You must work - we must all work to make the world worthy of its children -- Pablo Casals
Labor day today should serve as a stark reminder to the active struggles undertaken to strengthen worker's rights and unions around the world. Indeed, many of these unions and grassroots groups are increasingly also recognizing direct connections between workers rights and the fight against child labor, and are supporting efforts to end the latter by forging alliances with global unions to achieve global labor standards (such as ILO Convention 182 ), and to move children out of work and into schools.[1] As it stands today, 61% of the world's child labor occurs in Asia, 32% in Africa, and 7% in Latin America, 1% in US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations. In Asia, 22% of the workforce is children. In Latin America, 17% of the workforce is children.[2]
While doing some of my own basic research on the topic, I stumbled across the photo gallery of acclaimed Bangladeshi photographer G.M.B Akash, the link to whose site I found in an email sent to a distribution list by a friend at Asha For Education, the non-profit I am volunteering at. Besides receiving numerous awards and international recognition, in 2005 Akash was awarded Best of Show at the Center for Fine Art Photography’s international competition in Colorado, USA. In 2006 he was awarded World Press Photo award and released his first book “First Light”. In 2007 again he became the first Bangladeshi to be selected for the 30 Emerging Photographers (PDN 30) by Photo District News Magazine, USA. I was much enraptured by the pathos that ran so deep in his photographs,and so instead of forwarding his link around in email distribution lists to other friends, I contacted him for an interview, which he was kind enough to consent to give, even though he was traveling on various assignments to remote places. Here is a summarized transcript of the exchange that followed:
Q:Could you provide some background on the stories behind some of your images focused on portraying child labor in South Asia?
A:For a long time, I have been focusing my attention on portraying people living on the edge of society and have done this in various countries like Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Children in poor countries spend long days working under very unfavorable conditions. Child Labor an issue closely connected with poverty, education, socio-economic exploitation and discrimination. These factors keep children out of school and force them to work under harsh and dangerous, unhealthy and fatal circumstances.Child workers are subject to abuse, both physically and mentally, by their employers. These youngsters even risk their lives for low pay.
Q:What motivated you to capture difficult lives of others? When and how did this quest start?
A: My passion for photography started in 1996 when I received an old camera from father,and I started taking photographs randomly. I was fascinated by taking photos,and did not know why I was taking them, but I felt an itch in my hands if I did not push the camera shutter button. Before 1998, I did not know why I was taking photos, but I always interested in people and portraying their life. In 1998, I saw a photo exhibition in a gallery on HIV AIDS which portrayed how HIV patients were being treated by other members in their society. The exhibition changed my perception completely - I saw the power of images and felt that I have to take pictures to send a message to people and use the images for social change.It was then that I started to work on different difficult projects like child labor, sex workers etc. For the last four years, I have been working on child labor. Child labor has been forbidden in Bangladesh since 1992. In December 2005 I visited a garment factory in Narayanganj, which is the center of the garment industry in Bangladesh. I took a picture of the owner beating a 12-year-old boy because he had been too slow sewing t-shirts.
Q:What do you hope to achieve though your photography? Public awareness of this already widely documented problem, I suppose, but perhaps your first hand photo journalistic narrative accounts for more - after all, what you see is what you get...
A: Through photography, I want to do 2 things - bring to light things that should be changed positively, and things that should be appreciated. I believe photography can bring about a lot of change - anybody in any part of the world can understand the language of images. According to the U.N. Children’s Fund report, more than 6.3 million children under 14 are working in Bangladesh. Many of them work under very poor conditions; some of them even risk their life. Factory owners pay them about 400 to 700 taka (10 USD) a month, while an adult worker earns up to 5,000 taka per month.The fact is widely known, yet for a long time nobody seemed to mind. With my work I want to confront the people with the problem of child labor and motivate the people who begin to think about it — in poor countries where children are employed and in the rich countries of the Western world where products are sold that have been produced by children. My intention is not only to show the children at work as victims of bad bosses exploiting them, but I want to show the complexity of the situation: The parents who send their little boy to work in a factory because they are poor; the child who has to work to earn a living for the family; the boss of the factory who is being pushed by big garment companies to produce for less money; and the Western consumers as clients who buy cheap clothes. I think it is impossible to abolish child labor completely in a very short time, but I am sure it is possible to improve the working conditions for the children and to bring more from factory work into the schools.
Q:How has your photography changed you and others who view it? How have the subjects of your photography had an impact on you on a real-life basis?
A:Everybody knows that these scenarios have prevailed for a long time, yet nobody takes any initiative to stop them or improve the conditions. Through my work, I want to confront people with these problems and motivate them to speak out and say that these things should not continue — and also to change the basic working rights of children and the low wages given to them. My one and only wish is that these children get back onto a normal track of life and that they never be put in any other vulnerable circumstances again in their lives.
Q:What has your first hand experience been with these children, given that you have actually seen them in their condition?
A:Once I took a picture of a seven-year-old boy working in a bulb factory. His job was to check the bulbs by hanging them into an electric wire - without any protection. He had to do this very fast and any small mistake would have killed him. I only took two pictures before the manager threw me out of the factory. I didn’t even have the time to ask the boy’s name. Sometimes I just climb over the fence to get into a factory to take pictures; sometimes - like in this case - I go there with a friend who pretends to want to talk to the boss while I run into the working place.
Unfortunately, the real-life enactments of most of these images are all too common in many parts of the third world including South Asia. The fact that children are almost always employed in jobs in all spheres of the unorganized rural sector - ranging from working at construction sites to garment factories, to being the coffee boy at a local dhaba to the very omnipresent houseboy or naukar sweeping household floors, the presence of this obvious abominable phenomenon is, not unconscionably, but rather matter-of factly accepted at various levels of society in the Indian Subcontinent. Even so however, Akash's photographs seemed to have an unsolicited and distress-invoking saddening effect. They brought forth the story of people's lives and galvanized them into an undeniable truth that left you strangely feeling like you've never really seen these images before, except now through the eyes of the lens that took them.
To take a stab at the issue, successful eradication of child labor can only be achieved through positive social engineering combined with national economic growth. A solution cannot occur at the expense of acknowledging the fact that child labor is not an isolated phenomenon that can be tackled without taking into account the socio-economic mileu which is at the root of the problem. There have been advocates for reform in the form of boycotting products built through child labor, but one needs to consider the feasibility of this approach given that the manufacturing drive in some countries rests on the laurels of its so-called minimum labor costs, which translates at least partly into child labor costs as the latter are substantially lower than the wage of adults for the same work. Every time you go to buy a doormat from Walmart, or a pair of cheap scissors, chances are that you are unconsciously contributing to this practice by being at the demand side of the supply chain. Of course, everyone cannot be expected not to want to buy the cheapest goods available, but in theory if the market won't exist, neither will the jobs. In theory it would even help if you turn to buy products from a developed country; but a rather probing realization also lies in understanding that boycotting such products (for instance, garments such as those produced in garment factories in Bangladesh) may only coerce such children to resort to even more hazardous professions such as stone-crushing, street-hustling or sifting through trash, begging, stealing, prostitution or death.
The British historian and socialist E.P Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class draws a qualitative distinction between child domestic work and participation in the wider labor market. Further, the usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current trends has been disputed. Economic historian Hugh Cunningham, author of Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, notes that: "Fifty years ago it might have been assumed that, just as child labor had declined in the developed world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so it would also, in a trickle-down fashion, in the rest of the world. Its failure to do that, and its re-emergence in the developed world, raise questions about its role in any economy, whether national or global."[Wikipedia]
Apart from national policies that need to be implemented effectively, there is an even greater imperative need to sustain and support the work of non-profits that focus on the issue of child labor and concentrate their efforts on education of children. To that effect,Akash and I would both like to strongly urge you to donate to this cause and support these efforts, by following the link here :https://www.ashanet.org/siliconvalley/marathon/runnernet2/public.php?2009TASF1027
Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children -- Albert Camus
Other references to photography
1.G.M.B Akash - http://www.gmb-akash.com/ . Gallery for Born to Work
2.Heldur Netocny, Mark Henley, Stuart Freedman,Fernando Moleres,Dieter Telemans on Panos Pictures
3.Vikas Malhotra - He covers a wide range of other subjects also, unlike the rest of the above, but do check out his gallery. Don't forget to check out his Streets of Old Delhi, Jabalpur, Pushkar, Varanasi galleries (to say the least).