Tomorrow (12th June) is the World Day Against Child Labour, and hundreds of organisations around the world are marking the day with activities to raise awareness that Education is the right response against child labour.

Impactt’s report, Progress not Perfection highlighted the increasing incidence of child labour. Over the last couple of years, we have found children working in around 20% of the factories we have visited, with a total of nearly 600 individual children.  These children have been forced into work by a variety of circumstances.  The background theme is poverty, with the child usually being pushed into work by a catastrophic event in the family, the death of a parent or the pressing need to pay for medicine or the collapse of the family home.  In general, these children’s experience of education has not been very positive, children talk about poor facilities, boring lessons and often harsh punishments from teachers.

Tremendous work is being done to tackle these root causes of child labour, by UNICEF, IPEC, Save the Children and others – we at Impactt have been focussing on the individual level, on getting the children we find back to school, one-by-one.  It’s not easy – sometimes there is difficulty in proving the age of the child, sometimes the factory manager will try to make the children disappear before we can act, sometimes the child doesn’t want to go back to school, sometimes the parents are against it, sometimes no-one is willing to pay for the costs of education, and of maintaining the income of the child whilst they are in school.  Once a child is back at school, there are always loads of reasons why they may be tempted to go back to work.  Our experience in dealing with individual cases of child labour has prompted us to put together a set of draft procedures giving step-by-step guidance on what to do if child labour is found and how to organise remediation to give it the best possible chance of success. 

Over the past 3 months, we have been consulting with academics, local NGOs, international NGOs, trade unions, international bodies and companies themselves on the content of these guidelines and have received some immensely valuable comments from more that 70 organisations, including, amongst others, the University of Manchester, ITGLWF, ILO-IPEC, international and local NGOs and a broad range of practitioners from retailers and brands around the world. We are holding two meetings in June to discuss key areas of agreement and disagreement and to hammer out the detail of an agreed set of procedures.  We had our first meeting on Wednesday at the RSA in London. Impactt, representatives from 20 retailers and brands from the UK and continental Europe, as well as a representative from UNICEF met to share experience and develop the Operational Procedures further. In a couple of weeks, a group of practitioners will gather in Hong Kong to provide their insights. 

We hope that this process will result in some generally agreed procedures so that, when children are found in factory work, the tools will be there to support swift and decisive action, to maximise the chances of those individual children getting out of the workplace and into the classroom, so that they can build better life chances for themselves and their families.

If you are interested in knowing more, please email Magali@impacttlimited.com

Various media outlets in China including the Southern Metropolitan News, Xinua and Sina (links in Chinese) have been reporting that bonded child labourers have been found being ‘sold like vegetables’ in Shipai, Dongguan.   The working conditions into which they were sold were horrific. The reports allege that:

• There are up to 750 bonded child workers in the Pearl River Delta area.
• Workers as young as 9 years old are sold to factories.
• Young workers are threatened and beaten if they try to escape.
• Child labourers are working over 300 hours a month.
• Hourly rates for young workers are RMB 2.5-3.8 (18p-28p) per hour, with no overtime premiums, no benefits and no weekend rests.

This is the latest in a long line of exposes on the very worst forms of child labour in China.  We at Impactt are finding children in factories more and more often. All too often, shock and lack of information about what to do cause delays in tackling the problem, resulting in children slipping through the net and back into work.  The fate of these lost children has prompted us to develop our draft Child Labour Remediation Guidelines for the industrial context.  These set out some simple steps to for stakeholders to take when children are found in factories with the objective of getting children out of danger and back into school.  We are currently consulting on the guidelines – to give your views please, click here.