Child laborers are seen at a Bombay police station after their rescue from a small industrial business. (File photo; © AP Images)

11 May 2007

(Education, consumer awareness aid in stopping workplace abuses)

Washington – Nearly 30 years ago, when activist Kailash Satyarthi began rescuing children who were bonded laborers in India, he had little company.

“Child labor was a non-issue,” he told USINFO. “Now we see thousands of organizations are dedicated, very genuinely working to eradicate child labor.”  His efforts sparked young people, businesses and governments to cooperate in eradicating a practice that robs a child of well-being and a future.

To Satyarthi, who leads raids on offenders and epic marches against child labor, the solution lies in education. “Education is the answer to violence, education is the answer to conflicts,” he said at an April 26 event for youth organized by the International Center for Child Labor and Education (ICCLE), part of an international campaign for universal education.

Satyarthi recognized early that merely freeing children was not enough. Not only the children, but societies that employ children as laborers must be educated for the abuses to stop. He urges governments, activists and businesses to unite to prevent children from being forced to haul bricks at construction sites or work in mines or quarries when they should be in classrooms. Today, eliminating child labor is “very much on the political agenda; it’s very much in the social discourse and discussion,” he told USINFO.

But acknowledging child bondage is just a start in a world where, according to UNICEF, an estimated 218 million children aged 5 to 17 are forced to work, often in hazardous environments for little or no pay. This figure omits millions of children who work long hours as domestic servants and are vulnerable to abuse. Satyarthi says a significant number of children are sold into servitude.

Because Satyarthi believes abolishing child labor is “a matter of corporate social responsibility,” he founded RugMark, with the help of concerned businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to enlist market forces against child labor. Since 1994, RugMark has rehabilitated about 3,500 child weavers from “one of the problematic industries” that use child labor to keep costs down, RugMark director Nina Smith told USINFO.

RugMark offers voluntary, “child-labor-free” certification to carpet factories, soliciting retail outlets to stock RugMark certified carpets.  A recently launched “Most Beautiful Rug” consumer awareness campaign promotes rugs made by adult weavers. “[A] rug made by child labor is ugly, no matter what it looks like,” Smith says.

“The market here is growing. Something like one-third of U.S. consumers incorporate their social, environmental and spiritual values into their purchases,” Smith explained. “We believe about 15 percent market share -- we  are at 2 percent now – is the tipping point for where the industry would be child-labor-free, sometime in the next decade. One of the good things about what we do, our mission is achievable,” she says. RugMark income goes to rehabilitation and vocational training programs in South Asia.

The U.S. Department of Labor supports such multilevel approaches, according to Marcia Eugenio, director of the department’s International Labor Affairs Bureau. Since 1995, the United States has appropriated nearly $600 million for child labor and trafficking eradication efforts in 79 countries.  “As of the end of March 2007, we actually reached our 1 million children target,” she told USINFO. U.S. technical assistance includes refurbishing schools, training for children and adults, and access to microcredit.

Eugenio explains that children often labor away from the eyes of inspectors: “They are down in the supply chain to a point where they are not directly linked with the formal sector of the economy.”  Changing attitudes at the community level is critical to stopping child labor, she says.

U.S. grant money funneled through large NGOs to local organizations supports building sustainable programs. Annual reports to Congress track the nature and extent of child labor in countries around the world. The Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2005 mandates publication of a list of goods and companies associated with forced labor each year.

The Asia Pacific regions have the largest number of child laborers, followed by Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, according to UNICEF.

Satyarthi’s group, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, operates three centers in India that prepare former child laborers for productive lives through counseling and appropriate training. In 2006, the U.S. State Department, through the U.N. Development Fund for Women, funded the group’s public awareness campaign for child labor trafficking.

“I’ve come here to remind you about the children who are like any one of us, who are not able to go to school and have dreams and aspirations,” said Kinsu Kumar, a 12-year-old boy from India rescued from domestic servitude. He was among several former child laborers from India, Africa and Colombia who accompanied Satyarthi and shared their stories. Now in school, he said “I wish each one of us can work together to give the same opportunity to other children in bonded labor.”