Research Paper Final Draft.

Olesya Besprozvannykh

Professor Hayes

English 1A04HR

June 27, 2014

                                                Child Labor In Vietnam

            With the internationally recognized fame of the “World Cup 2014” people are trying get together not just because of soccer, but also to bring attention to the most terrifying social issues in modern society. June 12^th, 2014, Vietnamese soccer player Le Cong Vinh decided to take part at the International Labor Organization (ILO) event in New York City against child labor on the red carpet with many other celebrities (News VietnamNet 1). By doing so famous people want to raise awareness to the problem and shout out to reach the world. June 12^th is an international day against child labor in the world. Since 2002 governments, organizations, civil societies and millions of people get together to highlight the situation on child labor as well as figure out solutions to the problem (UN news center). Although child labor exists in many countries around the world, we hear about the Middle East and Indonesia greatly, but unfortunately Vietnam is never in the headlights, child labor on sweatshops in Vietnam is for some reason left unspotted and underestimated. Vietnam is a country in Southeast Asia that violates human rights of children. I want to investigate the problem of child labor in Vietnam, provide definitions, statistics, and examples in order to formulate possible solutions about the issue.

            To begin with we need to understand the meaning of child labor and whom specifically it regards. Child labor is “work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development”.  There are extreme forms of child labor that involve children being enslaved or exploited, taken from their families, exposed to serious hazards or illnesses and left to fend for themselves on the streets of large cities – often at a very early age. (ILO) The victims of child labor are “any human being under the age of eighteen, unless the age of majority is attained earlier under a state’s own domestic legislation” (Huong et al 6).  In Vietnam definitions such as “Work” and “ Child Labor” are often interchanged because of poor regulation. Consequently, some employers cover themselves by claiming that children are “working”, although they are violating the amount of hours that children can legally work and the type of work they can perform.

            Lets take a look at the background of the country and attempt to define exactly what the problem is. The population of Vietnam is about 93,421,832 people. The overall population of children from age 5-17 is estimated to be 18,349,629 people, accounting for 20.7 percent of the national population (Huong et al 10). What is striking is that 1.75 million Vietnamese children, with two in every five of them under the age of 15, work in situations that fit the definition of child labor (Country survey 1). Vietnamese law prohibits the exploitation of children younger than 18 years old, however there are exceptions for children aged from 15 – 18 who can work for enterprises just with agreement from families and MOLISA (Ministry Of Labor Invalid And Social Affairs). (Vietnam HR survey 49). Children are allowed to work no more than 8 hours per day, 40 hours per week accordingly.  Nevertheless statistics from “Child Labor National Survey 2012” shows that  “about 67 percent of child laborers work less than 42 hours per week, however as many as 569,000 (32.4 percent) exceed 42 hours of weekly work.”  (Huong et al 29) Children are being involved in work that directly goes against the law and human rights.  As much as one third works more than 42 hours a day, and 1.75 million children are in child labor, these numbers are even without the children who are “working” by definition, therefore surveys can not officially consider them for child labor statistics.

            Vietnam has several examples of child labor that are absolutely shocking in terms of treatment of workers and their wages. Special attention should be paid to the sweatshops that employ children from 5-17 and pay them minimum wages that do not provide enough money to buy minimal amounts of food each day. Nike factories are great examples. An IHS Child Slave Labor News article in 2005 wrote about how Nike decided to save money by using cheap Vietnamese labor in order to maximize advertising campaigns and hire the most expensive models. The average wage in Nike factories was 20 cents an hour or 1.60 dollars a day, which is less than the minimum standard of living in Vietnam (estimated as 2 $ a day). Children faced inhuman conditions at shoe factories, restricted to just one bathroom visit per day, only two water breaks, and other terrible examples that lead to workers fainting from poor health conditions, mal nutrition, and general factory pollution and emissions, all while working more than 42 hours per week in order to support their families. Even with these conditions, they are paid $37 a month, instead of $45, because Nike makes excuses with Vietnamese laws, which allow employers to pay training workers less than minimum wage. (Fabrics 1)

            Another example that shows the real picture of Vietnamese child labor is in a 2013 report from BBC news that covered the story of a few boys that were caught running away from their workplace. Employers take children from very remote areas so they cannot escape from the “working camp” which is located south of Ho Chi Min city. Youths are kidnaped from their homes and taken to a clothing factory where they spend years locked in tiny rooms making clothes without pay. Children told that their workdays started at 6am and ended at the midnight. Children were forced to live in groups of 14 in the rooms that they worked in. (Brown 1) These children had only eight minutes a day to visit the bathroom including morning showers and toilet breaks. The conditions Vietnamese children face are terrifying, although what we see is that some families still support their children working in these conditions to provide money for the whole family. Then the questions arise whether it is government’s fault or not.

            Vietnamese government states that national childcare and legislation has improved significantly over the past years, that “government has proactively incorporated related international laws into its national legal documents and accelerated the implementation of policies protecting children’s rights.” (Huong et al 4) It is contradictory that the government signed the Convention of Rights of the Child on January 26^th, 1990 and ratified it on the 28^th of February that same year (UNTC). This leads to an argument that article 32 (UNICEF) of the convention is violated. The government is responsible for the protection of children rights, but in reality we see that as many as 1.75 million children fall into the category of child labor. On the other hand, in order to protect child rights the government created an organization - MOLISA that is “responsible for enforcing child labor laws and policies. Government officials may fine and, in cases of criminal violations, prosecute employers who violate child labor laws.” (Vietnam HR survey 49) Even so, one of the policies declares “An employer is only permitted to employ junior workers in occupations suitable to the health of such workers that ensure their physical, spiritual and personal development.” (Huong et al 7) Clearly this requirement is not met, since children are working in conditions that are not even close to being “suitable”, and there is no hint of education or spiritual development. Entrepreneurs are using or finding small loopholes in the law and enslaving children on the terms written by the government. In most cases if they get approval by MOLISA they can make a child work for them, although any exploitation of the child younger than 15 years old is prohibited. As a result the problem occurs from both government and business side, both are seeking the benefit, but children are the ones who fall victim to authority and end up being stuck in child labor.

How can we stop the problem? I believe that the only solution would be to enforce laws that would firmly protect the rights of the children. The employers should be penalized financially for child labor, and more than that they should pay back the families of employed children for all of the labor performed (when one hour of payment is equal to or higher than the minimum wage). I believe that the government should reconsider the laws and MOLISA should enforce stricter policies to protect child rights in order to avoid loopholes. Corporations like Nike and other manufactories should be penalized financially, but not shut down. The shut down would lead to a crash in the growing Vietnamese economy. Moreover government should discourage families from exploitation of their children especially in hazardous environments, because children are not paid adequate money and are faced with inhuman work conditions. Events like what ILO hosted in New York City, as mentioned above, using athletes and sports as a way to promote the protest against child labor would significantly improve publicity. The world needs to know what the real picture of child labor is so that changes can be made that prohibit the exploitation of these families only to gain the benefits of cheap and fast labor. The world needs to never forget that these workers are young human beings, the future of humankind, who deserve to be protected by no less than basic human rights.

Word count: 1581 (without citation)

Works cited:

1.     Brown, Marianne. "Vietnam's Lost Slave Labour Children." BBC News. N.p., 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 15 June 2014.

2.     "Child Labour." CHILD LABOUR (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 15 June 2014.

3.     "Child Labour, Labor, Children, Adolescents, Slave, Unpaid Work, Debt Bondage, Serfdom, Forced Labour, Trafficking." UN News Center. UN, 12 June 2014. Web. 12 June 2014.

4.     Fabics, Christine. "Nike's Use of Child Slave Labor." IHS Child Slave Labor News ::. N.p., June 2005. Web. 15 June 2014.

5.     Huong, Nguyen Thi Lan, Nguyen Bao Cuong, and Tonh Thi Mai Hong. CHILD LABOUR SURVEY 2012 (n.d.): n. pag. Mar. 2014. Web. 11 June 2014.

6.     "Le Cong Vinh Holds up Red Card against Child Labour - News VietNamNet." Le Cong Vinh Holds up Red Card against Child Labour - News VietNamNet. VOV, 12 June 2014. Web. 15 June 2014.

7.     "One in Ten Vietnamese Youngsters Aged 5-17 in Child Labour." Country Survey:. ILO, Mar. 2014. Web. 13 June 2014.

8.     United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “Fact Sheet: Convention on the Rights of the Child.” New York: United Nations. 19 May 2014. Web. 21 May 2014.

9.     Whom, Hist Church Of Vietnam, Country Reports On Human Rights Practices For 2012, and United States Department Of State • Bureau Of Dem. VIETNAM 2012 HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT EXECUTIVE SUMMARY (n.d.): n. pag.Http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/204463.pdf. United States Department of State, 2012. Web. 12 June 2014.

10.   "What Is Child Labour." What Is Child Labour. ILO, n.d. Web. 15 June 2014.

11.   "UNTC." UNTC. UN, n.d. Web. 17 June 2014.

Webzine Reflection

1) For our Webzine project apart from contributing with my own writings, i was making sure that everyone would post their essays and put their names too as well as hashtags so posts would go to appropriate tabs. As well i was responsible for the share of information: sending out emails and exchanging contact information so we would save time by communicating online. I was doing a design work too, i was participating to the design of the theme of the blog, although i dont know tumblr at all, i tried to do my best to contribute in theme changes and media too. I am really glad that everyone in our group was participating in the development of the blog and engaging too. It was a pleasure to have such an amazing group.

2) I have learned a lot about child human rights. I would not even imagine what happens in the parts of the world like Middle East when kids are tortured and mistreated. I think i became more attentive to human rights issues, now i m trying to follow up these issues and find a way how we as human beings and just global citizens of the world can contribute to make changes so the kids would at least have a normal childhood and stop being abused. Such precise examples from particular places which just shock us to the point that we loose words, i think it can make a huge impact on the reader to talk about it to bring an attention to it. Webzine is such a good way to combine knowledge and to share your knowledge at the same time, it is amazing that finally you can state your own opinion towards the issues and propose your own solutions. Mostly because all the formal research papers propose raw solutions and they dont generate new ideas they are just stating the facts, but in webzine project i hope that we did propose and promote different ideas and solutions to the issues. Webzine definitely has changed my perceptions of the world in terms of children human rights.

3) I think it did engage me emotionally because throughout the quarter i was learning so much about human rights that sometimes i would find myself checking out the news about human rights or just looking at the newspapers with human rights which never happen to me before. I feel that we need to learn about it to be acknowledged that we have rights and we have organizations which are responsible for protection of our human rights. I definitely pushed myself as a reader and a writer, never read 2 books (on english ) just in 8 weeks. I see the changes in my writing style too , especially since before i would hardly find words to come closer o the minimum word count and now i exceed it significantly. It was intellectually stimulating, i felt that my brain was working throughout the quarter since we had a considerable amount of reading and writing.

4) We had so much reading this quarter that it was just a lot to cover especially when we have other classes to keep up with too... But in general i like that you were asking for our opinion and on mondays we would write small responses to the meanings of the words like dignity and etc, i think that was a perfect way to warm us up, i liked that we had to read a book as little bee which was super interesting for me and that we had to write a reflective paper. Well definitely we made a wrong choice with the book for presentation, but it was fun to combine our ideas and wrap up a book just into 15 slides of presentation. I think the only disadvantage is time management because we had too much planned and as a result we didnt even touch some parts. I think that a theme of the class works really well,  it is a topic which we can discuss and it does relate to us directly. I really enjoyed the class!

Final Draft for Webzine project

Vietnam - a country in Southeast Asia. Vietnam is a country that violates child human rights. The reason why I have chosen this particular country is because very few sources mention the problem in their human rights reports; child labor in sweatshops, fields and other industries in Vietnam are for some reason left unspotted and underestimated. This part of our blog is going to focus on child labor in Vietnam, it is going to define child labor, provide examples and statistics, and make suggestions on how can we resolve this problem.

Let us start off with background information and data. The population of the country is roughly 93,421,832 people. The overall population of children from age 5-17 is estimated to be 18,349,629 people, accounting for 20.7 percent of the national population. What is striking is that 1.75 million Vietnamese children, two in every five of them under the age of 15, work in situations that fit the definition of child labor. Let’s define child labor now. Child labor is – work that deprives children of their childhood, their potential and their dignity, and that is harmful to physical and mental development.

Who are the victims of child labor? It is any human being under the age of eighteen, unless the age of majority is attained earlier under a state’s own domestic legislation.

           Knowing the definitions we can go further and actually look at concrete examples, which show violations of the human rights of children. I want to bring attention to the sweatshops which employ children from 5-17 and pay them minimum wages that do not provide enough money to buy minimal amounts of food each day. Nike factories are great examples. The corporation decided to save money by using cheap Vietnamese labor in order to maximize advertising campaigns and hire the most expensive models. The average wage in Nike factories was 20 cents an hour or 1.60 dollars a day, which is less than the minimum standard of living in Vietnam (estimated as 2 $ a day). Children faced inhuman conditions at shoe factories because most of the kids aged 5-17 worked more than 42 hours per week in order to support their families.

           Another example of child labor/slavery in Vietnam is fieldwork. I would call employers “slaveholders” just because they take kids from the rural areas and bring them far away from their homes, so they have to work for the employer without any possible chance to run away. Yes, we are still talking about children from age 5-17. It happens in factories too. Children are locked up in small rooms making clothes and working from 6 am until midnight with restricted time for bathroom visits and showering in the morning, amounting to just 8 minutes every day. More than that, in many cases slaveholders do not pay any wages.

          Should we blame the government that lets businesses enslave children? Yes and no. Yes - because Vietnamese government signed (26 Jan 1990 ) and ratified (28 Feb 1990 )  The convention of the rights of the child. This means that right away article 32 of the convention is not followed. Moreover, the government has a restriction policy for juniors which are aged from 11-17 (excluding children between ages 5-10!) should work no more than 42 hours a week and should have appropriate work conditions which do not harm their health, do not affect their education, and do not exhaust toxic chemicals. All of this supposed to be under the supervision of the organization MOLISA (Ministry Of Labor Invalid And Social Affairs). No- because employers usually find loops in the law and enslave children on the terms written by the government. In most cases if they get approval by MOLISA they can make a child work for them, although any exploitation of the child younger than 15 years old is prohibited. Another issue is that to some extent the government has no power in the children’s upbringing. By this I mean that some Vietnamese families believe that their children from an early age should contribute to the family budget, therefore children end up working in the domestic households, factories, or fields for miserable wages.

           How can we stop the problem? I believe that the only solution would be to enforce laws, which would absolutely protect rights of the children. The employers should be penalized financially for child labor, and more than that they should pay back children’s families for all of their labor (when one hour of payment is equal to or higher than the minimum wage). I believe that the government should reconsider the laws and MOLISA should enforce stricter policies to protect child rights in order to avoid loopholes. Corporations like NIKE and other manufactories should be penalized financially too, because the shut down would lead to a crash in the Vietnamese economy, which is growing very well now.

Works cited:

1.    Brown, Marianne. "Vietnam's Lost Slave Labour Children." BBC News. N.p., 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 15 June 2014.

2.     Fabics, Christine. "Nike's Use of Child Slave Labor." IHS Child Slave Labor News ::. N.p., June 2005. Web. 15 June 2014.

3.     Huong, Nguyen Thi Lan, Nguyen Bao Cuong, and Tonh Thi Mai Hong. CHILD

4.      LABOUR SURVEY 2012 (n.d.): n. pag. Mar. 2014. Web. 11 June 2014.

5.      What Is Child Labour." What Is Child Labour. ILO, n.d. Web. 15 June 2014.

6.     "UNTC." UNTC. UN, n.d. Web. 17 June 2014.

Proofreading of Samantha's post

          When discussing the Israeli army's mistreatment of Palestinian children it is important to first establish exactly which human rights violations are being committed according to established international conventions and treaties. In February of 2013 UNICEF released a report “Children in Israeli Military Detention: Observations and Recommendations” detailing the specific violations being committed and which conventions or treaties were broken as the result of these violations. Some of the accusations of abuse towards Palestinian children by the Israeli army is wrongful arrest or imprisonment, acts of torture, failure to provide legal representation, and use of violence or threats of use of violence. Most of these violations are addressed in the UNICEF report. For this section of our webzine we will focus on the wrongful arrests and imprisonment of Palestinian children and it’s ramifications in the human rights discussion.

     In Israel and in accordance with the Israeli army order 1651 section. 191 it states “No child shall be arrested or prosecuted in the military courts.”, a child in this instance is considered twelve years old and younger.  Which is problematic in that there are numerous reports of the Israeli army arresting children as young as six years old. Therefore these children under the age of twelve are being unlawfully arrested and detained. There are also reports of the Israeli army wrongfully arresting Palestinian children for the crime of throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, detaining them for days, only to release the children without a conviction or proof of a crime ever have been committed. By not only wrongfully arresting and detaining these children the Israeli army violates article 37 section b. of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which states, “(b) No child shall be deprived of his or her liberty unlawfully or arbitrarily. The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time” and article 9 section 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which states, “ Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.” It clearly states in both the CRC and the ICCPR that by arbitrarily arresting these children without solid evidence of a crime being committed it is a violation of their human rights. The Israeli army must take measures to not only make sure that it’s soldiers are following the orders or laws laid down by the Israeli army itself but also that any arrests made by Israeli soldiers of Palestinian children are backed up with evidence of the child's involvement in an actual crime. According to article 9 section 5 of the ICCPR anyone wrongly arrested or imprisoned has a right to compensation, “Anyone who has been the victim of unlawful arrest or detention shall have an enforceable right to compensation.” Which the Israeli army has also failed to offer or provide as a means of an apology for it’s harassment of innocent Palestinian children. Of course a monetary compensation in no way makes up for any trauma inflicted on these children but it is a step in the right direction. 

             As mentioned earlier the Israeli army is accused of countless crimes against Palestinian children and the twenty-two page UNICEF report goes more into detail about those violations. The UNICEF report also offers up a few solutions of these violations for the Israeli army. Documents like the Conventions on the Right of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights were created for a reason, to prevent or stop human rights violations like the ones happening in the West Bank and Gaza from happening. While I am well aware that it’s a challenge to stop ALL human rights violations from occurring and even more challenging in a region of conflict. Nonetheless it’s important that governments like Israel still strive to implement policies laid out in these human rights documents in order to protect the human rights of all people, especially the rights of children. Failure to do so is inexcusable.