day and night in mines, factories, and farms. While various child labor laws were passed during this time, it wasn’t really eradicated until the full impacts of the rising standard of living from the Industrial Revolution were felt – meaning families no longer depended on their children’s income making it more feasible for people to become more educated. Even today, we look the other way to blatant violations of child labor laws as the children of migrant workers sweat in our fields to pick the produce we put on our table.
Our history is being played out around the world today. In India, according to government data, more than 12 million children under age 14 are working as domestic servants, in stone quarries, sewing factories, mines, or other industries. A 1986 ban on children working in “hazardous” jobs and a recent 2006 law banning employment of children in homes and in the hospitality industry, had has no impact. Since the 2006 law was put into effect, there has not been a single conviction of a violation. Why? It’s simple, people will continue to do what they need to do to survive, and the law has had not changed the underlying poverty and poor education that led them to indenture their children in the first place.
The only realistic solution is a three pronged approach – improved economics, improved access to education, and increased regulation. Any of these factors alone is not sufficient – (for example, education only works if there are jobs available for educated people).
Improving the economics of third world countries is something the smartest people in the world have been working on for a long time! We have seen too many examples of failed policies (indiscriminate funding of NGOs, supporting of corrupt military leaders, etc, etc), and precious few examples of policies that actually work. But successful examples are there and we must learn from them. Only then, can well meaning regulations and laws have the impact they are meant to.
The final prong is education. Access to education is something that many people are involved with. We are proud to be a member of CARE & FAIR – an industry organization that is not waiting for the governments to act, but is providing education for children of rug-knotting families. In addition, we are involved with a number of dedicated carpet weaving centers for displaced Tibetan refugees that are built around the foundation of educating both children and adults while creating crafts that can economically support these activities. These organizations are built around the principle that “wherever the social situation has improved and children have had a school they could attend, child labor has disappeared.” (TERRE DES HOMMES)
Care and Fair
Please let me know your thoughts in the comment section above.
Very well said. But, it’s still a conflicting dilemma.
Should I feel comforted by taking advantage of the status quo vis a vie child labor incorporated into a product based on the facts as outlined in this commentary?
There is little I can do as an American far from the scene of such domestic conditions that seem to make child labor a practical necessity in India, Pakistan, Asia, South America, …. I can “send money” to support educational projects, blog to express my “outrage” that children are exploited in the making of this or that product, wait for the evolution of conditions in those places to end child labor, …. Nothing I can do seems very satisfactory in the short range — and in the long term, I’ll be dead.
On the other hand, it is an imperfect world which, one hopes, is slowly grinding its way toward the light.
To conclude: Having read your other commentaries on the qualities of hand knotted rugs and having seen firsthand the artistry and exquisite quality of such, there seems to be no alternative for those of us who can afford to do so, to forging ahead with our inclinations to buy one or more of such expensive pieces of art. We can only hope that doing so will hasten the day when child labor will be overcome by prosperity in the places where these rugs are made. To not buy would seem to exacerbate the problem rather than resolve it.