Child Labor in China

Manfred Elfstrom, International Labor Rights Forum

On the day before May Day, police in one of China's great industrial boomtowns, Dongguan, raided a child labor trafficking ring. The children, most of whom were between the ages of 13 and 15, had been tricked or forced from their homes in Sichuan Province to work in an unnamed toy plant. 

The pioneering newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily, which triggered the investigation with a devastating report on markets where children were sold "like cabbages," followed the story up with a report on a fifteen-year-old boy who lost his left hand to the Hongsen Plastic Cement Factory's machinery. When labor inspectors later accompanied the reporter to the plant, they found more children on the company's payroll---children listed on paper with their real, illegal ages, in other words. 

National-level agencies are now sending investigators to Guangdong Province (where Dongguan is located) and Sichuan.

For companies willing to take the jump into blatant non-compliance with China's most basic labor laws, using children is an attractive cost-saving measure.  As an article in China's Legal Times notes, "Because hiring children is illegal, the employer does not need to pay different kinds of legally mandated social benefits." Contracts and consultation are, needless to say, off the table. And local minimum wages, which have been rising steadily to keep pace with the country's CPI inflation, can go out the window.  

Factories can hide abuses by maintaining secondary plants, where working conditions are not what their multinational clients might wish or, at least, publicly say they wish (Alexandra Harney describes this process brilliantly in her new book The China Price). Subcontractors can pass things on to subcontractors-of-subcontractors.  And subcontractors-of-subcontractors-of-subcontractors.

Equally importantly, private labor recruitment agencies, while circumscribed by new rules like the Regulations on Employment Services and Employment Management issued by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, can manage a shadowy world of deferred wages and tangled responsibility on behalf of employers.

These dangers may be exacerbated in the future by companies' push inland.  To escape enforcement of the Labor Contract Law (and rising prices generally), some bosses are looking to Jiangxi, Hunan and elsewhere. These provinces are rural, struggling and eager for investment. And their government inspectors, I fear, may have less experience and capacity than their counterparts on the coast.

UPDATE:

Guangdong Province's Emergency Management Office now says it will launch a massive drive to uncover child labor: "Not a single business, not a single employee should be missed in the general inspection."  Dongguan police have begun investigating 3,629 businesses, involving 450,000 employees, according to Li Xiaomei, the city's vice mayor. 

Interestingly, Li is now using language associated with China's anti-crime drives of the past: "(We) will strike hard against the underground employment agencies that exploited children, factories that illegally used child labor, and possible human smugglers." 

For more details see the Macau Daily Times (English).

Comments

[Helly]

Great post -- employment agencies will continue to make a profit from desperate people, desperate for work -- unless laws are enforced regularly and strongly.