Member Since: 8/18/2013
Posts: 15,244
|
Quote:
The largest-ever investigation into labor practices in India’s handmade carpet industry by Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights has revealed startling details of slavery and child labor.
The report revealed horrifying details of sub-human working conditions, physical and verbal abuse, chronic underpayment, severe ailments and several other hardships endured by men, women, and children working in the industry, many of whom were sold into slavery.
Here are some of the report’s most horrific findings:
The study documented 1,406 cases of child labor.
“The scenarios typically involve shacks in remote rural areas into which
children have been trafficked. The children are kept locked inside, are beaten and verbally abused as they are forced to work up to 18 hours per day, are given minimal food and water, and suffer severe physical and emotional damage.
Many children worked, ate, and slept inside rural carpet shacks, rarely if ever stepping outside for weeks or months at a time.”
“The children were too young, frail, and frightened to attempt to escape.”
“They had suffered beatings for complaining and were terrified of punishment to them or harm to their parents should they disobey their captors.
They were also far from home in remote rural areas without any clear sense of where to go and what to do should they even try to escape.”
The average hourly wage for carpet workers is $0.21.
Most wages were also chronically delayed by anywhere between three weeks to three months.
Women and children were paid 12% to 32% less than adult males.
The researchers saw young women weaving while babies slept in their laps, exposing the infants to thread dust all day leading to substantial risks of pulmonary ailments.
Children of adult workers played amid stray electrical wires, rusty tools, and exposed nails.
The majority of minors working in the carpet industry are female.
Carpet weavers, especially children, suffered from several ailments including loss of vision, spinal deformation, malnutrition, and trauma because of hazardous working conditions.
They suffered from eye diseases because of insufficient light, spinal deformations due to being hunched for hours, muscle pain, headaches, malnutrition, pulmonary diseases, cuts, infections, and psychological trauma.
|
|
|
|
|
