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child labor
Submitted by johanneswilm on Tue, 2009/02/17 - 16:03.
Hey, we were up in Estelí this weekend, when we encountered this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7puwBMMMOQ&cc_load_policy=1
If anyone knows organizations that work with this kind of stuff please contact me about them.
Update: Given a series of strange emails I've received and two comments on Youtube, it seems I have to clarify some things, I thought were obvious:
1. We do not in any way criticize the girl for working given the circumstances that she lives under. We do not believe that anyone would rather work than to play and go school at that age.
2. The wage one receives for ones labor is not automatically just. Since the start of the labor movement, wages have been struggled for all over the world. There is overall a constant struggle for the distribution of wealth in society. Poverty is therefore not caused by the poor, but by wage relations.
3. Those who should be taken to court are the owners of the tobacco farm, who employ the girl and those who pay her father sub-subsistence wages.
4. The owners are to our knowledge not Nicaraguan and at any rate, their actions are not in any way an expression of Nicaraguan mentality or culture. As far as we know, they are Cuban-Americans living in Miami, FL.
Not Just Nicaraguan
I agree this is a problem. The "how to address this" is a big discussion. I just want to toss in a data point.
When I lived in eastern Washington, migrant workers picking fruit was the norm. What you would see was a whole family working together. For example, one family my partner met was picking Italian prunes. Dad would be picking from the top of the tree moving down to a child of maybe 5 picking at the bottom.
The workers were paid by the pound of picked fruit. At the time it seemed "fair". That is, the family could make more money and work together. What was missing from my 1975 analysis was pesticide residue, kids not in school and a general lack of worker's rights.
As long as lowest cost (I guess that means free market Capitalism) is the goal, you are going to have this type of problem. In the U.S. it tends to be addressed with legislation such as attempting to control immigration, required school attendance, I-9 inspections, ... That doesn't eliminate the problem as lower-costs push in the other direction.
Here in Nicaragua the problem certainly exists. Even a "family business" such as mom making cajetas or arroz con leche and a young kid selling it has much of the problems—the kid is not in school. On the other end, as the kids "belong her" (in other words, they are Nicaraguans rather than "illegal immigrants" there is at least some social pressure to do the right thing.
As was said in other posts,
As was said in other posts, it's not unusual to see whole families (including kids) work together, especially in farms and agricultural areas, an example is coffee picking, but it's more rare to see in the tobacco fields and very frowned upon in Esteli. However, keep in mind that in cities and developed countries we see kids in family shops helping out their parents but people understand the context and don't make a fuss about it. Overall though, it looks like region is in transition towards what one can hope is development thanks to tobacco and the transition isn't pretty or perfect but at least it's happening.
here we go
Again, Chaq
so what is your suggestion?
at least you are talking to the people.
but what are you saying to us? your language seems to be couched in some sort of pre-existent set of agreed-upon values, and we are just too late entering the conversation to be able to follow.
so is Ortega the problem or not? so is some cuban american the problem? better if there were no job for the girl? so is the famous cigar man the problem because he hasn't bought out the cuban american?
you seem to be sure already you know about the magic solution ;) ? so let us know instead of just nodding your hear and making the handshake ?
Man, you guys are really
Man, you guys are really aggressive.
We picked up one girl from the street. Why would I immediately know if her president knows about the Cuban-Americans acting the way they do?
There is one advantage in this case compared with others: the soil of Estelí.
Talking to people in Estelí, Ortega started charging these companies taxes, and they announced they would leave. Yet, that then didn't materialize and instead they have started paying taxes.
In a very different way, I've seen the same in many European countries: companies threaten to go away if taxes aren't lowered or at least stay at the same level. But taxes are finally raised, they stay anyways. Why? Because although they wouldn't admit it, there are certain qualities about the place they wouldn't want to miss.
I could therefore see several different ways of getting at this problem, and I'm sure there are others:
A. The government way
1. Pass laws that prohibit the export of large factory materials and limit the amount of dollars you can send out of the country with-in a week to say 100,000 USD.
2. Crack down on said tobacco-farmer and similar places and make them actually pay minimum wages (which can be adjusted somewhat upwards to mete the cost of the ganasta basica).
3. Any business that tries to flee the country after this, or goes broke, will be nationalized.
B. The union way
1. Tell US unions it's in their interest to help organize workers throughout Latin America, so that the competition between all of the workers of the Americas isn't as fierce.
2. Have US unionizers spread through northern Mexico, and Mexican unionizers through Central America.
Both of these are of course just basic models, and I'm no expert on this. The concrete way of doing it will first have to be figured out. Maybe all of you critics could start asking yourself what you have done yourself to better the situation, before criticizing me and us.
A very small but important step though is recognizing that because one is filming a little girl that is working, one is thereby not saying that she is somehow doing something evil. And also to recognize that poor people are not themselves automatically responsible for their misery.
I had no idea someone could see it that way, but given some of the earliest angry comments, that's an opinion that is out that.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
Not that simple...
In my view child labor in itself is not a single standalone "problem", that can be solved by a small bunch of measures as you suggest. Nicaragua now needs all foreign investors it can possibly drag in. Child labor is more like a symptom, caused by a whole lot of other problems: poverty, corruption, (civil) war, bad government, bad politics, bad judiciary, bad legislature, bad law enforcement, etc. It's not a coincidence, that you find most of those problems in Nicaragua. Unfortunately a lot of those problems were caused in the history of Nicaragua by western countries, as we all know...Nicaraguans are far more aware of "their" problems as one might think. That's why I can fully understand the post of Chaq and possibly other Nicaraguan PM's you might have received. Most western countries have also suffered child labor, even in the near past. Norway, Germany and the UK had child labor in the 20th century too! I hope this adds to the discussion.
BTW, I am a fan of your videos! Not in the least because they are unedited and uncut. I hope you will make many in Nicaragua.
Hi, thanks for your comment.
Hi, thanks for your comment.
I believe this is not first and foremost an expression of "bad government" in Nicaragua as compared to the first world. In fact, I think this has very little to do with bad government per se. As we all know, the US has had a non-elected president for 8 years and fought a bunch of illegal wars. Whether you like Ortega or not, he will never ever measure up to GWB. Yet: the average US American is still better off.
No the emails I've received somehow read into the video that I am blaming colored people for being poor -- I guess due to mental deficiencies or something.
Just because you are from a country, does not make you understand that better. The comments I've received have been from upper-class people with strong connections to the US, who likely would like their accumulation schemes on the back of everybody else. 9that's at least my interpretation of it)
I am a political radical, and so maybe I take a certain world model as given. Lenin saw imperialism as the "highest stage of capitalism" in which all profitable accumulation schemes in the first world had been exhausted, and further profit would therefore depend on super-exploiting the third world (he also believed this made third world at times better places to do a revolution). Later on dependency theorists calculated that countries exporting agricultural goods were continuously and increasingly more screwed over by the exporters of industrial goods.
With all this, I took it as given that the hyper-exploitation is to be blamed on western super-capitalist, and in part by local elites that work together with western elites to make radical changes impossible.
I had likely just chosen to forget that there apparently still are people around (the first world) who blame the situation of the third world entirely on themselves and their skin color.
Sorry, I should probably have been more explicit about that.
But the same happened to me in the US. Try to google "Johannes Wilm" and "Bisbee, AZ". You'll find a bunch of rednecks being angry at me as a foreigner speaking to a reporter of the local newspaper about the war being wrong -- back in 2004.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
One very concrete thing I'd
One very concrete thing I'd like to do would be to get in direct connection with some activist group in whatever western town one can find the owners of one of these sweatshops. The newsstory of when I a handful of other activists stormed the offices of the Norway Oil Company (DNO) in Oslo after these had signed a contract for oil drilling in Iraq -- even without consulting the Baghdad government made it pretty far back in 2005 or whenever that was. Mostly it seems these accumulation schemes have a very crude geographical division: sweatshops in the third world with gun men hired death squads, but main offices in downtown areas in western cities with absolutely no security whatsoever (but all very nice looking). Now the US is a little different, cause there are gated communities and a state apparatus with a KGB-style secret police, etc. . But in general I'd still it should still be possible to have some students urinate on the front lawn of that companies offices and get some media coverage on it in a way that would be impossible here.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
Contra-productive...
I don't think nailing the Cuban-Americans by bad publicity will work. My guess is this scenario will work out even contra-productive! What will happen? Nicaraguan cigars will be associated with child labor by the public in all export countries. Demand will drop and so will prices and export. Foreign investors like the Cuban-Americans might even pull out of Nicaragua. It might even affect negatively the Nicaraguan tobacco cultivation as a whole. Don't forget there are a lot of small tobacco farmers in Nicaragua and lots of families (including children) working the fields during harvest and in curing the tobacco. So quite some people might get unemployed and poverty will increase.
It's better to work on a more positive solution. One that stops child labor and even increases export at the same time. How? Well easier said then done, but a "child labor free certificate" could work better. If (all) Nicaraguan cigars are associated by the public as child labor free and marketed that way, then demand, prices and export will increase...and Nicaragua's poverty will decrease as long as the profits stay in the country...You might even find some investors on Nicaliving that will participate in making business plans. Don't underestimate the expertise of the NL-members.
Another post that is just
Another post that is just silly. You prefer to lie to the western consumer and not make them able to distinguish between cigars that are produced by people who earned a living wage and those made by child labor at sub-minimum wage rates. Good luck implementing your certificate. I'll support you (honestly) is you ever move a finger to get this implemented. Until then I'll blackmail people like the Cuban-Americans to stop their crap, if they don't want this to get _really_ public.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
Child labor has a place
Child labor has a place in the world economy, as long as it is neither hazardous or dead-end work, where the child-laborers can still get an education and thereby help get their families out of poverty, since an education (which most of their parents do not have) will ensure better-paying jobs in the long run.
A number of researchers in Latin America and the Philippines have come to the same conclusion: the less educated the parents, the more likely the child will work. The conclusion is simple: poverty appears to be the main cause of child labor.
Even the United States nowadays, does not have totally clean hands in regards to child labor. Mostly, this occurs with the children of migrant farm workers. Human Rights Watch says that child farm workers in the United States - the vast majority of whom are Latino - regularly work 12 to 14 hour days, often suffering pesticide poisonings, heat-related illness, machine and knife-related injuries, and life-long disabilities. Many are forced to work without access to toilet or hand-washing facilities or adequate drinking water.
Child labor exists for a long time in Nicaragua, before and even after the Sandinista revolution. Don't you think the Sandinastas (and the Liberals) are aware of this fact? Do you think you're the first one, who came up with the idea to create negative publicity on this issue by bringing in foreign media? Why do you think this hasn't happened yet, while the Nicaraguan law is very clear about child labor? Ask your Sandinista friends. The answer is simple: the Nicaraguans have come to the conclusion that they can't do without yet. Anyway it's better to let the Nicaraguans run their own country, you always will be an extranjero that intervenes with their internal affairs. And they are right.
Sorry, but this is again
Sorry, but this is again just ridiculous. The Nicaraguans I showed the video to react with the some kind of horror as my parents in Europe. One really doesn't need a range of studies to come to your conclusion "poverty appears to be the main cause of child labor". That is self-said.
As to the international media: someone doesn't like them to come. Given that the Sandinistas don't really control the media nor the international media connections (go to Montealegre and the MRS for that), this is another ridiculous argument.
There are black sheep amongst the Sandinistas, and I won't go into putting percentages on them in relation to the good ones. Also, there are big logistical problems. And there is most definitely a lack of international press contacts.
Of course I'm not the first person who sees this. I never claimed I was. Yet, the current situation is clearly not known everywhere, and so there is a need to get it out there.
The rest of what you're saying is unlogic: there is no assembly of all Nicaraguans where they decide to let US investors employ child labor. I expect you have your Nicaraguan slave-"friends" or rich golf Nicaraguan friends, I have other Nicaraguan friends, and they disagree with your friends just as much as you and I do right now. Besides, different from many other products, the tobacco from Estelí has special qualities, which cannot just be reproduced anywhere on the planet.
Given all the reactionary garbage answers I've received here (amongst a few select reasonable ones), I will not answer anymore of the garbage comments.
And please, no PMs or emails on this matter! -- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
For those who are new to
For those who are new to this kind of discussion: The strategy of using certificates has been promoted by the political right and the CIA for the last few years. Their idea is that this way you can avoid having Latin American governments get overly big from their perspective, the same time as the conscious consumer can choose a product that is organic, fair tree, without child labor, etc. . The "free market" can therefore just continue.
What are the problems with it? Well, many:
- Those who buy the products with certificates have no clue what they mean. For example the definition of the most popular "fair trade" seals means nothing more than that a certain minimum price or a certain minimum above the market price has been paid per pound. Say, the market price may be 1.15 USD/lb and the fair trade price 1.20 USD/lb for coffee. Yet it says nothing about how much the coffee worker ends up making per month, or whether its sufficient to cover his expenses.
- The products with certificates are only sold to a certain market segment. We're talking high spending academics. These may make up some 3-4% of the total market of coffee buyers, and the distinction in the end just hives western chains the chance to market the same product (coffee) twice to two different groups, at two very different prices. A pound of fair trade coffee may therefore very well end up costing 12USD in Danish stores, with normal coffee at 6USD. Normal consumers wouldn't all be able to afford the 12USD coffee either, and the academics use it to buy themselves a clear conscience. However as long as not everybody in the west is a highly paid academic, most of coffee production will also have to continue to be non-fairtrade.
- Certification costs a lot of money for the producer. It represents the privatization of government hobs of work place control. As such, someone has to pay for it, and the producer is being asked. Of course only ig fish are able to pay.
Because of this, and many more things, certification is a very bad idea. I don't want to sell some group of academics a good conscience, but I want to do away with child labor in general. There are laws to prevent this, both in the US and here, and they only need to be enforced. Also, the Cuban-American has no God-given right to move production in and out of Nicaragua as he pleases.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
I did my share
of tobacco fields working when I was 12!!! and and???? nobody forced me,I did it to have money on the weekends,even thou my dad was against it!! It's just life in a third world country,deal with it!!!! instead of trying to change the world!!
BTW. 90% of the tobacco growers are Nicaraguans,NOT Cubans, furthermore 90% of the cigar FACTORIES are Cuban owned. 100% of the Under Age/child employment takes place on the fields,NOT on the factories.
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seems like i got exploited
as a child as well. I came from a family of 10 children and in my family everybody worked as soon as they were old enough to handle a hoe or a pick.This included farming 20 acres of truck farm, digging postholes and setting fence on a 100 acre farm. Cutting brush and trees on various parts the farm as well as shrubbing in the years after cutting. It was often dangerous work if you didn't keep your mind on what you were doing.Dangers as diverse as rattlesnakes, losing a finger in a corn husker, or chopping into a artery with a missed hoe stroke. All labor that I was forced to do by my dear old tyrannical stepfather. I used to yell at him when I got old enough they'd have robots to do all this hard work and he'd laugh at me and reply he was ahead of his time-already had 10 little robots and get my butt back to work. It was my turn to laugh when I watched Johann's video grilling the family about the young girl working with them in the fields. I guess poor Johann never had to do a lick of hard work in his Socialist/communist life and forgets the old rule of those who don't work don't eat. Perhaps a few years of Maoist "being sent down to the countryside" would do his intellectual elitism some good.
Sure, I am agreed that children should be allowed to be children -go to school,and have lots of playtime. But, having grown up "old school" there's nothing wrong with children working to add to the communal family pie. You are born into the economic circumstances that you find yourself-it is only through hard work and using your native intelligence that you break through the bonds of poverty. Government programs and legalities are never going to do that for you.
I would vote that Johann go down into the tobacco fields and work himself for six months in the grueling sun to get some real work experience to go with that Sandinista bombast.
sorry BE but, . . .
too many people in the developing world have been working too hard, too long for too little. No one believes that hard work alone is going to lift the developing world up. So long as the developed world is content to exploit the developing world they are f@#ked. No one smoking a cigar in the US wants to know how it got there or that .01¢ from a cup of coffee goes to the coffee grower. No one thinks about the maquila and the label on their jacket. What's the price? Ask Kathy Lee how hard it is to make a profit without exploiting labor. Legalities are the only thing that reigns in the ugliest aspects of capitalism. It was true 100 years ago and it's true today. I worked on our farm too but, I was never sent to a farm to work - and it didn't keep me from attending school. I would vote that every north american, european demanding ever lower prices be made to know what that does to people in developing economies but, ohh they'd get conscience fatigue or some other euphemism for not giving a shit. sorry for the rant but, our working on family farms to "help" is not the same as it is in the developing world to "survive". It may have been at one time but, never in my lifetime.
guess you missed my corollary, Arlington
along with hard work I said also use your "native intelligence." As a former UN staffer and with some 75 countries behind me I have seen lots of the world, Third World and otherwise. Hard work alone will not lift a person or a nation out of poverty but it will help. Using your "smarts" will.It's not by accident that Costa Rica next door to Nicaragua is the highest per capita income in Central America..nor is it by accident that Nicaragua is the poorest country in the region. In both countries, both its citizens and it's politicians made the choices that have situated them where they are. Now I know that people like Senor Johan would like to point to colonial exploitation and say this is the sole reason for Nicaragua's poverty but that is far from the only reason. It's all about choices that countries and their peoples make-the same applies to us as individuals in life.
During my travels around the planet I have watched billions, if not trillions, of dollars poured into the Third World by the so-called First World. My own estimate of the amount of money or aid that actually reached down to the "grass roots" level would be less than 10%. The rest got siphoned off by bureaucratic procedure and corruption.So I am not a fan of "giving" things away.
One of the few programs that I ever saw actually work good was the USA's Peace Corps program during it's first 20 years of existence. After that too much bureaucratic malarkey began to get in the way. But from the Otovalo Indians of Ecuador to the hill tribes of SE Asia the Peace Corps did make a difference during the years before excessive government got in the way.
Now then as for Nicaragua it's up to the people of that nation to make their choices. They can continue to be poor and have the "beggar mentality" that now exists... or they can organize, make the political changes that need to be made, make themselves into a nation whose people work hard, make themselves into a nation that deserves credit rather than charity and then they will prosper-Otherwise, they continue to exist as they are.
for what it's worth
Who determines the price of coffee and bananas? Who determines the price of Washington apples? I think that pretty much is my case. I agree with you that giving cash is not the way to go. Giving cash to our own governments doesn't get any better results. Direct cooperative oversight of infrastructure projects with 99% local labour and engineering would be better. I also agree with you about it not being an accident that Nicaragua is behind Costa Rica in terms of development. I'm not sure we'd be in complete agreement about what factors led to this situation but, there'd be some convergence I'm sure. I think it remains the case that there is no free trade arrangement of equals between the developed and developing world and until that changes . . . well, I don't know where you go from there. I'm not a christian but, isn't there something about doing unto others . . .
I don't think it's just
I don't think it's just stupidity/being cheap amongst western consumers, although I agree with the rest of the comment. The way prices are defined in the west is oftentimes largely independent of production prices in the third world. So when the distributers charge 6 USD/lb normal coffee and 12 USD/lb for "fair trade" coffee, although the buying prices are 1.15 USD/lb and 1.20 USD/lb respectively there is something strange going on. The coffee obviously costs something more once it reaches the stores of EU/US. But how did the difference of 0.05 USD/lb grow to 6 USD/lb?
The thing is that chains make market studies of who is willing to buy a product, and how much they are willing to pay or can afford. So one product is marketed to working class, and one to the academics (see other post). But never will the fair trade coffee be sold at prices that the working class can afford or is willing to pay, and besides, the concept of fairtrade coffee is fundamentally flawed (see other post). If you push it through as a government thing (the other option I see is through internationalized unions), one should likely lobby for import laws to the EU/US to change in a way that only coffee can be imported, of which the workers producing it get a wage that allows them a reasonable standard of living (defined by some international body or another, like the UN). Then supermarkets would be forced to lower their profit rate, and maybe sell it 7USD/lb or so to everybody. However, given the overall corruption of EU/US, that is likely not to happen within the first few years. More likely would be some action by our national government down here. However, due to the
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
The logic employed in the
The logic employed in the above post is that to word hard (physically) is good in itself, independently of the social necessity for it. In the end I'm being disqualified from having an opinion at all. I really don't know what to say except that I myself am afraid to get a heart attack before I'm 50, given the amount of hours I work a day. But of course work in itself is not something positive. It is a necessity up to a certain point, but of course something that should be avoided as much as possible. Flying in westerners to paint a wall, built a chicken fence or cut some leafs of tobacco is most certainly not helping -- it just makes more Nicas unemployed, the western can feel a little better, and a lot of fuel is burned on nothing. There is one fault with the video: I turned of too early. In the continuation thy explain about their father earning 7.50USD a week and how the price of food simply doesn't allow for her to go to school. That is an outrage in 2009. And it shows that the world capitalist system has failed to provide for some.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
Heart attacks and work are not necessarely related
And surely writing reports to left wing political groups does not constitute hard work. I would suggest to Mr. Wilm that he not worry about heart attacks because of his hard work.
Once again I find it amusing to observe the "Union organizer mentality" of Mr. Wilm. It appears that he is too busy making Utube videos, and has little time to observe what is happening all around him.
Car makers, the perfect example of the all too fat Union Environment are shutting their plants all over the world. OPEL in Germany is bankrupt. 47000 overpaid, low skilled and under educated autoworkers out of a job. Why? Thanks to the incessant Union demands the factories are no longer able to afford to produce at a profit. SAAB --- Same story. Toyota on the other hand seems to be doing quite well without any union help.
Therefore, in my opinion, the very last thing Nicaragua needs is to unionize. I watched a demonstration by unionized truckers in Managua. As a matter of fact, I took the time to speak with a few of them to see what they were demonstration about. The demands were to abolish weight and size restrictions for trucks. Just what we need! More overweight unsafe vehicles on the road.
If Mr. Wilm really feels that unions are the answer to "Child Labor" in Nicaragua he should think again. So called child labor was very common on all farms in Europe, the US and the rest of the world. It remains so today. This is called working as a family and everyone pulling their weight. Maybe Mr. Wilm should try this at least once. He may actually learn something....
this post made absolutely no
this post made absolutely no sense whatsoever. Basically your logic is that life in the third world sucks, so it should stay that way. Well good luck being miserable the rest of your life, but some of us actually want to do something about it.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
thanks
well, i'm new here but i think you misinterpreted CHAQ who had no tone of anger in his voice. glad to see your comments. as a small business owner it sounds like i was right in my original suspicion: you're not really thinking about the difficulty of finding solutions. i see this with anyone who has never had to be the boss before. once you have the experience of being the boss, then you learn that you need to think about the unrealistic aspects of your brilliant ideas and then try to accept reality a little more, otherwise you are like a goat on a treadmill who actually thinks he is getting somewhere.
respectfully, if you have read the news about nicaragua you know that the pellas family, the FDC group, arnoldo aleman, and the ortegas are the only ones expropriating more than 100 large per week, so i have no idea what your first suggestion is meant to achieve. number two is pretty good, IF there is enough profit margin. why don't you ask the cigar mfg about the profits to figure out whether your plan is realistic?
when you come to your unionization suggestions, this reads right out of samuel gompers with the idealism of emma g., in case you haven't noticed, that propaganda isn't you're reality in the unions, which are nothing more than leeches that tax workers for their own benefit and provide privileges for the "FAMILY" while those outside the union can eat scraps.
thanks again for your further explanations, best of luck with your reaserarch and developement.
that's rich
Ah tobacco company, or any
Ah tobacco company, or any kind of company for that matter, as a charity? Employing children and breaking the law by paying sub-minimum wage wages? Yeah well, your concept of reality and those alike were what I previously referred to as something I had chosen to forget.
-- Johannes Wilm http://www.johanneswilm.org
your education
since *you* make it about you, now it's about you. you choose to ignore reality. the reality is that you don't know the economics of the people involved other than some family who may have lied to you to tell you what you wanted to hear. go ahead, post the video, but to propose solutions as useless as your'se, and to flat out say that you simply ignore reality, is the reason why people don't respect you.