Indian clothes factory in Gap inquiry raided again by police

By Rohit Gandhi and Christian Cotroneo, CBC News

Last Updated: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 | 2:27 PM ET

CBC News

The Indian factory accused of being a child labour sweatshop for retail giant Gap Inc. is still in production.

Ten-year-old Sheikh Ali is being taken out of the sweatshop by the rescuers.
(Rohit Gandhi/CBC)

Following reports that the factory in Shahpur Jat was using child labour to produce garments for Gap’s children’s line, New Delhi police have conducted two raids on the factory.

Officers first descended on the factory Monday afternoon, finding 14 children in a single workshop. Children’s aid workers and journalists accompanied the police. On Tuesday, another 28 children were rounded up.

Reporters were told by factory managers to leave the premises, but not before recording images of barefoot, shirtless boys at work. Ten-year-old Sheikh Ali said he had been in training, without pay, for the last three months.

“I work from 9 a.m. till about 8 p.m. in the evening,” said another boy, who would only give the name Rahman.

The raids came a day after the British newspaper, The Observer, published stories about children working in medieval conditions at the south New Delhi plant.

The Observer said children were forced to work as many as 16 hours a day, without pay amid oppressive conditions, including being punished with rubber pipe beatings and having an oily cloth stuffed in their mouths.

Gap stops sale of products from factory

Vowing not to carry any products produced at the factory, Gap Inc., which operates 3,100 stores internationally, has since fired the subcontractor responsible for the abuse.

“As soon as we were alerted to this situation, we stopped the work order and prevented the product from being sold in stores,” Gap North America president Marka Hansen said in a statement issued hours after the story broke on Sunday.

“While violations of our strict prohibition on child labour in factories that produce product for the company are extremely rare, we have called an urgent meeting with our suppliers in the region to reinforce our policies.”

It’s not the first time Gap Inc. has had to face criticism over child labour in overseas factories.

In 2000, a BBC documentary discovered a Cambodian factory using young girls to produce clothing for Gap. For its part, the company says it’s striving to ensure subcontractors adhere to its Code of Vendor Conduct, which strictly forbids the use of child labour. In 2006, the company stopped doing business with 23 factories, citing violations of that code.

Authorities too lax, says children’s group

An Indian Non-Governmental Organization, Save the Children Foundation of India, had demanded the police action, saying authorities have been too lax for too long in tackling the issue of child labour.

“Police need to do a more proactive job,” said Bhuwan Ribhu, a lawyer and activist with Save the Children. “The labour department needs to do a more proactive job, the sub-divisional magistrate who is the implementing authority of the labour act needs to do a much, much better job.

“And on top of everything else, we as common citizens need to be more aware of these things. There are people living in the area. They should have immediately called the police when they saw this happening.”

Ribhu also called on the garment industry — a $10-billion a year business in India — to adopt an anti-child labour certification program, already in use by the carpet and sporting goods industries.

“It has to be on the ground,” Ribhu said. “And it’s high time the garment industry also takes a proactive stand and develops good, effective monitoring mechanisms with the civil society, the government and the trade unions to ensure that there is active public participation and there is no child labour.”

The children rescued during the raids were herded into a nearby police station to be interviewed before they appear in court Tuesday. It may take weeks for them to be released and reunited with their families.

On the Indonesian island of Java, the tropical morning is already hot as ten-year-old Anis climbs down from a bicycle-driven rickshaw on the busy street. She joins her friends as they enter school to begin grade five. Anis’s mother had to quit school when she was ten, to help support her family by selling homemade tofu. She and Anis’s father share a small dirt-floored home with extended family. They have scrimped and saved to pay for Anis’s tuition, books and uniform. They share Anis’s dream that she might one day become a doctor.

Investment in girls’ education is the single most effective way to reduce poverty. Educated girls marry later. They have fewer and healthier children. They are better able to care for their children and to provide for their families and themselves. They are more likely to send their own children to school.

Discrimination against girls begins at an early age. Social customs often give preference to boys. If poor parents can’t afford fees for all their children, they send their boys to school. If poor communities can’t afford to build separate schools for boys and girls, they favour boys. Female children often have domestic work and responsibilities that leave little time for school. Families living with HIV/AIDS usually rely on girl children to replace sick adults.

Poverty often prevents parents from paying school fees, and buying uniforms and books. Support services for students, especially child care and safe travel, are expensive and rare. Even when girls make it to school, they often drop out, because the schools don’t meet their needs. The teachers, curriculum and textbooks frequently reinforce gender stereotypes. The lack of female teachers can also make girls feel less secure.

Ugandans are all too acquainted with the concept of corruption.  The Lord’s Resistance Army, under the leadership of Joseph Kony, has terrorized the people of that country under the umbrella of Christianity for years.  Perverting the teachings of the Bible and the Ten Commandments, Kony has abducted an estimated 25,000 children.  With a trail of murder and rape following him and his army, Kony personifies ‘passion’ gone wrong.

Jennifer and Susan, arms linked, backs straight, hair tightly shaved, hiked dusty trails without shoes, their feet swollen and callused. They walked with thousands of other children, all rushing away from the danger of nighttime rebel raids on their villages and toward the safety of the town centre to sleep. Tiny boys in tattered clothing, girls with chubby cheeks clutching ragged dolls, others with foam mattresses balanced on their heads, others with nothing at all were walking.

Jennifer and Susan sang a marching song. “People in Gulu are suffering. Education is poor. Communication is poor. There are no more virgins in Gulu,” the girls sang sweetly in English. “They were all raped. Hear us now: There are no more virgins in Gulu.”

The children are called simply “the night commuters” or “night dwellers.” About 15,000 young Ugandans trek every evening from more than 300 villages, some more than five miles away into the safety of Gulu, about 175 miles north of the capital, Kampala.

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit. - Eli Khamarov

Growing up in a village in Angola, Fatima had to spend up to four hours every day collecting water from the river. It was a dangerous trek. One year, seven of Fatima’s friends were attacked by crocodiles.

But the girls carried a much bigger danger back with them to the village. The water was polluted and spread disease. As a result, when Fatima herself was not sick, she had to spend many hours each week caring for sick brothers and sisters, and when she grew older, for her own sick children.

In 1999, Fatima’s first child died after repeated illness with diarrhea. “Isabel was always sick, she could just never get strong,” says Fatima, hugging her second child, 13-month-old Fernando. “By the time Isabel was Fernando’s age she had been sick a dozen times. But, this boy has never once had diarrhea. Not once.”

In 2000 the Angolan Government and UNICEF teamed up to lay a pipeline from the river to the community where Fatima lived. Latrines, washbasins, taps and showers were then built, together with a filtering system to ensure every drop of water was drinkable. As a result, diarrhea rates dropped almost to zero, child deaths plummeted, and many girls (who no longer had to spend hours every day carrying water) entered school for the first time. A community water and sanitation committee now maintains the system and teaches hygiene to the rest of the community.

Unfortunately, Fatima’s village remains the exception rather than the rule in Angola. Almost three decades of war have left millions of people without clean water or basic sanitation. A huge task remains: drilling boreholes across the country, constructing major pipelines, establishing a national sanitation education campaign, and providing water to schools.

Clean water is an inviolable right, not a privilege. - Carol Bellamy, Former Executive Director, UNICEF

Not a bad deal.

If you were told that you could save a child’s life for a dollar, you would do it in a heartbeat.  The senseless reality is that millions of children in developing nations are dying because they cannot afford, or cannot access, an immunization that only costs one dollar.

When hundreds of thousands of people die in a hurricane or tsunami, the world seems to stand still.  It seems so unfair that ‘mother nature’ would deal those cards to innocent, unsuspecting people.  The element of surprise, combined with the fact that nothing could have prevented it, seems to create an eerie sense of awe.  What, then, do we feel when more people die as a result of something that is completely preventable?

The only word to describe this is Injustice.

Have you ever had diarrhea? So have 300,000 poor children. They died of it, this year. Almost 11 million children under age 5 died in 2000, mostly from preventable diseases.
Stop, read that again. Nearly 11 million under the age of 5 died in 2000, mostly from preventable diseases. The Boeing 747-100SR airplane seats 550 people. It is like stacking a 747-100SR full of kids and then downing it into the ocean, every 24 minutes, every hour, every day, every week of the year. Have a nice sleep tonight.
How do we know that it’s not getting any better? Because 97 percent of the world’s population growth takes place in the developing world. This is true despite the sad fact that the infant mortality rate per 1000 births is 7 in northern Europe, 51 in South America, and 108 in Eastern Africa.

There are 2.1 billion children in the world, accounting for 36% of the world’s population. Some 132 million children are born each year. One of every 12 children dies before they reach five, mostly from preventable causes.

Where are you from?  What nationality are you?  These are pretty common questions.  Imagine not being able to give a straight answer.  Imagine a life where no country will claim you as its own.  This is a situation called Statelessness.

“No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality, nor denied the right to change his nationality.”
– 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights

Follow the process.  A young expecting mother flees her war torn homeland for economic and political exile.  Two weeks after arriving in her new home country, her child is born.   That child is not given a birth registration of any sort.  That child, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, does not exist.  The worst is yet to come as this little boy will not have the ability to go to school to get a proper education.  No education and no birth certificate means no real job opportunities.  Some realistic options are bonded labour or crime.  After a long life of manual labour and the frustration of not having a real identity, the final slap in th face is dealt.  No death certificate, no real burial plot, no lasting proof of existence.

In the Mirpur area of Dhaka, twenty-two-year-old Han spends his days in a small two-floor wooden structure completely filled by two huge looms and a set of narrow steps leading upstairs.  Sitting for long hours at the machine is not physically difficult for him because he has worked like this since he was age ten.  He can produce about three saris in a nine or ten hour work day, with a break every three hours.   A six-meter garment made by two people is sold for about 300 Taka, approximately $5.00.  Most of this earning is used to rent the equipment from a local Bangladeshi owner, and the rest Han uses to help support his parents and siblings.  Han acknowledges that the camp where he lives needs education and a technical institution, but he says that what Biharis really need is a solution.  “We are not citizens of Bangladesh or Pakistan.  It’s like being in a ‘hanging position.”

Chapter 6 Sample

Kamal is a young man of 22. He is lying on a bed in the intensive care ward after having undergone surgery on his left leg. His arms and his face are heavily burnt; he is covering the scars with a towel while he speaks:

“I am from Baghdad. My job is to work as a guard for a security company. About two weeks ago, we were travelling from the north towards Baghdad in a convoy to deliver goods. I was sitting on the first car, a pick-up-truck. Suddenly there was an explosion. I went unconscious. When I woke up for some seconds I saw the driver of my car lying next to me - he was dead. The other two men in the car were also wounded. They brought us to this hospital. I have several fractures in my left leg and these burns on my face, my arms and my side. In total 22 per cent of my body surface was burnt. I had surgery on my leg. All in all, I am happy I am still alive. When I get out of the hospital I will continue to work as a guard. Life has to go on!”7

Jamie McIntosh
Executive Director - International Justice Mission Canada