NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2008
Child Labor
Chidren and young persons are at present worse treated and harder worked than at any previous period.
--Karl Marx, Capital
Child labor, described by Karl Marx in Capital nearly 150 years ago, is alive and well in China despite a recent New York Times expose of a child labor ring in China's southern provinces. Underground organizations lure children younger than the legal working age of 16 to industrial centers on the coast. Although officials have "instructed" police and labor departments to rescue child laborers and punish those responsible, there are believed to be thousands more children working throughout the Pearl River Delta region.
Journalists with Southern Metropolis, a crusading newspaper which first uncovered the abuses, recently interviewed parents and residents and posed as recruiters in Liangshang prefecture in southwestern Sichuan Province. Children were "sold" to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province. At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type. Children are paid about 42¢ an hour, far below the local minimum wage of 64¢ an hour. Some children were threatened with death if they tried to escape.
Chen Fulin, a government spokesman in Liangshan Prefecture, said that the child labor articles were accurate. "Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days," Southern Metropolis wrote in an editorial, "how could the labor departments show no interest in it and ignore it for such a long time?"
Several factors create conditions that perpetuate child labor in China: Recruiters receive between 200 and 300 yuan (about $29 - $45) per child; leaders of the underground organization can earn up to 100,000 yuan in three months; most companies employing child labor are small to medium-sized and not registered with labor departments.
Parents, who cannot support their families by farming, send out children as young as 8 or 9, pleased that the children earn several hundred yuan a month. One mother, who cried when she learned her son was sent thousands of kilometers away, was comforted to hear that he received a rice meal every two to three days.
Enforcement is weak. Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart, have been accused of using child labor and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have increased inspections of factories that produce goods for them, but suppliers evade scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedules.
As long as the world economy operates under the capitalist production system, these conditions will persist as corporations are driven to reduce labor costs. Increasing automation and sending jobs overseas to cheaper labor markets, leaves young people here idle and miseducated for jobs that no longer exist. Exploiting children as workers is capitalism's method in developing countries. In no case are poor children nurtured and educated to realize their full human potential. Until capitalism can be destroyed, revolutionaries must expose and oppose the exploitation of children in all forms.
--Susan Van Gelder
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