Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

186 PLANET OF SLUMS
A Museum of Exploitation
i If the informal sector, then, is not the brave new world envisioned by
its neoliberal enthusiasts, it is most certainly a living museum of human
exploitation. There is nothing in the catalogue of Victorian misery, as
narrated by Dickens, Zola, or Gorky, that doesn't exist somewhere in a
Third World city today. I allude not just to grim survivals and atavisms,
but especially to primitive frt?s_gL_lQi!ti(),11. tJ:?:tllave been given
new life by postmoder11..glob.?:li.zation - and child labor is ;;-;ts-td-
ing example.
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Although children are rarely discussed by ideologues of bootstrap
capitalism, their extralegal labor, often on behalf of global exporters,
constitutes an important sector of most informal urban economies.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child - ratified by all countries
except the United States and Somalia - bans the most egregious
abuses, but as Human Rights Watch and UNICEF have discovered,
it is rarely enforced in poorer cities or across the divide of racial
and caste prejudice. The full extent of contemporary child labor,
of course, is zealously hidden from view and defies any straightforward
measurement; nonetheless, what has been exposed is
shocking.
A recent study of slum children in Dhaka, for instance, discovered
that "nearly half of boys and girls aged 10 to 14 were performing
income-generating work," and "only 7 percent of girls and boys aged 5
to 16 years attended school." Dhaka has the largest number of child
laborers in Asia (about 750,000), and their earnings provide half the
income in poor, female-headed households and nearly a third in maleheaded
families.41 Although Mumbai boasts of its high levels of school
attendance, Arjun Appadurai finds that its "gigantic restaurant and
food service economy [is] almost completely dependent on a vast army
of child labor."42 In Cairo and other Egyptian cities, children under
twelve are perhaps 7 percent of the workforce; this includes the
41 Jane Pryer, Poverty and Vulnerability in Dhaka Slums: The Urban Livelihoods Stutfy,
Aldershot 2003, p. 176; Victoria de la Villa and Matthew S. Westfall (eds), Urban
Indicators jor Managing Cities: Cities Data Book, Manila 2001 (number of child laborers).
42 Arjun Appadurai, "Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the
HOrizon of Politics," Emironment and Urbanization 13:2 (October 2001), p. 27.
A SURPLUS HUMANITY? 187
thousands of street children who gather and resell cigarette butts (a
pack a day otherwise costs half of a poor man's monthly salary).43
The world capital of enslaved and exploited children, however, is
probably the Hindu sacred city of Varanasi (population 1.1 million) in
Uttar Pradesh. Famed for its textiles as well as for its temples and holy
men, Varanasi (Benares) weaves its carpets and embroiders its sans with
the bonded labor of more than 200,000 children under the age of 14.44
In exchange for tiny loans and cash payments, incredibly poor rural
Dalits and Muslims sell their children - or their entire families - to
predatory textile contractors. According to UNICEF, thousands of
children in the carpet industry are "kidnapped or lured away or pledged
by their parents for paltry sums of money."
Most of them are kept in captivity, tortured and made to work for 20
hours a day without a break. Little children are made to crouch on their
toes, from dawn to dusk every day, severely stunting their growth during
formative years. Social activists in the area find it hard to work because
of the strong Mafia-like control that the carpet loom owners have on the
area. 45
Varanasi's silk san' industry, investigated by Human Rights Watch, is no
better: "The children work twelve or more hours a day, six and a half
or seven days a week, under conditions of physical and verbal abuse.
Starting as young as age five, they earn from nothing at all to around
400 rupees (US $8.33) a month." In one workshop, researchers discovered
a 9-year-old chained to his loom; everywhere they saw young boys
covered with burn scars from the dangerous work of boiling silkworm
cocoons, as well as little girls with damaged eyesight from endless hours
of embroidering in poor lighting.46
Another notorious center of child labor is India's glass capital:
Firozabad (population 350,000), also in Uttar Pradesh. It is bitterly
ironic that the glass bangles beloved by married women are made by
43 Nedoroscik, The City oj the Dead, p. 64.
44 Zama Coursen-Neff, Small Change: Bonded Child Labor in India's Silk Industry
(Human Rights Watch Report 15:2, January 2003), p. 30.
45 UNICEF, The State oj the World} Children 1997, Oxford 1998, p. 35.
46 Coursen-Neff, Small Change, pp. 8, 30.