Child's Play

20cm x 23cm x 12cm (sewing machine )

 

Description

Child's sewing machine, fabric labels

 

Themes, comments & storylines

Child labour in textile production, from the cotton fields of Egypt to the sweatshops where our clothes (and our identities?) are made

 

 

"Slumped next to his mother, Shaban's youngest son, seven-year-old Abdul Rachman, looks exhausted. Drenched in sweat and dirt, with holes in his shoes and trousers, his face is a picture of misery and suffering. 'It is my job to take the worms off the cotton leaves,' he tells me, his voice a whimper of embarrassment and nerves. 'But it is hard. The worms that eat the cotton are difficult to spot and the earth is dry and dusty. I feel sick in the heat but I must work. My family needs bread.'

For the children here, education is a luxury their parents cannot afford. Instead their days are regulated by the harvests: radishes in winter, onions in spring, and Egyptian cotton in summer and autumn. In the next month the fields that cling to the banks of the Nile will be full of children working the cotton for up to 10 hours a day. Perhaps most alarming is the nature of
their work – removing the bollworm, the cotton farmers' nemesis, and handling plants drenched in pesticides. Accurate health studies are thin on the ground here, but many of the children complain of breathing difficulties at the height of summer.

Drive across Egypt and you will see children working everywhere. In rural street cafes they serve tea to farmers, on building sites they carry heavy limestone bricks. Though the issue has traditionally been ignored, the focus on their plight has grown in recent years. Today, an estimated 2.7m children work across the country, the majority in agriculture, with more than 1m hired each year for the cotton harvest, during which they work long hours in 40C heat. Increasingly, though, there is no school time in between. In a recent Unicef survey, nearly all children asked reported beatings by foremen in the fields.

According to most NGOs, eradicating child labour in agriculture in Egypt would be impossible, as it is traditionally an issue between families. But our investigation in the Nile Valley has found that the children are more likely to be victims of modern-day gangmasters, who recruit them from impoverished families to work the fields from dawn until dusk.[...]

Walking across the cotton farmers' pathetic patch of land we find half a dozen children crawling on their knees through the undergrowth, like field mice. It is early in the growing season and their vital role is to remove tiny insects and worms that threaten the cotton plants. Standing waist-high in the cotton

of an adjacent field, Ahmed Khaled casts nervous glances back towards his foreman. At 10 years old he is a 'veteran' of the fields. His day begins at 6am harvesting onions, a reliable year-round crop; the hardest part of the day comes when he enters the cotton fields, by 8am. 'We work up to eight hours a day,' he says. 'This is the hardest time, keeping the cotton safe when the sun is at its hottest. The harvest is easier – the hours are hard but the weather is cooler.' The youngster shows me his calloused hands, the dirt ingrained in his palm. 'I cannot read or write,' Ahmed says. 'We go to school when we can, but we cannot afford to. School is for rich children.'

According to Hamdi Wabid, a campaigner for the Land Centre for Human Rights, an NGO that fights for cotton farmers, the Egyptian cotton we sleep on in the west comes at the end of a chain of hardship and suffering. 'Counting seeds and fertiliser, the cost of starting each year's crop has jumped from zero to hundreds of pounds,' Wabid says. 'At the same time,
cotton prices have plunged, mainly because of oversupply but also because the US, the world's largest cotton producer, provides generous government subsidies to its farmers, allowing them to sell at a far lower cost. This has led many in Egypt to blame the Americans for creating the crisis,' says Wabid.
'Those who are suffering more are the children. You can be assured that any Egyptian cotton you buy in Britain has been picked or processed or tilled by children, some as young as five and six. They have no opportunities to thrive or grow, or even, as children, to have dreams and ambitions.[...]."

McDougall, Dan, 2008. Working flat out - the child labour behind your Egyptian cotton sheets. The Observer [ONLINE] Sunday 8 June 2008, p.30

 

"For me, the materiality of cloth (and clothes) lies in the way it receives the human imprint; cloth smells of mortality as much as it carries the signs of sweated (migrant) labour."

Jefferies, Janis, 2007.  Laboured cloth: translations of hybridity in contemporary art. In: Livingstone, Joan & Ploof, John eds., 2007. The object of labor: art, cloth and cultural production. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The MIT Press, p.284

 

 

"'The Government thinks it terribly important that you set up these weird incentive schemes in classes, so you get ticks, smiley faces and certificates. This is about competitive stigmatising. They think it's rewarding the children; in fact, it ends up punishing most of them.'

He is angry at the rigorous testing regime which has reduced his passion, literature, to a series of tick-box exercises.[...]

'If you look at the questions they ask about a story, they are all obsessed with telling the events of the story in the right order, understanding the chronology, logic and facts. This is why you write up scientific experiments, but it isn't why you tell stories. They have completely misunderstood the purpose of narrative. We tell stories to engage people's feelings ... Unless you do that, there isn't really much point. You might just as well do reports.'"

 

Rosen, Michael, 2007. Children need freedom and chaos, not tests, ticks and smiley faces (In conversation with Alice Miles and Helen Rumbelow). The Times, 15 September 2007, p.36.