Ban on Imports (Child Labour) (Hansard, 25 July 1989)

§ Mr. Jimmy Dunnachie (Glasgow, Pollok)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to prohibit the sale of imported goods, the manufacture of which has involved child labour. I place before the House a Bill that seeks to ban the import of goods that have been produced using child labour. I do so because to use children in this way is a crime. It denies their right to be treated as human beings while, at the same time, denying the right of adult workers to earn a wage worthy of their labour. As long as we buy the goods that child labour produces, we help to maintain a system that our own history has proved evil.

Today, I shall cite examples of child exploitation in India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, South America, Turkey and Portugal. This is only scratching the surface, because child labour is so commonly used that it is impossible to detail the full extent of its misery in 10 minutes.

Children today work in conditions every bit as wretched as those that prevailed in the darkest days of our own industrial revolution—when little mites were forced to toil from dawn till dusk in unhealthy, poorly lit, badly ventilated and highly dangerous conditions because the pittance doled out to them by the profit-hungry capitalists was needed to eke out the miserable wages that were grudgingly given to their parents.

Such vile conditions epitomise the very worst of those Victorian values that are so highly revered in certain quarters—values that set the human soul at naught in the all-pervading pursuit of profit.

My interest in the evils of child labour was aroused by various media reports, and, while I am pleased at the number of hon. Members who have signed the early-day motion that I tabled at Easter, I am sorry that the Government would not name the high street stores that currently sell goods that have been made using child labour, because, every day, all over the world, children are abused as they produce many of the goods we buy. Often they work in conditions of slavery—always in conditions of misery and injustice.

This is clearly seen in the now infamous story of India's carpet boys. In the state of Uttar-Pradesh 100,000 children work their weary little fingers to the bone as they knot carpets, 90 per cent. of which are exported. Children as young as five and six work up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week, and a boy of seven is described as a "skilled craftsman". They get just enough food to keep them working, are frequently beaten, and often have to sleep beside their looms because they do not have homes to go to as they have either been kidnapped or sold into debt bondage.

One of the biggest British Firms using looms here is E. M. Hill and Co., which pays its loom owners £105 for a carpet. The loom owner, in turn, may pay his four children £4 each—that is, if he pays them at all. What price the status symbol of those handwoven Indian carpets that sell in some London stores for from £1,200 to £5,000?

Next to that cruelty are the flames reminiscent of Dante's "Inferno", whose deafening noise drowns out the piteous cries of those who toil amidst blazing furnace temperatures, designed to rent asunder body and soul. 854 Life's punishments are meted out by making the doomed slave in temperatures of 1,800 deg. as they are forced to stretch into the mouth of a furnace to draw out molten material. They then have to run, carrying it on a seven-foot ladle, trampling on broken glass on the way. In such a hell-hole, is it any wonder that tuberculosis is rife, and hideous accidents and burns commonplace?

Yet those are the conditions that little children of eight and nine have to work in as they toil in India's glass factories. Their labour is deemed to be so necessary that the owner of the C. A. glass works, where Nescafe jars are made, has been quoted as saying: The glass industry cannot function without children. They can run much faster than adults and therefore production goes up. Similar conditions apply in neighbouring Bangladesh. The Daily Record recently exposed the shame of the Scottish tea company, James Finlay, whose chairman, Sir Colin Moffat Campbell, was quoted as saying: We are very proud of our achievements over there in Bangladesh. Those achievements involve adults having to work for 60p a day and children having to work with them. Sir Colin's claim not to employ child labour is on a par with the description of his home at Kylbryde castle as "just a medium-sized house". Thank God I do not share his values.

In Thailand, poor people are often forced to sell their children into slavery and a quarter of the work force is aged between 10 and 14. As outlined recently in the magazine Marie-Claire, conditions in Thailand's sweat-shops make those described by Charles Dickens read like life in a holiday camp. Examples have been given of children working in a soya sauce factory from 5 am one morning until 2 am the next. Others in an electric light factory have to cut through bare wires with their teeth. In a factory that makes plastic straws, kids work from 5 am until 11 pm, after which they are locked up to stop them running away.

In Malaysia, many children are forced to work as part of the family unit because their parents are too under-nourished to have the strength they need to meet their daily rubber quotas. The quotas are becoming more and more difficult to meet as the demand for latex products grows with the AIDS epidemic.

The BBC programme, "Child Slaves", also showed recently that children have to work as part of the family unit in Mexico where, at the age of 12 or 13, they have to tend the crops to make sure that the man from Del Monte says yes, that everything is ship-shape in Captain Bird's Eye's garden and that life stays jolly in the valley of the Green Giant. Life is anything but a barrel of laughs for the kids whose youth is eaten away by the greed of the multinationals. The "real thing" for kids in Brazil means that they have to toil in the sugar plantations to make sure that "things go better with Coca Cola" for the millions who drink it.

Nor can Europe be complacent. Children as young as 10 have been found working in the sweatshops of Turkey, sewing garments for customers who often ask that the products reach them without labels so that they can then sew in their own, unblemished by the sweaty calluses on the tiny palms that made them.

Everyone knows that Portugal's shoe trade has been allowed to flourish at the expense of British jobs. Its cheap shoes are in most high street stores. Even though Portugal 855 has been a member of the EEC for three years, many of those shoes are still made using child labour. Firms such as Marks and Spencer say that they try to ensure that the shoes they sell have not been made by exploiting children, but why do they not guarantee it?

I fear that, all too often, reasonable prices hide the real cost of the products that we are asked to buy, in terms of the misery and suffering that have produced them. Opponents will argue that such is life, and that to ban the imports would make life even worse for the children. Balderdash! Two wrongs do not make a right in any language and so long as we stand back and do nothing, we condemn more children to endure hell in their short lives here on earth. The time for mere sympathy is over. We must act now to make sure that child exploitation is ended.

Britain can give a lead here, because we are one of the biggest importers of goods that have been produced by child labour. We must now become the voice of conscience, through which the silent pleas of the abused cry out for mercy.