Don’t mention the Poor

If there is one childhood memory that stands out from all the others, it is this from my teenage years: I had just got a new (very dishy) boyfriend who’s father was Indian, mother Caucasian Brit. I myself was white middle-class, living in a very white middle class UK Home County (just to set the scene, you may have guessed what’s coming..). People who had been friends for years and never expressed an opinion on the subject before, began to call me abusive names and came up with all sorts of opinions about why ‘these people’ were OK but each should stick to his/her ‘own’. That didn’t hurt me per se, but racism is something I have never been able to stomach in any form (to put it extremely mildly), and now I saw a whole new side of people that I had previously been completely oblivious to, which devastated & shocked me to the core.

Why mention this now? Well I feel like I have this week had a very similar experience, but this time the ‘boyfriend’ was my introducing into conversation the idea that one might want to think twice before spending money with a company who were known to support oppressive labour regimes in their supply chains. At first it was laughed off and I was told I was ‘funny’ & ‘unique’, but when, with one eyebrow raised, I questioned why it was funny, those in the group started to shift uncomfortably, I was told I was entitled to my own opinion, and when I offered to show documentation to support what I had suggested, I was told very forthrightly – “No thanks!“

Well! Why do these concepts evoke such a powerful response? I am particularly interested in this group of people because they do not live selfish lives and very often go out of their way to help those around them both financially and with their time. They are intelligent, have religious backgrounds and profess to care about welfare and the poor. They are also not short of money themselves. I still live in a white, middle class UK (albeit different) Home County.

Firstly, there is the “No thanks!”, fingers in ears, ‘la-la-la’, I don’t want to know what is going on, because if I don’t know, I’m not doing anything wrong. There is a fundamental underlying thought pattern that says: ‘What I do doesn’t hurt anybody else. What I do in my own life is my business.‘ This is a concept known as ‘privatisation’, and is utterly flawed. We live in society, and society is more interconnected now than it ever has been. Every action has a consequence. In this instance, the decision to ignore the facts laid down in front of you and continue to do business with companies who deliberately turn a blind eye to

• the Worst Forms of Child Labour,
• to health and safety hazzards which are life threatening and maiming,
• to labour conditions and pay which force whole communities to live in abject squalor, without adequate housing and well, well below the bread line,
• and even to ‘bonded labour’ (in other words slavery),

supports these companies and ensures that these appalling living (and sometimes dying) conditions perpetuate. In our society there is a malaise which is the complete failure to think things through. As a society in general, we must start to recognise the responsibility we have for our actions.

Then there is the complete lack of comprehension of the power of consumption. ‘I am only spending 75p on this Tshirt. What possible difference can that make to anybody?’ That Tshirt would not be up for sale if it did not make a difference. That retailer is making a profit out of it, hard as it may seem to believe. And that profit is at the expense of a good many people involved in the supply chain. You too, are profiting from their labours, and in so doing condeming them to the conditions outlined above, if you think it through. Your consumer power is the most powerful weapon you have to combat these evils, and you can use it on a daily basis. Your money is the loudest voice these retailers hear, and at the moment all they hear is ‘the public want their Tshirts cheap, and lots of them. And they dont care how they get them.’ They are not hearing – we are holding you accountable for what happens in your supply chains. In short – People Matter!

I would also like to see an examination of the view that: ‘I have a right to cheap clothing* {*insert here any other product of dubious origins which is freely available on the market}. Do we? Yes, I have four children to clothe; and yes they trash and grow out of their clothing at a rate of knots; and yes I resent spending my hard-earned cash on these things that don’t last and are not appreciated; and yes, I do not have a lot of disposable income after the mortgage and bills are paid. But I have a mortgage, I have access to all the utilities, I have a disposable income for goodness sake! I’m rich! What right do I have to demand that someone else should lay down their life to supply me with items which, when compared, are luxuries. They are items that will never be afforded in these communities in Bangladesh, or Western Africa, or vast vast swaithes of communities across the globe. Why do I have the right, at the expense of others basic rights, and in some cases Human Rights?

Phew! I am aware that what I have written this evening is very emotive, but I hope it is also provoking. I have heard it said that we are a generation who are very well schooled but completley uneducated. Socrates said: the unexamined life is not worth living. Let us continue to examine, adjust, learn, and avoid at all costs getting our ears full of sand!

Another flat battery..

I have been struck by a paragraph in a book (Child Worker (Real Life Stories)) I have been looking at with the children, a picture in fact, which depicts a tiny 3yr old Indian girl sitting in a pile of stones, a wooden mallet in her hand and a look of determination on her grey dusty face.

The text that goes with it explains that she is breaking stones to collect manganese ore for the equivalent of £1.80 a week. The children sit in the sun all day doing this work, their skin itches because of contamination from the toxic dust. The long term physical effects are notable. For this little girl sitting in one position for hours at at time, she can expect to suffer bone distortion including a bent spine, cramped organs, damaged reproductive organs & pelvis inevitably having long term effects on childbirth. The sun will usually cause chronic headaches, the dust lung disease, and the manganese will cause manganism, an incurable condition which attacks the nervous system with symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease – fatigue, aching, clumsiness & gradual crippling. This combined with the effects of poverty and malnutrition paints a very bleak picture for her future.

Why is she doing this? India is the biggest exporter of manganese ore, which is used to make some ceramics, pesticides, fertilisers, steel and batteries. This is where it all falls apart for me. In our household, we seem to eat batteries. We could go through many more than we do, admittedly, as there is always a huge pile of items waiting for new batteries, the majority of which are not necessities, they are luxuries, and actually often rubbish. I just cannot tally in my mind the use of several batteries in some noisy irritating toy of my 3yr old, bought by some well meaning friend’s parent for his last birthday, now knowing what a child of the same age has to do to produce the raw materials for this disposable commodity.

But what can I do about it? Don’t replace the batteries is the obvious answer, but actually I can’t see that that will solve anything. Even if a mass boycott of batteries containing Indian manganese ore were to occur, this presumably would just produce more poverty in these desperate communities. Child labour itself is a very tricky issue. Whilst there is no question in my mind that young children like these should not be working in these conditions, the line is not clear cut in the cultures in which they live. The more affluent in their societies are just used to it and think nothing of it, like wallpaper, and the less well off cannot afford to eat unless all hands are on deck within a family. In the past however, children would help with looking after other children, grazing cattle, collecting firewood or some light agricultural work. These days younger and younger children seem to be doing heavier industrial work in the mining, cotton and silk type industries, and working very late shifts in retail and the hotel trade. One report claims that of the 246 million child labourers in the world, 50% are in India. Auntie Oscar’s blog provides a little more insight.
The scant few reports that I have been able to find indicate that the Indian government legislated against this kind of labour some twenty years ago, and has been making efforts ever since to aid these children out of hard labour and into education, but it would seem has met with very limited success, and lets face it, this is a huge issue for a country to deal with on its own. I feel that we in the West who are consuming the products of these labours must also have a part to play.

One tack is clearly the political one. Boycotts, legislation, aid. Raising awareness, writing to MPs. The other tack though is the business one and it seems to me that this would be as powerful and probably far more so than the political one. Who is importing from these mines? I haven’t been able to find out and would love to know. I would like to put pressure on these companies to budget into their annual expenses some money to plough back into the communities they are working with, to enable the younger children at least the opportunity to go to school, to raise the salaries of the older members of the families to make this possible. For this little girl in the picture, her parents would need to earn a mere £1.80 a week more for them to be able to afford for her not to work – how hard can that be to accomplish?

Interestingly this week there have been reports in the Indian press of a project by some children who escaped from these labours and have been in schooling. Fifteen of them have been on a 4000km cycling trip to take photos and make a short film about the everyday horrors of their peers. They have aired this at their own school and are hoping that it will be aired in schools nationwide. I would really like it to be available outside the country too so as to inspire those of us with financial influence (by that I mean any Western consumer as well as Western business) to act.

Q: – Do you have any experience in this culture – I would love your views!

– What would be an effective first action for us to take to motivate Western business, politics and/or consumers to tackle this issue?