Development, Urbanization, Migration, and Quality of Life - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 113

half the income in poor, female-headed households and
nearly a third in male-headed families.
Millions of children work 10 or 12 hour days in dan-
gerous, medieval conditions in glass, match, textile dyeing,
and carpet factories, gravel pits and brick kilns. They tote
bricks for construction, carry baskets of raw sewage out of
drains, and pick through garbage for anything salable. For
the “boss” or factory owner, paying child labor a pittance is
better than buying machinery for a fortune. Long hours,
with lack of nutrition, combined with virtually no safety
standards, means that accidents are commonplace. Dust,
fibers, and chemicals cause respiratory damage and blind-
ness. A villager in northern India proudly showed me his
7-year-old son at work weaving a magnificent carpet in a
small, mud brick enclosure with one tiny window . The air
was thick with fiber from the wool.
Another form of injustice is bonded labor . People
who need money and have no assets to back a loan
pledge their children' s labor as security to the money-
lender. Interest rates are usurious and borrowers rarely
get out of debt. Therefore, their children are relegated to
a life of toil. In the Hindu, sacred city of V aranasi, carpets
and saris are woven by the bonded labor of more than
200,000 children under the age of 14, some as young as
5 according to Human Rights Watch.
Glass bangles, popular with Indian women, are often
made by children in horrendous factory environments.
They carry molten globs of glass on the ends of iron rods
that they have drawn from furnaces with temperatures of
2,732

will literally starve to death. Working children are facts
of life in many parts of Asia.
Enforcing child labor laws is problematic given
Mafia-like control over disguised factories, hidden chil-
dren, corrupt officials, and dire poverty in certain re-
gions. Furthermore, not all work environments are
terrible. Significant numbers of children work as contrib-
utors to the family farm or business in relatively decent
conditions. Many go to school as well.
Education works against child labor. In places where
school attendance is enforced, child labor rates decline.
Still, families in poverty must make a decision as to
whether long-term gain, via education, is worth the wait
in terms of their immediate needs. Education requires
expenditures for topics, uniforms, and food. This money
and time spent must be balanced against lost wages.
Official and other organizations, while making efforts
to end enslavement, brutality , and unsafe and unhealthy
work environments, try not to further impoverish fami-
lies or children by removing them from the workforce
altogether. Instead, they attempt to get the children and
keep them in school and improve working conditions.
Half-day classes are common in such countries as
Myanmar, and children work before or after school. In
Bangladesh, garment workers' unions actually run
schools.
Child labor may be unacceptable in societies flush
with palliative programs for the less fortunate, but in so-
cieties characterized by large numbers of desperate poor
and limited if any safety nets, a single working child
might be the only solution to survival.

C). Factory floors are commonly strewn
with broken glass, and many children have no shoes to
protect their feet. If a child is hurt and can't work, she is
fired and sent back to the streets.
Worldwide, the largest sector of child labor is do-
mestic service. Surveys of middle-income society in
Colombo, Sri Lanka and Jakarta, Indonesia revealed that
one in three households had a domestic worker younger
than 14. In Kuala Lumpur and other Malaysian cities,
most domestic workers are children and teenagers from
Indonesia who are forced to work 16 hour days, 7 days a
week with no scheduled rest periods—ever!
Most people condemn these practices and decry the
cruelty of child labor no matter what the circumstances.
Sanctions and boycotts might be successful in removing
significant numbers of children from deplorable work
environments, but the story is more complex.
Realities often make child labor essential for family
survival. Many children of poverty have been sold into
servitude by desperate parents. Many have crippled or
diseased parents, or none at all. Without income they

F (1,500

WOMEN AND SUPPLY CHAINS
In economic development zones, 80 to 90 percent of
workers are women, resulting in the coinage of the term
feminization of labor . Companies hire women, espe-
cially in assembly-line industries such as electronics, be-
cause they are considered to have “nimble fingers” and
are more obedient than men. Moreover, in virtually all
cases they are paid less than male workers. No benefits
are provided. T Twelve-hour days and seven-day work
weeks are common. While “cheaper” women are em-
ployed in factories all over Asia, we will focus on this
phenomenon in China and the Philippines in the re-
gional chapters.
We have all had visions of hundreds of women slaving
away on assembly lines—one person puts a sleeve on a
shirt, the next one sews on a button, and so on. In the
twenty-first century , everything has changed. Employees