Latest Information

We are all hearing much more about child labour these days.  The hundreds of children trafficked to work in the brick kilns of Shanxi  province in China, and the trafficked child labour in the garment industry in Delhi have recently made the international headlines.  We are also finding child labour more often in our own assessments - uncovering underage workers in 20% of the workplaces we visited globally in 2006-2007.  These experiences make the ILO’s 2006 report ‘The end of child labour: Within reach’ seem overly optimistic.  There seems to be an almost unlimited supply of potential child workers in many of the countries we work in.  As well as tackling the root causes of the problem (poverty, inadequate education provision, family breakdowns, and migration of whole families for work, to name a few), there is an urgent need to develop consensus on practical guidelines on how to tackle individual cases to make a positive outcome for individual children more likely.

On Thursday 6^th March, Impactt held a seminar in Guangzhou to launch our draft child labour remediation guidelines for the industrial context.  What was unusual about this seminar was the presence of a former child worker, now in a remediation programme, studying IT and clearly enjoying it.  The child, who is now 15, talked to the assembled brands, retailers, academics and ethical trading practitioners about his experiences. 

He had left school at the age of 13 because of bullying, lack of supportive teachers, as well as financial difficulties at home.   He started working in the paint spraying department of a toy factory in Dongguan in South China when he was 14. Here workers worked 11-13 hours a day with frequent overnight working and were not given any protective equipment at all.  Luckily his uncle also worked in the kitchen at the factory and was able to get the child transferred to kitchen work. He worked from 8am till 8 or 9pm without any rest day at all.  The only time he was able to take time off was when auditors came and he was told by factory managers to hide himself away.  He would immediately start working again when auditors left the factory.  He recounted the culture of bullying at the factory, where supervisors routinely treated workers harshly, and said that he felt lucky to have escaped from this situation.

When Impactt discovered him, the team faced many difficulties in getting the factory to admit the problem and to sign up to a remediation programme, but, thanks to the determination of the brand we were working with, we were able to get the child back into education, where he is currently, clearly really enjoying his studies.

We’d like to see this kind of outcome in far more of the cases of child labour which we uncover.  Sadly, we find that we are successful in getting children to go back to school and stay back in school in only around 20% of cases.   Children often don’t want to go back to school, their families sometimes prefer them to carry on working, factory managers regularly deny the issue, and try to hide vital evidence and stymie remediation.  Brands often don’t know where to turn and precious time is lost, resulting in children trickling back to work elsewhere, out of reach of remediation efforts.  This is why we have developed the guidelines as an initial discussion document.  They are based on our experiences of working with children and supply chains in China, Bangladesh and Turkey.  We are keen to start a debate to develop consensus on the best way forward.  If you are interested in participating, contact rosey@impacttlimited.com or post a comment on this blog.