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January 12, 2012<\/p>\n
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Contact: Reid Maki,\u00a0(202) 207-2820,\u00a0reidm@nclnet.org<\/a><\/p>\n Washington, DC\u2014Advocates from the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), a group representing more than two dozen organizations concerned with protecting working youth, has released a list of the top ten child labor stories from 2011. The list represents international and American issues in child labor that received considerable attention in 2011 and what advocates hope is an increase in attention to exploitation faced by vulnerable child workers that has previously gone unnoticed by mainstream media.<\/p>\n \u201cThe year brought some much needed attention to serious child labor problems in the supply chains of some of the world\u2019s largest companies,\u201d said Reid Maki, Coordinator of the Child Labor Coalition and the Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards for the National Consumers League (NCL). \u201cHowever, we also saw a disturbing move in a few states to roll back long-standing child labor protections and a much-publicized attack on child labor laws by a presidential candidate.<\/p>\n The year\u2019s 10 biggest stories, according to the CLC, included (in no particular order):<\/p>\n 1)\u00a0Apple hit with allegations that its iPhones and other electronic gadgets are manufactured in Chinese factories by child laborers.<\/strong>\u00a0In February,\u00a0<\/strong>Apple announced that it had found 91 children worked at its suppliers in 2010\u2014a nine-fold increase from the previous year. The company also acknowledged that 137 workers had been poisoned by the chemical, n-hexane, at a supplier\u2019s manufacturing facility and that less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with Apple\u2019s code on working hours. In the year prior to December 2010, Apple had sales of over $65 billion.<\/p>\n 2)\u00a0\u00a0Victoria\u2019s hidden \u201csecret\u201d: children help harvest the cotton that goes into garments.<\/strong>\u00a0Bloomberg Markets Magazine<\/em><\/a>\u00a0revealed in December that some of the cotton retail giant Victoria\u2019s Secret uses is harvested by young children in the West African nation of Burkina Faso. The piece profiled 13-year-old Clarisse Kambire, who works on a cotton farm, where she said she is routinely beaten by the owner. By hand, Clarisse performs work that many farmers use a plow and oxen to perform and often works in 100-plus degree heat and eats just one meal a day. Some days she gets no food. Many of the children like Clarisse are considered \u201cfoster children\u201d and receive no wages\u2014 most do not attend school. Limited Brand, the parent company of Victoria\u2019s Secret, has annual sales in excess of $5 billion.<\/p>\n 3)\u00a0\u00a0U.S. DOL issues proposed child labor rules to protect children on farms from dangerous work.<\/strong>\u00a0For the first time in four decades, the Department of Labor has issued proposed rules to prohibit work on farms that is dangerous for teen employees. The regulations would ban kids from driving tractors and other machinery, work from heights greater than six feet, work in grain facilities, and other dangerous activities. Despite a far-reaching \u201cparental exemption\u201d that would exempt the sons and daughters of farmers from the proposed protections, many members of the farm community and many farm-related groups attacked the proposed regulations as an assault on the family farm that would make it hard to train the next generation of farmers. DOL received more than 18,000 comments about the regulations. CLC members remain strong supporters of the proposed protections, which we believe will save 50-100 teen workers over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n 4)\u00a0\u00a0Human Rights Watch and NBC News draw much needed attention to child labor in gold mining.<\/strong>\u00a0Artisanal mining for gold is a common but brutal and dangerous form of child labor for West African children. In early December, the NBC News show\u00a0Rock Center<\/em>\u00a0featured\u00a0a chilling report about child gold miners in Mali, Africa<\/a>. As many as 20,000 kids are estimated to work in artisanal mines, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which found that kids as young as six years old \u201cdig mining shafts, work underground, pull up heavy weights of ore, and carry, crush and pan ore.\u201d As if this backbreaking labor wasn\u2019t bad enough, many children also work with toxic mercury to separate the gold from the ore. Many child miners are not paid wages for their labor, receiving bags of dirt which may or may not have any gold dust in them. Many children work instead of going to school.<\/p>\n 5)\u00a0\u00a0Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich calls child labor laws \u201cstupid\u201d and urges U.S. to save money by hiring school children to clean school bathrooms.<\/strong>\u00a0Republican Newt Gingrich made headlines this November when he suggested that poor kids in struggling schools be given jobs as janitors. Gingrich suggested that poor children typically lack the example of a working parent and that cleaning school bathrooms would help develop a strong work ethic. Gingrich has previously made headlines for having spent $750,000 on jewelry at Tiffany\u2019s, raising questions about his ability to empathize with the struggling poor.<\/p>\n 6)\u00a0<\/strong>Advocates draw attention to the forced labor in Uzbekistan to harvest cotton by getting a dictator\u2019s daughter ousted from Fashion Week.<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s not always easy to get the attention of one of the world\u2019s most brutal dictators, but that\u2019s what the advocacy community did during\u00a0New York City\u2019s Fashion Week<\/a>\u00a0in September 2011, when several CLC members and the Cotton Advocacy Network successfully got Uzbekistan\u2019s Gulnara Karimov ousted from the prestigious fashion show. A designer and a Uzbek diplomat, Gulnara is the daughter of Uzbekistan\u2019s brutal leader Islam Karimov. Each fall, Uzbek school children and their teachers are forced to leave their classrooms and perform arduous hand-harvesting of cotton for up to two months. The children, whose numbers are estimated to range from several hundred thousand to almost two million, receive little or no pay. Recently, the European Union voted not to ease import rules for Uzbek cotton, hoping to force the regime to allow independent investigators to survey child labor in the country.<\/p>\n 7)\u00a0\u00a0Nestl\u00e9 agrees to hire a third-party monitor to examine child labor in its supply chain.\u00a0<\/strong>For a decade now, the world has known that cocoa in West Africa is often harvested by children under difficult and dangerous conditions. That cocoa is purchased by the world\u2019s leading chocolate companies and eventually becomes the chocolate treats that we all love to eat. For years, the advocacy community has pushed the chocolate industry to do more to combat this intractable problem. This year, Nestl\u00e9 agreed to hire the Fair Labor Association, a nonprofit monitoring group, to look for child labor and other problems in the C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire.<\/p>\n 8)\u00a0\u00a060 Minutes<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0and \u201cThe Harvest\u201d film bring much needed attention to the problem of child labor in American agriculture.<\/strong>\u00a0Children as young as 12\u2014and sometimes even younger\u2014toil in the fields beside their migrant farmworker parents, harvesting fruits and vegetables. The work\u2014legal under U.S. child labor law\u2014is often back-breaking and sometimes dangerous. \u201cThe Harvest,\u201d a brilliant and poignant film by director Roman Romano and producers Shine Global, followed the lives of three migrant children as they struggled to overcome exhausting work, missed educational opportunities, and social disruption.<\/p>\n 9)\u00a0\u00a0State\u00a0<\/em>attempts to roll back child labor laws.\u00a0<\/strong>Conservative legislators in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Maine worked to reduce child labor protections in 2011. The Maine legislature increased the number of hours teens can work during the school week from 20 to 24 and allowed them to work till 11 p.m. at night. In Wisconsin, legislators pushed through changes\u2014without a public hearing or debate\u2014that removed restrictions on the total hours that 16- and 17-year-olds can work. A bill to weaken protections in Missouri went down to defeat but legislators essentially got their way by defunding the<\/strong>\u00a0state labor investigation team.<\/p>\n 10)\u00a0<\/strong>President Obama issues waivers for countries that use child soldiers.<\/strong>\u00a0For the second year in a row, the President decided to waive congressionally mandated restrictions on giving military assistance to Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Yemen because they continue to use children in their armed forces. Issued in the name of \u201cnational security,\u201d the waivers will result in thousands of children\u2014some of them very young\u2014being forced into armed conflict, including many young girls forced into sexual slavery.<\/p>\n \u201cThis list serves as a painful reminder that much work needs to be done in 2012,\u201d said Sally Greenberg, a co-chair of the CLC and NCL\u2019s executive director. \u201cCorporations need to tighten their supply chain monitoring. Consumers need to make informed purchases and let companies know that child labor is an issue that they care about. It\u2019s also imperative that we let the Department of Labor and congressional members know that the safety of children working in U.S. agriculture requires the immediate implementation of the proposed child safety rules, which are 40 years overdue.\u201d<\/p>\n ###<\/p>\n About the Child Labor Coalition<\/strong><\/p>\n The Child Labor Coalition is comprised of 28 organizations, representing consumers, labor unions, educators, human rights and labor rights groups, child advocacy groups, and religious and women\u2019s groups.\u00a0It was established in 1989, and is co-chaired by the National Consumers League and the American Federation of Teachers.\u00a0Its mission is to protect working youth and to promote legislation, programs, and initiatives to end child labor exploitation in the United States and abroad. For more information, please call CLC Coordinator Reid Maki at\u00a0(202) 207-2820<\/a>[reidm@nclnet.org<\/a>].<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" January 12, 2012 Contact: Reid Maki,\u00a0(202) 207-2820,\u00a0reidm@nclnet.org Washington, DC\u2014Advocates from the Child Labor Coalition (CLC), a group representing more than two dozen organizations concerned with protecting working youth, has released […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1720"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10866,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions\/10866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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