Child labor continues in rural Mon areas and along Burma’s eastern frontier, according to a new report released by Woman and Child Rights Project (WCRP) on Nov. 20.
The 54-page report entitled “Children for Hire: A portrait of child labor in Mon areas,” highlights the use of underage workers in agriculture, furniture factories, and restaurants in Mon and Tenasserim areas as well as along Burma’s eastern border.
Drawn on 67 interviews with working children, child protection officers and others, the report provides first-hand accounts of the causes and consequences of child labor.
“If I didn’t work one day, I wouldn’t eat that day, so there are no holidays for me,” reads one interview with an 11-year factory worker.
WCRP also interviewed underage workers’ families, aid workers, members of the public sector and civil society.
WCRP Project Manager Mi Sautajo stated in a press release, “it was important to see and verify that there are significant amounts of child labor in Mon areas.”
Mi Sautajo says that despite Burma’s ratification of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1991, endemic troubles like lack of access to healthcare and education are still causing many children to be “trapped in struggles with poverty and hard labor. Children are not accessing their fundamental rights.”
WCRP found that child labor is being used in several major industries, including farming on rubber plantations and betel nut orchards, furniture factories and local restaurants. Children have been employed as day laborers collecting plastic for recycling, clearing weeds on plantations, and working as cowhands and woodcutters.
“I have to work because my family would not have enough food without my income. I would like to join school like the other children. I want to play like them,” said one interviewee.
The report recommends that President Thein Sein “Create a single, nationwide, uniform legal definition of a “child” as being under 18 years of age; to strengthen legal frameworks with substantive child protections that go beyond general provisions in the 1993 Child Law and reflect commitments made since the 1991 ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.” Support for ethnic schools that would equal government-run school funding is also recommended.
WCRP also urged non-state armed groups, civil society organizations, Mon communities, donor agencies and foreign investors to increase efforts to end child labor in Burma.
