This Sunday is World Day Against Child Labor, and the UN wants to spotlight the 1,000,000+ children working in mines around the world. Child miners perform heavy physical labor in unsafe and unsanitary conditions. They risk injury or death from the awkward, heavy loads and the instability of underground structures. They risk illness from the chemicals used in mining and the exposure to the elements.
Mines are often located in remote areas without schools, legal services, or social services. The harsh boom-or-bust conditions lead child miners into prostitution and drug and alcohol abuse.
“Because the money they earn is crucial to ensuring that they and their families survive, many are unable to attend school at all. These children are digging for survival,” the UN International Labour Organization (ILO) says.
“Underground, they endure stifling heat and darkness, set explosives for underground blasts, and crawl or swim through dangerous, unstable tunnels. Above ground, they dive into rivers in search of minerals, or may dig sand, rock and dirt and spend hours pounding rocks into gravel using heavy, oversized tools made for adults,” it adds.
The UN’s International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) is working to ensure that no child has to toil in a quarry or mine.
“Pilot projects undertaken by ILO/IPEC in Mongolia, Tanzania, Niger and the Andean countries of South America have shown that the best way to assist child miners is to work with the children’s own communities,” ILO adds.
ILO says it has helped mining and quarrying communities to organize cooperatives and improve productivity by acquiring the machinery that reduces or eliminates the need for children to risk their lives. Such communities have also obtained legal protections and developed health clinics, schools and sanitation systems.
Over a four-year period, the remote gold mining community of Santa Filomena, Peru, went from employing to 200,000 child miners to declaring itself “child labour-free,” it says, adding that ILO helped the community develop new income-generating projects for adults.
I have just been showing my students “Harlan County USA.” They just finished reading “The Grape of Wrath,” so they have been thinking about the “holiness” of working together lately. I think that I will share this info with them tomorrow.
No, but it’s getting dangerously close to 1984.
How awful. Children are exploited worldwide, including the US again, or still. Usually under the radar in many countries, because they are considered cheap and disposable labor.
By the way, I wanted to mention that I’ve enjoyed your other diaries as well, on the environment and energy.
From the photographer Louis W. Hine. His notes on the above photo read: “View of the Ewen Breaker of the Pa. Coal Co. The dust was so dense at times as to obscure the view. This dust penetrated the utmost recesses of the boys’ lungs. A kind of slave-driver sometimes stands over the boys, prodding or kicking them into obedience. S. Pittston, Pa.”
Mines in China account for more than half of all the mining deaths in the world. More people die there in one year than have been killed in US mines in the last thirty.
Last year alone, China lost more than 4,000 people in mining accidents. Most of the mines there are small “community” operations. Where US mines are now highly mechanized and depend on “continuous miners” or “longwall” machines, Chinese mines are what used to be called “standard” mines. That means they mine the coal by drilling holes in the mining “face,” setting dynamite, blasting, and removing the fractured coal by hand.
There is almost no enforcement of rules for supporting the roof, or for circulating fresh air to the face. No safety training. Nothing done to prevent mine fires. No maps to prevent miners from running into old works that may be flooded or contain explosive or smothering gases. There is no supervision of the blasting. In many cases, the dynamite itself is homemade (from good old nitro-glycerin and clay) on the mine site. Deaths from explosions are common above and below ground.
It’s hard to imagine anyone working under these kind of conditions, much less a child.