"With Gap Inc. under fire for selling clothes made by children in India, activists and police raided a sweatshop in New Delhi where 14 boys were embroidering women's garments Monday, illustrating the widespread problem of child labor in the South Asian country."
When I first read this, I thought that it was the same old line about how horrible child labor is and that it must be abolished at all costs. Don't get me wrong, I believe that child labor is horrible (how could I not?) but I feel that sometimes it is neccessary to make third-world countries less impoverished. However, the article went on to state that, " India's transformation in the past decade into an emerging global economic power has done little to alleviate the country's widespread poverty - and the problems that go along with it, such as child labor."
It should also be noted that about 13 million children work in India, many of them in hazardous industries, like glass making, where such labor has long been banned.
The article stated that the boys had not only been working 15 hours a day in a sweatshop with horrible conditions, but they were sleeping that same place. Many had been sold into this line of work years before; some had just left with promises of money for their families. However, they had never been given the promised wages.
The sweatshop had been found just a few houses down from the "now-shuttered operation that made Gap clothes." Gap said that the sweatshop was being run by a subcontractor who was hired in violation of Gap's policies, and that they won't sell any of the products in stores. At least, that's what it said in the second article I read about this. If you're interested in all the details you can find it at http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/pf/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1333&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20071029%2F1326021175.htm&sc=1333. However, the first article I read stated that, "Gap terminated the relationship with the subcontractor and said that all of the 700 blouses made there will be destroyed." That version sounds a lot more defensive, and the destroying of the blouses sounds a lot to me like destroying evidence. Personally, I think it would be better if they donated those blouses to all the impoverished families, and not just destroyed these kids' hard, un-paid work.
If you're interested in reading the first article I read, it can be found at http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx. Type in "New Delhi raids highlight indian child labor problems" in the search bar and you should be able to find it.
While Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer who works with Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or the Save Childhood Movement, said that, " International companies hire subcontractors and then forget about it. There is no monitoring at all," he places most ofthe blame on the Indian government, saying that it hasn't developed a way of monitoring factories at all. He added, "Where the Gap is concerned, at least they've taken a good pro-active stand against the subcontractors."
It seems like blame is shared all around, but for the sake of 13 million children, I hope something is done.
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5 comments:
Yeah. I mean, those poor kids put all that work into making those clothes, so why destroy them? That's sort of stupid, even though I can understand why some people may want to do that.
Destroying the clothes is odd....that is not going to take the blame away from Gap or India, nor is it going to help the children. To learn more about child labor in India, and if you want to help, please visit http://wiki.vibha.org/About_Overview.
I think it is rediculous that they would waste the clothing and destroy all the hard work that those children did. That wont help anything. It might make a point but i think it's rather silly. There are other ways to tackle the problem of child labor and sweat shops.
I agree that is completely pointless to destroy the kids' hard work, they should donate it or give it to the kids. This isn't the first time that Gap has been under fire for using child labor, I remember reading an article about Gap getting in trouble for using child labor a couple years ago...which shows that they still haven't changed even though they claim "the sweatshop was being run by a subcontractor who was hired in violation of Gap's policies," they should have known about this subcontractor and paid closer attention to where their products are coming from. I wouldn't be surprised if they had purposely been looking the other way and kept the subcontractor in order to keep production costs low. Even though children are being exploited, I don't think shutting down the factory is the right thing to do because for many families the little income that the children make are essential to putting food on the table. Instead of shutting down the factory they should create better working conditions, pay workers more, and have shorter working hours. Unfortunately this will probably not happen because Gap, like most other big companies wont want to spend extra money on poor, exploited children in India because they're only interested in profit...which is ironic because Gap has an entire line of clothing (productRED) that was created to help women and children with AIDS in Africa, so they're exploiting children in one country, but helping children in another.
Kind of like the Brazilian advertising signs we saw in Gov. class. Ok, I saw this article on the news the first day it came out. Now yes it is horrible that 13 million children are working in these factories, but if you have 1 billion people in your country in retrospect that is not to many individuals. But besides that point, I agree that the clothes should not just be destroyed or thrown away, there are plenty of people out there that are freezing at night or that do not have clothes that don't care where their clothes come from. I guess when one has money, like mostly everyone in our area in retrospect to where these factories are, we have the option to refuse to buy these clothes and instead pay for more expensive clothes made from fairer contracts.
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