Children Found Sewing For Wal-Mart. Children Found Sewing Clothing For Wal-Mart, Hanes & Other U.S. & European Companies From the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights (formerly National Labor Committee) According to a National Labor Committee 2006 report, an estimated 200 children, some 11 years old or even younger, are sewing clothing for Hanes, Wal-Mart, J.C.
Penney, and Puma at the Harvest Rich factory in Bangladesh. The children report being routinely slapped and beaten, sometimes falling down from exhaustion, forced to work 12 to 14 hours a day, even some all-night, 19-to-20-hour shifts, often seven days a week, for wages as low as 6 ½ cents an hour. The wages are so wretchedly low that many of the child workers get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning to brush their teeth using just their finger and ashes from the fire, since they cannot afford a toothbrush or toothpaste. [read the full report from the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights] Mexico shuts down more than 20 coal pits. Mexico's labour ministry has shut down more than 20 coal pits due to an investigation into illegal child labour, after snap inspections at 200 operations between December 2012 and February this year showed evidence of illegal employment of minors. According to local news agency Notimex (in Spanish), the Ministry of Labour is preparing a draft bill that seeks to fully eradicated the high-risk practice, particularly in the state of Coahuila, which holds 80% of the country’s coal deposits.
The Coahuila mines are noteworthy for being particularly unsafe. Tunnel collapses and methane gas explosions are common in the area’s north, which shares a border with Texas. According to Mexican human rights groups, since the infiltration of the Zetas drug cartel in the industry, Mexico’s most violent and feared gang, miners are no longer allowed to utilize what limited safety protocols they previously had access to, making the environment all the more hazardous. Image courtesy of Harmony Foundation. Vietnam's lost children in labyrinth of slave labour. 27 August 2013Last updated at 10:39 ET By Marianne Brown Hanoi, Vietnam Trafficking gangs in Dien Bien, one of Vietnam's poorest provinces, promise to provide work for children but many of the victims are then forced into long hours for little or no pay Last year, three teenage boys jumped out of a third-floor window in Ho Chi Minh City and ran as fast as they could until they found help.
It was one in the morning and they did not know where they were going. "I was really scared someone would catch us," recalled Hieu, 18. Hieu, who did not want to give his real name, is from the Khmu ethnic minority. When he was 16 he had a job making coal bricks in his home village when a woman approached him offering vocational training.
"My parents were happy I could go and earn some money," he said. He and 11 other children from his village were taken by bus on a 2,100km (1,300 miles) journey and put to work in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), south Vietnam. Prostitution, begging and garment factories. Child slavery and chocolate. In "Chocolate's Child Slaves," CNN's David McKenzie travels into the heart of the Ivory Coast to investigate children working in the cocoa fields. (More information and air times on CNN International.) By David McKenzie and Brent Swails, CNN Daloa, Ivory Coast (CNN) - Chocolate’s billion-dollar industry starts with workers like Abdul. He squats with a gang of a dozen harvesters on an Ivory Coast farm.
Abdul holds the yellow cocoa pod lengthwise and gives it two quick cracks, snapping it open to reveal milky white cocoa beans. Abdul is 10 years old, a three-year veteran of the job. He has never tasted chocolate. During the course of an investigation for CNN’s Freedom Project initiative - an investigation that went deep into the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast - a team of CNN journalists found that child labor, trafficking and slavery are rife in an industry that produces some of the world’s best-known brands. It was not supposed to be this way. More about the Harkin-Engel Protocol It didn’t. Cheaper clothes (American Apparel) bottom of the article. American Apparel is a company that has gotten a lot of flak for its lewd ad campaigns, lack of transparency, and its controversial CEO Dov Charney, who received a number of employee complaints against him for sexual harassment, among other things.
But for once, I’m inclined to take Dov Charney’s side on his stance regarding failing labor practices that led to the devastating factory collapse in Bangladesh in April, which killed more than 1,000 people. In a podcast with VICE Magazine, Charney ranted about H&M’s cheap fashion prices, Charney tore into the retailer for its unwillingness to pay workers overseas the same wages it pays within its home country, calling for the company to match the Swedish wage in its manufacturing zones abroad. Citing an H&M advertisement that promoted a $4.99 bikini, Charney argued that it’s impossible to sell bikinis for that price unless someone is getting squeezed. He said that such a product cannot exist unless the company is “screwing someone.” Coffee in Child Slave Labor. By T.J. Hoppe November 2007 Children should be in school, not out working.
Even so, the International Labor Organization estimates that there are 250 million working children, 120 million of whom work full time. Some children are counted on as a major part of family income. Many children work for commercial farms and plantations that produce commodities exclusively for export, making up an estimated 7-12% of the work force on these plantations. Coffee is one of the most abundant products made through child slave labor. These child slave laborers are basically risking there lives because on the farms, coffee laborers are involved with every aspect. Coffee workers make hardly enough to live on. .
In Kenya's central province, 60% of the workforces on coffee plantations are children. These children experience the same, poor working and living conditions as the adults. Coffee is a very strenuous and articulate product to make. Sources Used: Slave Labor in the Walt Disney Company. By Frederick Kopp November 2005 For decades people around the world have associated "Disney" with innocence, imagination, and purity. However, behind the scenes of this gigantic company there are human rights violations being committed daily around the world. In factories workers are being paid staggeringly low wages. These factories not only pay their employees minute amounts, but they provide dirt-poor conditions as well. This issue is a problem not only for the third world nations, but for Americans also. The small Caribbean island of Haiti is the most glaring example of an inhumane Disney sweatshop.
Workers there stitch Aladdin t-shirts for 28 cents an hour (Haiti). Most of the world's slave labor in the past ten years has taken place in Asia. It isn't difficult to understand the injustices taking place here. Wages are only one of the negative aspects of these Disney sweatshops. Although these people may not be physically enslaved, financially they usually are.
Indian 'slave' children found making low-cost clothes destined for Gap | World news | The Observer. Child workers, some as young as 10, have been found working in a textile factory in conditions close to slavery to produce clothes that appear destined for Gap Kids, one of the most successful arms of the high street giant. Speaking to The Observer, the children described long hours of unwaged work, as well as threats and beatings. Gap said it was unaware that clothing intended for the Christmas market had been improperly subcontracted to a sweatshop using child labour. It announced it had withdrawn the garments involved while it investigated breaches of the ethical code imposed by it three years ago. The discovery of the children working in filthy conditions in the Shahpur Jat area of Delhi has renewed concerns about the outsourcing by large retail chains of their garment production to India, recognised by the United Nations as the world's capital for child labour.
Despite its charitable activities, Gap has been criticised for outsourcing large contracts to the developing world. Nike Accused of "Slave" Child Labor. The Indonesian government increased the minimum wage of blue collar workers from 4,600 to 5,200 Indonesian rupiah earlier this year. The increase, however, was heavily criticized by businessmen, arguing that it is a financial burden. Some executives of middle and small companies even refused to obey the minimum wage regulation, creating tension between labor activists, the government and the business community in Indonesia, which hosts the largest Moslem population in the world. Nababan, however, questioned the analysis, saying that he works and has a lot of contacts in the working areas. "They work and live like slaves, you know that! " he said. A Jakarta-based international labor observer also confirmed the report, saying that they have "boxes of reports" on Nike abusing worker rights in Indonesia which include "child laborers or workers earning 20 to 24 cents an hour, less than two dollars a day.
" Gender Discrimination. Girls: Household Servants When a boy is born in most developing countries, friends and relatives exclaim congratulations. A son means insurance. He will inherit his father's property and get a job to help support the family. When a girl is born, the reaction is very different. Some women weep when they find out their baby is a girl because, to them, a daughter is just another expense. Her place is in the home, not in the world of men. In some parts of India, it's traditional to greet a family with a newborn girl by saying, "The servant of your household has been born. " A girl can't help but feel inferior when everything around her tells her that she is worth less than a boy. A combination of extreme poverty and deep biases against women creates a remorseless cycle of discrimination that keeps girls in developing countries from living up to their full potential. Greatest Obstacles Affecting Girls Discrimination against girls and women in the developing world is a devastating reality.
Dowry.