There is less value placed on life, in general, in India and Africa and, of course, much less value on a woman’s life. Women suffer greatly and daily, and their pain is somehow accepted by the world as a fact of life and probably beyond anyone’s control. But we would do well to remember when we look at the faces of young children staring pitifully up at the TV cameras, as in times of famine, that for every child there is a long and harrowing tale of suffering with a woman at its heart.
Although the purpose of this book is to focus on women, I want to dwell for a moment on the children who are equally downtrodden but are also a vital source of revenue to impoverished families. We cannot think that we can impose the standards and practices of the developed world on developing countries. It won’t work, and the sooner we realise that the sooner life will change for the better for many thousands of children and their families. Just as I want to change the mindset of people in their attitude and treatment of women, it should also be possible to change our attitude towards child labour.
According to Indian government statistics, there are 20 million child labourers in the country. I would not be surprised if the figure were more than double that, as other agencies claim. There is a law in India which makes it illegal to employ someone under 14 years of age unless they are working within a family environment, but like so many other laws in India it is flouted. According to the International Labour Organization, there are 250 million children aged between 5 and 14 who are working for a living in developing countries – nearly half of them full time.
The simple truth is that in communities where people are poor, children have to work. It is impossible for families to manage without the help of their children. So if a child is not going to school then he or she is working. It is a matter of survival. What we should be focusing on is children’s working conditions. Rather than having them slaving in sweatshops, legitimate and respectable companies could find ways of employing these children for a maximum of four to five hours, giving them a hot meal in the day and providing two hours of schooling. A fanciful dream, I know, for the worst sort of ‘employers’ in some backstreets, but a realistic proposition for legitimate businesses who would not need to pretend that they don’t have children working for them. The children will still earn money for their families, they will be well nourished and they will be learning at the same time. What has to be stamped out is 12 hours in a backstreet sweatshop with scarcely a break.
Many would say these children should not be working at all, and they would be right in an ideal world, but we do not live in an ideal world. The children should be in school, but there are two problems here. First, how can their parents manage their lives without their children’s labour? And second, most parents cannot even afford to send their children to school. It’s the double whammy. It is hard to see how that circle can be squared, because the advantages of the child offering some help to the family are clear if their help leads to a better way of life in the future with improved prospects for the whole family. Child labour is not an optional extra – everyone, regardless of their age, is needed to help in whatever way they can. It is not a choice, it is a necessity.
Western standards cannot be applied unless we make the most impoverished as well off as the West, which is clearly not possible. We are rightly concerned about the conditions and hours children work and the fact that they don’t get a good meal during the day. How can a child’s health be maintained like that? It can’t, and it is plain that the fitter the children, the better the nation. My contention is that we have to start somewhere. We must be pragmatic as well as practical. There is a difference between child labour and child slavery. In India young children are ‘indentured’ to other people. In fact they are sold into slavery – ‘bonded labour’ – because it is virtually impossible for the child or family to ‘buy’ their way out of the ‘employment’, and families are dependent on the meagre wages to survive. In the Middle East there is so much slavery, usually among immigrants who come to the cities in search of fortune – they are the people on whose backs the glittering apartment blocks, hotels and shopping malls are being built.
If at a stroke child labour were abolished the result would be even more deprivation and hunger. Let the children in Pakistan make the footballs and Indians make clothes all for sale to the western market, but at least be sure that their conditions are good, that they are fed, receive some education and learn a skill. This would give them a future and an opportunity to make the break from a life of poverty.
Once again I turn to the business community to use their influence. They have a corporate social responsibility which takes them beyond the confines of their offices and factories where their responsibility is only to their immediate workforce. What I am advocating, if we really want to do something about what amounts to child abuse, is for companies to go out into the cities where they operate and show some real social responsibility. This is all tied up with helping women to run small businesses where they could also employ youngsters under their supervision and care.
We have to start at the beginning, at the root cause. In Asia they have children with the expectation that, as soon as their sons and daughters are able, they will work and contribute to the family. It is what they perceive as the duty of the child. Not only is it a duty but it is also a necessity, both in the cities and in the rural and farming communities. The situation is far worse in the cities, where the sweatshops proliferate and offer virtually nothing in return. The sight of boys selling magazines and newspapers on the roadside, making sales of maybe Rs. 300 a day, are familiar. They, of course, are controlled by one man who would provide them with the magazines at the start of the day and take most of the profit at the end. Some have tried to tell me that it is like the ivory poachers in Africa. If people go on buying ivory, the trade will continue and elephants will continue to die, somehow suggesting that it is better for these children to earn nothing at all rather than be working in the streets. But it is a false comparison. Child labour is a tradition, but a tradition born out of necessity, and it will continue because the necessity continues. The only way to bring it to an end is if you change the economic situation in the family.
In the cities women are earning and may often be the only one in the family in any kind of paid work. But the men take the money and squander it while the children toil away in the sweatshops, maybe not even earning anything but paying off some debt. In the cities it is particularly important that businesses find ways of employing children in a much safer and productive environment where they can be given food and some schooling. That is the only way to change their lives.
Just one survey, by the International Labour Organization, offers an array of depressing statistics. More than four out of five working children receive no pay at all because the majority – about 70 per cent – work for their families, usually in agricultural activity. As well as in farming, children can be found working in mines and weaving carpets as well as in domestic service and, of course, prostitution. Many children work seven days a week without holiday and for long hours, leaving them no free time to rest. Typically girls work longer hours than boys and for less pay. While it is easy to point the finger at Africa and Asia, it is worth remembering that there are many child workers in the industrialised countries of Eastern and Central Europe,42 and not so long ago we had child workers in what we now regard as the advanced West. We should remember that in not-so-distant times children worked in British mines and in factories. Women, too, toiled in harsh conditions doing menial work, but even so were not seen as part of the natural workforce.
Let us not look at the developing world through the eyes of an idealist. Children will work because they have to work; what we have to do is to improve conditions so that gradually their lives improve. It is up to companies to get over their squeamishness about employing children. It is seen as a great taboo, but what is the alternative? They will sit in a dirty sweatshop working for hours on end with no hope of escaping their torment. Far better to accept that if they have to work they do it in a decent environment: five hours of work with some food and two hours of schooling. Then they can still help their family in the evening if there is a need.
I can just imagine the bad press if an organisation like ICI, for example, began employing 30 children. But someone has to break the mould and show how the children could benefit from such a working environment rather than slaving in brutal conditions. All it will take to answer all the criticism is for one leader to make a stand and demonstrate what can be done. What would we prefer – boys sold into bonded labour and girls into prostitution? How can that be something anyone would want for a child? Far from getting a bad press, a company should be applauded for announcing that it is taking the initiative to take on a group of children and give them a chance in life. Yes, of course, the business can also make a profit, because everything I am suggesting has to be sustainable: charity can only go so far.
This is not a case of perpetuating child labour; it is a rather accepting the facts of life, appalling though they are, as a reality. It is creating a new generation of workers who are well nourished and educated. In fact you will be creating a new workforce which is confident, healthy and literate. If children are literate, they can build a better life for themselves. I am not talking about college and university education; if a child can read and write, that’s education and it’s enough. Numeracy and literacy means that the children cannot be cheated or treated as dumb animals. Again we tend to think in terms of western education – secondary school and further education. But for me, literacy is the only basic requirement. That ability alone will be a major advance. I am also in favour of adult literacy in the community. If there is a woman who can be taught to read, she will teach others in her village to read, and that tiny, precious gift can be passed on. I have seen this very thing happen in a village in Madhya Pradesh, where a woman having being elected head of her village council decided that the one thing she wanted to achieve was to make everyone literate, so she started a campaign called Jai Akshar, which loosely translates as ‘Honour to the Alphabet’, and encouraged everyone who was literate to teach someone else to read. In the end every adult in the village was reading. Just as Jai Hind was the slogan rallying people to rise up against foreign rule, Jai Akshar is the campaign to liberate people from illiteracy and ignorance. The difficulty is that women’s lives are so overburdened that it would be difficult to find time for education, so here again business can help. Businesses manage to train their employees to do the simple tasks they require: why not also find time for a little reading and writing? I used to teach English to women during their lunch hour at businesses in Maidenhead. It is possible to find the time. The upside for the employer is a smarter, brighter workforce and, in time, a wealthier community. A wealthier community spends more, and so you have the virtuous circle.
In these straitened times businesses may say educating the workforce is not their responsibility. Perhaps not, but I suggest that they should see it as an opportunity quite apart from discharging a debt to the society in which they are operating. And what about the wives of all the executives (who are probably mostly men)? There used to be a tradition for what we once called ex-pat wives living abroad to do some charitable work, but I fear that tradition is on the decline. I went to one summer party attended by many Indian executives’ wives and one of them said she taught. I was delighted and asked where, and she said rather grandly, ‘a Montessori school.’ That’s not what I mean by teaching, helping children who are already many rungs up the ladder. Another one had a lifestyle shop, as so many of the wealthy women do; it seems to have become fashionable to have a ‘little shop’ just to keep oneself occupied and amused. It probably makes no real difference to them whether it is profitable or not. They don’t seem to want to do anything for anybody who is really in need. I find this trend very depressing. They could be out teaching the least fortunate children the basics in how to read and count, because those very basic skills will utterly transform lives. It would make children infinitely more employable – yes, even as children – and it could set them on a career path that they would never normally have enjoyed.
One western or developed world practice I would employ is that of careful scrutiny and monitoring, not only to ensure that the children were not suffering, albeit now in a gilded cage, but also more particularly to share news of success stories. I would mark it a success if companies could demonstrate that their initiative was helpful to the children as well as being profitable, or at the very least breaking even. I believe this should be one corporate achievement which chairmen would want to shout about – it hardly represents a confidential matter that they have been able to achieve a positive balance between their commercial duty to their shareholders and their corporate social responsibility to their workforce and the community in which they are operating.
Children will work anyway: they have to. By creating a caring environment for them to work it may well also create a life for them to live. Make the leap of faith away from the attitudes of developed countries where it is not necessary for a child to work. If you apply those attitudes to the developing countries, you will deprive so many youngsters of that chance of a better life. By applying those attitudes and practices, which are completely unsuitable in developing countries, you are positively damaging the prospects of those children.
I would take the words of Sarah Brown, wife of the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, when she said: ‘If you save mothers, you improve the chances of children’ and extend the sentence by adding ‘… and if you improve the chances of the children, you also save mothers.’ What I mean by that, of course, is that with a modicum of education and a better life, it is just possible that the young boys, as they grow into adults, will treat the young women they meet with respect. It may not work in every case, but what is certain is that if we continue with more of the same we cannot expect to see any change. It is clear to me that more of the same can only lead to disaster, which in today’s age will be global in scale.
42 ILO Bureau of Statistics, Geneva.