Outraged

 

There's been quite a fuss in the media about Primark sourcing clothing from foreign companies - mostly Indian - which employ children and as a result Primark have said that those contracts have been cancelled.  The children were employed in sewing on sequins and ribbons, often as outworkers in their own homes. 

 

I have 3 hand knotted silk Kashmiri rugs which were in all probability made by the small nimble fingers of children - at 400 knots to the square inch I know for sure no fully grown adult fingers could have done the work.  The money I paid for my rugs made a profit for the shop owner, and for the person who owned the frames and supplied the silks, but it also helped feed poor families and possibly paid for one or more younger siblings to attend school.

 

For around 15 years now we have helped to support a school for 300 of the poorest children in a small Indian town.   Over time we have come to realise that the only really succesfull way of using that money and promoting the children's education is to provide a reward for regular attendance which is meaningful for the child and it's family.  The only useful reward and the only one which actually has a positive impact on the education of the poorest children, because it keeps them coming to school, is to reward attendance with cash money to replace the wages they could otherwise earn by labouring on building sites or by begging.

 

The shock and outrage here in the UK arises from the fairly new-found western belief that children should not work for money - and this moral outrage from a society which allowed British 11 year olds to leave school and go out to work only a hundred years ago.  Many children still do work in the west, but they work for their family business and don't get paid for their labour  - many farms, restaurants and small corner shops would go under if school age children were actually prevented from breaking the law by working for free.  On a BBC4 programme about London's Hasidic communities only this week it was quite openly stated that Hasidic Jewish children in London leave school and start work at 14 - two full years before the legal school leaving age.   So child labour is obviously tolerated here regardless of our self-righteous clamber onto the high horse of child protection for foreign children.

 

Now that those Primark contracts have been cancelled of course, those unemployed children will all go skipping merrily back to school.  Not.  Instead of sewing sequins on to tee shirts they will likely be employed in road making, carrying heavy hods of stones, or smashing large rocks into smaller chips.  Or they will be sent climbing up bamboo scaffolding carrying breeze blocks for new hotels or office blocks, or they will wander their towns rummaging amongst rat-infested rubbish piles for empty bottles, or tins, or old paper to sell.  They may even have to resort to prostitution or begging.  Some may starve to death.

 

But still, when all's said and done we have to do what we can to discourage children in other countries from following the life patterns which have sustained poor people throughout the ages so that we can wear £3 tee shirts with a clean conscience.