Production Rejects

(Child Labour Third Part)

minor labour

There are situations of exploitation of minors, very similar to the Asiatic ones, also in our country, particularly in the regions where poverty causes child overpopulation. In some cases they are the children of immigrants who, like the Chinese, reproduce, in our country, the conditions of baby worker semi-slavery typical of their origin country, but most of 300 thousand young Italian slaves who, according to the International Confederation of the Free Trade Unions, are compelled to work under fourteen years of age, depend on our fellow countrymen.

Child labour in Italy

Italian law prohibits child labour, but minors are often just the ones who work illegally instead of their jobless parents. In Catania girls under twelve years of age nourish the industry which makes jeans and pret-a-porter designed by stylists for the big names with a yearly turnover, unknown to taxes, of more than 7 million euros.

A minor who earns 15-30 euros a day working in a restaurant in the evening can, in Italy, survive and partly his own family. And perhaps it’s for this that minors, between seven and fourteen years of age who work illegally,are so many.

If we think the situation of child workers is tragic we have to consider that the figures of child exploitation are specular to the ones concerning hunger in the world. More than 50 million children in East Europe and in the ex URSS live in absolute poverty and are often at high risk of tuberculosis so as measles and dysentery. Child mortality rate is 26 per thousand in Eastern Europe, inferior only to 32 per thousand in Latin America and the Caribbean countries, against 7 per thousand in the United States.

Poverty rate varies from 1% in Slovenia, Czech Republic and Slovakia, to 4% in Hungary, 20% in Poland, 50% in Russia, 60% in Turkmenistan, Ukraina, Kazakhistan and Moldavia; the highest peak of 80% is in the Caucasia Republic of Kyrgystan.

The child poor

In the Horn of Africa, desperation heart of 800 million people who, from a hemisphere to another, suffer from starvation and malnutrition, 80% of population is suffering from serious diseases caused by lack of food. Children, particularly, lose their hair, nails and also the first layer of the skin.

According to the Oms in 1999 10.5 million children under five years of age died because of acute respiratory infections like bronchitis, 49% caused by malnutrition.

PRODUCTION REJECTS

In all the cases where children in excess can’t be absorbed by any kind of economy , they are simply and dramatically abandoned or destroyed just like tomatoes or oranges are by their producers when the harvest is overabundant and no market can absorb it.

Newborn babies in dustbins

Only in Italy in two years 650 newborn babies have been thrown into dustbins, but child abandonment concerns any age, any country, any circumstance, any kind of child, the examples are so many, so tragic that it’s superfluous to list them.

Newborn baby rescued

See also :

1) Pyramid Builders (Child Labour First Part)

2) Child Soldiers (Child Labour Second Part)