FoxBusiness.com - More Countries Use Child Labor, U.S. Says

By Elizabeth MacDonald

Published December 16, 2010

FOXBusiness

 

The U.S. Department of Labor just announced it has added six new products from a dozen new countries, 11 in Africa, to the list of countries that use child labor or forced child labor to produce goods for markets around the globe. 

The Labor Department now says a total of 128 goods from 70 countries are made by child or forced child labor, meaning children under the age of 15, in violation of international standards. Many children around the world work in slave or bondage conditions, the department says.

The Labor Department says an estimated 115 million children worldwide are child workers, working in dangerous conditions that are hazardous to their health, says the International Labor Organization.

More than 12 million children and adults “are trapped in forced labor around the world,” the report says. The list of countries fighting child and forced child labor has grown to 170, including the U.S., which has taken an active role.

Forced child labor is still a major problem plaguing the world’s markets.

Children are either forced by governments into labor, or governments ignore companies that forcibly employ them, in Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand and Uzbekistan, among others.

Under forced labor conditions, children produce jewels and precious metals like diamonds, sapphires, gold and silver; clothes; coal; tobacco; food items like poultry, nuts and sugar; construction materials like bricks; and Christmas decorations, electronic goods, fireworks, footwear and toys; and pornography.

The worst forms of child labor include slavery, forced labor, debt bondage, trafficking, illicit activities like drug dealing, commercial sexual exploitation and armed conflict, as well as hazardous working conditions, such as mining for precious metals or jewels in lakes filled with chemicals and nothing more.

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said in a statement: "We consider the eradication of the worst forms of child labor to be a matter of urgency,” adding, “no human being should work under conditions of forced labor or debt bondage or be forced to work under fear of punishment. Shining a light on these problems is a first step toward motivating governments, the private sector and concerned citizens to take action to end these intolerable abuses that have no place in our modern world."

The Labor Department says its Bureau of International Labor Affairs developed the reports based on data collected from U.S. embassies, foreign governments, international and nongovernmental organizations, as well as information gathered from field research projects, academic research and the media.

The newcomers to the list are Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

India has the greatest number of child laborers, followed by China. Smaller nations in sub-Saharan Africa have a higher percentage of children, as much as a third of children under 14, who work in diamond mines or other factories instead of going to school. One in every four children in sub-Saharan Africa was engaged in child labor in 2008, the most recent data available.

But the Labor Department says there is some good news. It removed Brazil from the list for child labor used in charcoal production. And it says India and some other countries have moved to stop child labor through anti-poverty programs and compulsory education. Brazil, Thailand, Jordan, Ivory Coast and Ghana also won praise by the department for their efforts in fighting child labor.

In its report, the department also notes that “some countries with relatively large numbers of goods on the list may not have the most serious problems of child labor or forced labor,” adding, “often, these are countries that have adopted a more open approach to acknowledgement of the problems, have better research and have allowed information on these issues to be disseminated.”

The labor department says these countries “include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, India, Kenya, Mexico, Philippines, Tanzania, Turkey, Uganda and Zambia.” The Labor Department says it has spent more than $740 million in programs to help more than 80 countries combat child labor since 1995.

Iowa Democrat Senator Tom Harkin sponsored a law in the late 1990s that outlawed any company in the U.S. from importing goods made via child labor. In 2005, Congress passed the “Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2005,” which directs the Labor Department to compile a list of goods produced by child or forced child labor. The first list was produced last year.

Source: foxbusiness.com

http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2010/12/16/countries-use-child-labor-says/#ixzz18sSd6f3L

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• PHOTOS: 13 Products Most Likely To Be Made By Child Or Forced Labor (huffingtonpost.com)
• Catholic Church Fights Child Labor on Indian Tea Plantations (humantrafficking.change.org)

A dozen nations added to child, forced labor list

Associated Press December 15, 2010 10:44 AM Copyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Susan Walsh / AP

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis speaks during a news conference at the Department of Labor in Washington regarding the release of three reports on international child labor and forced labor, Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010.

(12-15) 10:44 PST 

WASHINGTON, (AP) --

The Labor Department is adding a dozen countries to the list of nations that use child labor or forced labor, as officials warn the global economic crisis could cause an upswing in the exploitation of children and other workers.

From coffee grown in El Salvador to sapphires mined in Madagascar, the agency's latest reports released on Wednesday identify 128 goods from 70 countries where child labor, forced labor or both are used in violation of international standards.

"Shining light on these problems is a first step toward motivating governments, the private sector and concerned citizens to take action to end these intolerable abuses that have no place in our modern world," said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

New to the list are Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The annual reports are not intended to punish or shame the countries where an estimated 215 million child laborers toil in factories, on farms or as domestic helpers. In fact, the agency says many of the countries that appear on the list are taking steps to address child labor problems. Labor Department officials say making the public aware of the problem helps promote efforts to combat child labor.

While the total number of child laborers fell by about 3 percent from 2004 to 2008, the rate of decline has slowed in recent years.

"I think the very recent picture gives us significant cause for concern," said Sandra Polaski, deputy undersecretary for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs. "That has a lot to do with the economic crisis."

India remains home to the greatest number of child laborers, followed by China. But smaller nations in sub-Saharan Africa have a much higher proportion of children — up to one-third of children under 14 — who go to work instead of school each day.

For the first time, the reports include a set of proposed actions for each government to consider to help reduce the problems detailed.

The agency praises India and some other countries for working to address the problem through anti-poverty programs and compulsory education. Brazil, Thailand, Jordan, Ivory Coast and Ghana also win plaudits for their efforts to combat child labor.

At the same time, the report calls out some of the worst offenders. They include Uzbekistan, where local officials require children to pick cotton, and Myanmar, where forced labor of adults and children helps produce everything from sugar and teak to rubber and rubies.

"They know what the problem is and they know how to fix it, they just need to get serious about doing it," Polaski said.

The problem is complicated in countries like India, Pakistan and Tonga that have no legislation setting a minimum age for work. That makes children more vulnerable to being pulled into hazardous or grueling trades.

Some of the most common products produced by child labor or forced labor include cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, bricks, gold, diamonds and coal.

Since 1995, the Labor Department has spent more than $740 million in programs to help more than 80 countries combat child labor.

The agency is also working to combat instances of child labor in the United States. Last year, for example, investigators from the agency's Wage and Hour Division found children as young as 6 working on blueberry farms in Michigan. Eight farms were fined about $36,000 for violating federal migrant-housing and child-labor laws.

Solis said inspections this year during the harvest in Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina have yet to find child labor violations.

Source: sfgate.com
 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/12/15/national/w000240S22.DTL#ixzz18midxjs1

Related articles

• More Countries Use Child Labor, U.S. Says (foxbusiness.com)
• PHOTOS: 13 Products Most Likely To Be Made By Child Or Forced Labor (huffingtonpost.com)

A dozen nations added to child, forced labor list - Yahoo! News

Wed Dec 15, 1:44 pm ET

 

 

 




AP – Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis speaks during a news conference at
the Department of Labor in Washington …


WASHINGTON – The Labor Department is adding a dozen countries to the list of nations that use child labor or forced labor, as officials warn the global economic crisis could cause an upswing in the exploitation of children and other workers.

From coffee grown in El Salvador to sapphires mined in Madagascar, the agency's latest reports released on Wednesday identify 128 goods from 70 countries where child labor, forced labor or both are used in violation of international standards.

"Shining light on these problems is a first step toward motivating governments, the private sector and concerned citizens to take action to end these intolerable abuses that have no place in our modern world," said Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

New to the list are Angola, Central African Republic, Chad, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The annual reports are not intended to punish or shame the countries where an estimated 215 million child laborers toil in factories, on farms or as domestic helpers. In fact, the agency says many of the countries that appear on the list are taking steps to address child labor problems. Labor Department officials say making the public aware of the problem helps promote efforts to combat child labor.

While the total number of child laborers fell by about 3 percent from 2004 to 2008, the rate of decline has slowed in recent years.

"I think the very recent picture gives us significant cause for concern," said Sandra Polaski, deputy undersecretary for the Bureau of International Labor Affairs. "That has a lot to do with the economic crisis."

India remains home to the greatest number of child laborers, followed by China. But smaller nations in  
sub-Saharan Africa have a much higher proportion of children — up to one-third of children under 14 — who go to work instead of school each day.

For the first time, the reports include a set of proposed actions for each government to consider to help reduce the problems detailed.

The agency praises India and some other countries for working to address the problem through anti-poverty programs and compulsory education. Brazil, Thailand, Jordan, Ivory Coast and Ghana also win plaudits for their efforts to combat child labor.

At the same time, the report calls out some of the worst offenders. They include Uzbekistan, where local officials require children to pick cotton, and Myanmar, where forced labor of adults and children helps produce everything from sugar and teak to rubber and rubies.

"They know what the problem is and they know how to fix it, they just need to get serious about doing it," Polaski said.

The problem is complicated in countries like India, Pakistan and Tonga that have no legislation setting a minimum age for work. That makes children more vulnerable to being pulled into hazardous or grueling trades.

Some of the most common products produced by child labor or forced labor include cotton, sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, bricks, gold, diamonds and coal.

Since 1995, the Labor Department has spent more than $740 million in programs to help more than 80 countries combat child labor.

The agency is also working to combat instances of child labor in the United States. Last year, for example, investigators from the agency's Wage and Hour Division found children as young as 6 working on blueberry farms in Michigan. Eight farms were fined about $36,000 for violating federal migrant-housing and child-labor laws.

Solis said inspections this year during the harvest in Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina have yet to find child labor violations.
Source:
A dozen nations added to child, forced labor list - Yahoo! News

Foreigners victims of abuse in workplace - KansasCity.com

Posted on Fri, Nov. 05, 2010 05:24 AM

By MARK MORRIS

The Kansas City Star

Related:

• Read The Star's award-winning series "A New Slavery: Human Trafficking in America"

Foreign workers in the United States on temporary work visas have been targets of fraud and abuse, a federal report concluded this week.

The study by the Government Accountability Office mirrors many of the findings of a five-part Kansas City Star investigation of human trafficking published last year.

The new report could spur federal regulators to probe deeper into such abuses, said workers’ rights advocate Mary Bauer, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“I hope this is the beginning of some government oversight of this program,” Bauer said. “This is a good first step.”

The study highlighted a Virginia fraud case reported by The Star in which conspirators obtained fraudulent H-2B visas for more than 3,800 workers and then charged them exorbitant fees and excessive rent for unsanitary and overcrowded housing. The H-2B program allows employers to hire foreign workers when U.S. workers can’t be found to take the jobs.

Such workers most often are found working legally in the construction, landscaping, forestry, manufacturing, hospitality and food processing industries. The number of workers who are defrauded or abused never has been clear, and the authors of the latest study said its findings could not be generalized to the entire program.

GAO investigators also went undercover, contacting 18 labor recruiters to see if they would encourage the agents to violate federal rules. Though 15 of the recruiters made no such suggestions, three offered advice on how to evade U.S. law, the study said.

To discourage American workers from applying for landscaping jobs, one recruiter suggested having applicants “run around the shop carrying a 50-pound bag to determine (if) they were fit for the work.” He suggested scheduling job interviews before 7 a.m. and requiring pre-interview drug tests to “weed out” qualified U.S. applicants.

Investigators posing as employers also heard suggestions that they fire all their American landscaping workers and replace them with foreign guest workers, who could be paid far less.

The report sought to answer a question posed by a member of Congress as to whether the GAO could find examples of labor recruiters and employers engaging in illegal or fraudulent activity within the H-2B visa program.

Enforcement questions about the H-2B program surfaced in Kansas City last week at the trial of an Ellisville, Mo., businessman who was convicted for his role in a human labor trafficking enterprise. Evidence showed that the conspiracy used bogus paperwork to fraudulently obtain hundreds of H-2B visas.

Under questioning from Assistant U.S. Attorney William Meiners, officials from the Department of Labor and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services testified that they have no way of determining whether the labor certification and visa applications they review are fraudulent.

“They just have not been allocated the resources to properly police and regulate the type of fraud that we saw here,” Meiners said this week.

The new federal report, which reviewed closed criminal and civil court cases and conducted spot checks on current workers, should help government watchdogs know what they should be looking for. The study outlined several issues, including:

•Employers not paying proper wages or overtime. Investigators found a New York carnival operator who paid his foreign guest workers less than $5 an hour, even as he worked them up to 80 hours a week.

•Employers charging H-2B workers excessive fees. In more than half the cases investigators reviewed, fees for visa processing, overcrowded housing and transportation reduced some employees’ paychecks to as little as $48 for a two-week period.

•Employers and labor recruiters submitting fraudulent records. The documents allowed some businesses to avoid hiring American workers or to exploit foreign workers by paying them less than promised.

All of those problems were highlighted in The Star’s series and were factors in the Kansas City human trafficking scheme recently prosecuted in federal court here.

The new study also found instances of companies receiving federal contracts even though they had faced criminal charges or settled worker lawsuits over wage or intimidation issues.

Investigators conducted site visits with labor recruiters and H-2B workers. Generally, workers said they were paid and housed adequately. But investigators found some cases that made them suspicious.

A West Virginia circus operator, who previously faced allegations that he had charged “exorbitant” recruitment fees and not paid his workers properly, was housing up to seven workers in a travel trailer.

And workers at a North Carolina seafood processor told investigators that they were afraid to speak with outsiders because their employer could retaliate.

GAO reports, such as the one released this week, can provide guidance to government officials as they consider how to reform programs that are inefficient or ineffective. But changes to the federal government’s human trafficking enforcement bureaucracy have been slow.

At the conclusion of The Star’s series in December 2009, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano promised to announce a “major set of initiatives” to escalate the battle against human trafficking the next month. Ten 10 months later, she still hasn’t laid out her plans, but a homeland security representative told the newspaper that there were plans to implement parts of Napolitano’s initiatives piece by piece over time.

As part of that piece-by-piece campaign, Napolitano in July announced the Blue Campaign, a Homeland Security program that seeks to improve public awareness, victim assistance programs and law enforcement training and programs to fight human trafficking.

In testimony to Congress in September, Luis CdeBaca, the U.S. human trafficking czar, said the administration had made progress by having federal agencies coordinate and improve their grant programs.

Other reforms to the H-2B visa program have been incremental.

Last year, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis told The Star she planned to add more investigators to the Wage and Hour Division. That effort is getting noticed. In September a national hotel trade association notified its members that the Labor Department is “heavily” auditing H-2B seasonal workers.

And last month, Solis said she is seeking authority to have employers pay H-2B workers what their labor is worth.

---

Employment problems
A new federal report on temporary foreign workers highlights several problems including:

•Employers not paying proper wages or overtime.

•Employers charging H-2B workers excessive fees.

•Employers and labor recruiters submitting fraudulent records.

---

@ Go to KansasCity.com to read The Star’s series on human trafficking.

To contact Mark Morris, call 816-234-4310 or send e-mail to mmorris@kcstar.com.

Posted on Fri, Nov. 05, 2010 05:24 AM

Foreigners victims of abuse in workplace - KansasCity.com

Source: The Kansas Star

Related articles

• Human trafficking domestic and international issue: RCMP (canada.com)
• Domestic Workers Most Vulnerable to Trafficking (humantrafficking.change.org)

U.S. Labor head visits Immokalee |Says administration supports all workers

Image via Wikipedia

By AMY BENNETT WILLIAMS • awilliams@news-press.com • May 18, 2010

1:10 A.M. — U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis toured Immokalee on Monday "to show the (Obama) administration's support for the farmworker community and in the fight against labor abuses."

It was the first visit by an Obama Cabinet member to Southwest Florida.

Rural Immokalee faces myriad labor challenges including the recent devastating freezes, perennially low wages and the stigma of being dubbed ground zero for modern-day slavery.

Solis' first stop was the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, where she donned headphones to speak on the nonprofit group's low-power community radio station.

Outlining her department's new "Podemos Ayudar (We Can Help)" campaign, which encourages workers to report labor abuses no matter their immigration status, Solis said.

"This department of labor is on the side of the worker. With or without papers, everyone has rights and there should be no fear of retaliation," she said.

Solis also spoke about "U" visas for victims of crimes such as human trafficking, before climbing up the stairs of a produce truck replicating the site of such crimes: the coalition's Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum.

The stuffy, windowless truck is like the the one Immokalee's Navarrete family kept its slaves in - 12 men forced to pick tomatoes in area farm fields - before family members went to federal prison in 2008.

The dark interior was so hot that Solis shucked her jacket as she moved from exhibit to exhibit, shaking her head at displays detailing Florida's seven federal slavery cases successfully prosecuted over the past 15 years.

Solis has a history with Immokalee; she campaigned there for Obama as a congresswoman and she spoke about the town in the first speech she made as a Cabinet member.

In February, she joined the 4,000-member coalition in Washington, D.C. as it signed a three-way agreement with East Coast Growers and Compass, the world's largest food-service company, to improve Florida tomato pickers' wages and working conditions.

Solis also participated in a roundtable discussion with community members at the Immokalee Technical Center that covered green jobs, more employment training and worker safety.

She told the approximately 150 audience members her department has added more than 250 new investigators in the past year, but asked for the public's help as well.

"We can't be everywhere, and we need people to help be our eyes and ears," Solis said.

Throughout the visit, she urged workers to raise their voices without fear.

"I'm here because of my boss' commitment to all workers and their rights," she said.


U.S. Labor head visits Immokalee | news-press.com | The News-Press