Whit's China Business Blog
Child labor
March 2, 2010 by whit · 5 Comments
I read with interest the recent articles (couple of them here and here) about Apple’s announcement that some of their suppliers had used child labor in the past.
What I found most interesting was the “child” part – when I was 15 I would have slugged anyone who called me a child. During the summer of my 15th year, I was working in our metal stamping plant where the highest temperature reached 103 F (40 C). I had my first factory job when I was 14 turning wheels on a lathe. My Father never read child-labor laws, and thank God for that. It was an invaluable experience that I am sad to say I won’t be able to give to my son.
I can remember in 1998 visiting a factory for a major automotive supplier in Taiwan. There were 14 year old boys working on the lines making seat belt assemblies. I asked about it and found that they were students at the local technical school. They worked half a shift on the line and spent the rest of the day in class studying engineering. Today, 12 years later, they would be around 26 with degrees in mechanical engineering and over a decade of hands-on experience. I imagine some of them are running plants in China now.
I’ve written about The Wiffle Ball Life before, a term coined by P.J. O’Rourke to denote the rather pathetic American obsession with safety, self-esteem, and never doing anything the slightest bit risky – especially if it might also be fun.
I understand that Apple is worried about its image, and I acknowledge that those eleven 15 year olds may not have wanted to be there. But there is a big difference between a 15 year old farm kid fibbing about his age to get a good factory job to help support his family and using 6 year old slave labor in an illegal fireworks factory in Sichuan. It would be nice if the amazingly flexible English language had a concise way of stating the difference. I think “under-aged labor” is more reflective of the reality of the situation.
Should you need to verify that your suppliers are not using “under-aged labor”, our friends at China Quality Focus can perform a Corporate Social Audit for €376 + travel expenses, a small price to pay to avoid the kind of (undeserved) bad publicity Apple is experiencing. PassageMaker can also help our clients, under the auspices of a Vendor Coordination contract, draft supplier agreements to reflect the social norms of their home country or industry.
A better solution would be to have PassageMaker perform the Assembly-Inspection-Packaging functions in our 100% US-owned and -operated Assembly Center. We will warrant that we meet the necessary social compliance metrics.
Give us a call before you write the press release or talk to the New York Times.
I was fed up with middlemen & poorly run factories distorting pricing, failing to control quality and allowing intellectual property (IP) to be knocked off, so I decided to do something about it. 
My father was working in the shipyards of Scotland at the age of 14. The alternative was not being able to contribute to a family of 5 headed by a widowed mother. My husband’s grandfather worked full-time in a mine in IL at the age of 9; he and another 9-year old shared a man’s full time wage. The alternative was starvation.
What would have happened to either of these families had some piss-ant with a full stomach decided that “child labor” was unacceptable? All I know is I wouldn’t be here to write about it.
One need only look at Bangladesh, where because of pressure (I think from students in the U.S.) the factories pulled out and stopped employing under-16′s in their factories. Prostitution and child trafficking went WAY up.
Anne, thanks very much for your comment and thanks for reading. In today’s USA, the lack of work experience I see in high school and college students I talk to is a huge argument for a whole lot more ‘child labor’. PassageMaker regularly has adult interns willing to work for a stipend to get the China experience, but if a high school student wanted to work in the factory to learn the business, they would have to be at least 16 and I am required to pay them minimum wage. Given that requirement, why not hire an adult that already has experience. No wonder unemployment is so high among young adults.
Anyone smart enough to quote P.J. O’Rourke always gets my time.
Through fortunate circumstances my three sons and one daughter have all had the opportunity to work in a local factory on their breaks from school. I pair dearly for their Catholic school education but would rank the factory experience as more important.
Coincidentally, I got a phone call yesterday from the mother of a 20 YEAR OLD. The son had just accepted a position at the same factory and the mother called me to ask if it was “safe”. Pathetic.
If memory serves, it was unions who managed to get rid of “child labor” here in the states; which as far as I’m concerned says it all.
Anne, you are too kind. Any fan of O’Rourke is a friend of mine! I had the opportunity to meet him once – sadly I was so gobsmacked, I am sure I came off poorly.
The reality of China’s development, with more than twice the USA’s population still living on the farm in abject poverty in the interior of the country, a factory job in the city is a big financial step up for the family. Under the one-child policy, China faces a demographic bomb a couple decades hence that they are only now starting to recognize. The saying in China is “2 + 1 = 4″, meaning that two parents have one child who will have to support four elderly folks someday (parents and in-laws), assuming they even marry. With a male-to-female imbalance driven by the traditional preference for sons, cheap ultrasound and practically free abortions, there are roughly 25-45 million men in China who will never marry for lack of a mate. There is no social safety net to speak of outside of the family, and so the pressure for young adults to start earning money at the earliest possible moment is enormous. Basically, if you aren’t college bound, you better get a good job and start getting a paycheck that you can send home to Mom and Dad pronto.
I am not pessimistic about the future of America in the long term, as we still have significant advantages over any of our competitors around the world, and I can see the point in the future where manufacturing could start to flow back this way, especially if unions, both private and public sector, can be brought to heel. However, in the near term protecting little Jimmy from a hard day’s work does him no favors. I agree with your point – the lessons I learned in the factory are every bit as important as anything I ever learned in a classroom.
Thanks very much for your comments! You are welcome anytime!