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 the 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 the 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.
Considering all stated above, 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 INVALIDS 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.
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