A picture drawn by an American college student in 1991
Nike basketball shoes sell for$130,
Labor wages: 60 cents a day for these kids (6 cents an hour)
This picture of young boys sewing soccer balls emblazoned with the Nike logo sparked public debate about child labor around the world.
Children’s rights and the world’s ethics, where something is going wrong, there are people who are leading the way to correct it. The person who made the biggest single contribution to the exposure of child labor exploitation in the Third World in the 1990s is none other than ‘Kailash Satyarthi.’
Same place, same age, different reality
Plush villa, sumptuous food, chic clothes
Kailash was born into an upper-class family in India’s Kshatriya caste.
However, the children of India’s untouchables inherited their father’s jobs; their lot was to live out their entire lives under disdain. Child abduction, physical abuse, sexual assault, and forced labor were rampant, and no one bothered to help them. As a child, Kailash Satyarthi was shocked by the reality of his friends having to go to work instead of school and became determined to change the children’s miserable lives.
Founding a human rights organization to save youngsters
Launched in 1980 with the aim of rescuing children from the cycle of poverty and violence, Kailash founded the ‘Save the Childhood Movement’ or in his local tongue ‘Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA)‘.
BBA* raided child labor exploitation sites, rescued children, and educated the rescued children.
*Bachpan Bachao Andolan (BBA) is a frontline anti-trafficking and anti-slavery grassroots movement in India, founded by Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi in 1980.
They campaigned against child labor, sending thousands of letters to governments and courts, and visiting villages to put up anti-child labor stickers.
World’s ‘heapest’ labor: Children of the Third World
Yet, even though they managed to rescue the children and return them to their homes, they were again hauled off to the sweatshops. Because they were the ‘cheapest’ workers in the world. What global companies want is low production costs, and children are the cheapest labor force. Middlemen who connect companies and third-world children would siphon off all the profits by giving the child laborers tiny wages. Kailash had to find a better way.
Schools are where children should be, not factories
“Help these kids go to school, not the sweatshops”
At a meeting of the International Labor Organization
In 1998, Kailash Satyarthi joined 7.2 million participants in 103 countries in a global march against child labor. Kailash marched with 1,000 rescued children and made the world aware of child labor in the Third World. The following year, the ILO adopted a special convention to protect children from hazardous occupations and exploitation.
✻ The sum of the total length of the world march courses amounts to 80,000 km
Convention on Immediate Measures for the Prohibition and Eradication of the Worst Forms of Child Labor
Article 1 Each Member State ratifying this Convention shall, as a matter of urgency, take immediate and effective measures to prohibit and eradicate the worst forms of child labour.
(ILO Convention No. 182)
In 1999 Kailash Satyarthi established the Global Campaign for Education, In 2001, he led the adoption of an amendment to the Indian Constitution guaranteeing the people’s right to education and vocational education.
The anti-child labor movement has spread like wildfire to third world countries, many of which have begun enacting child labor laws.
Good Marketing for Kids
“Would you buy a product made by children in forced labor at a cheap price?”
Kailash Satyarthi believed in consumer ethics. He led ethical consumption by giving ‘Rugmark’ to good carpets made without child labor.
Boycotts of child labor products spread all over the world, and demand for child labor products plummeted. Companies rushed to ask their suppliers to end child labor, and more than 80,000 children were freed from forced labor and were able to return to their homes and schools.
“Fighting against the oppression of children and youth and for the right of all children to an education”
Nobel Peace Prize Committee
In 2014, Kailash Satyarthi became a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
“If a child is deprived of an education and forced into labor, they are subjected to violence. [Omitted] Violence is committed when obstacles that impede the child’s growth and development stand in the way of the child.”
Kailash’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech
