Child Labour In Turkey

October 24, 2016 1:52 PM

The BBC programme Panorama has uncovered evidence of child labour being used to make clothes in factories in Turkey. FTA: "I'd been told that child labour was endemic in Turkey. But I wasn't prepared for the reality of it. Or the scale of it. One basement workshop was almost entirely staffed with children, many of whom couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old, the very picture of Dickensian misery."
posted by marienbad (10 comments total)

The fact that Syrian refugees are exploited this way is a special kind of evil.
posted by Bee'sWing at 2:11 PM on October 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

One boy, just 13, told me he was between jobs. He had spent the morning looking for work when we spoke. No luck. I asked him what he would do now. Tears rolled slowly down his cheek as he told me that if he didn't work, he couldn't live.

I think child labor is bad for children, but taking away these jobs probably won't help the poorest children who are using them to get by. Is there a push for a more moderate solution? Like regulating child labor better to prevent unsafe conditions?
posted by melissam at 2:24 PM on October 24, 2016

Yeah, child labor is bad. Child starvation is worse.

The fact that Syrian refugees are exploited this way is a special kind of evil.

I would counter it may well be that refusing Syrian refugees the opportunity to be exploited this way is also a special kind of evil.
posted by 2N2222 at 2:42 PM on October 24, 2016

So we're really onto defending child labor in this thread? Really? Really? What working class people fought so, so hard to eliminate in our own countries is okay as long as it's refugee kids somewhere else?

One solution which perhaps the USians in the room could endorse would be to bring those people over here to our large and wealthy country, reducing their desperation and hence the need to have kids at work in the first place.
posted by Frowner at 2:58 PM on October 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

As long as poor children exist, child labor will exist. I was just figuring it can either exist illegally in hidden dangerous factories or be reasonably regulated while we do other things to reduce poverty.

Also I'm very pro bringing more refugees here, but that's not going to happen tomorrow.
posted by melissam at 3:03 PM on October 24, 2016

FTA: it's estimated that as many as 400,000 are working, many of them in the garment industry.

It is almost impossible not to be complicit in this, given the labyrinthine web of contractors and subcontractors in the fashion world. You just don't know where your stuff is made, even if you can identify the codes on the labels. My wife does socks and even when they know which factory they're working with, they have no way of knowing if the factory actually produces the goods or outsources it. They hide that info.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:03 PM on October 24, 2016

melissam: I think child labor is bad for children, but taking away these jobs probably won't help the poorest children who are using them to get by. Is there a push for a more moderate solution? Like regulating child labor better to prevent unsafe conditions?

Ideally, better paying jobs for their parents/caregivers so that the kids don't have to work, and state support for kids without parents/caregivers. It's not as though banning child labour in Western countries when we were at a similar level of economic development caused our economies to collapse. This is a doable thing for a country like Turkey.
posted by clawsoon at 3:03 PM on October 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean, "they wouldn't have any work and that would be worse" is not a new line of reasoning - it was used to people who objected to child labor in the early industrial revolution, it was used about the children who were dipping their hands in caustic chemicals and eroding their own flesh to produce metal finishes in pre-revolutionary Shanghai, it was used against boycotts of apartheid South Africa....everyone always says that somehow child labor is essential to the wellbeing of the children, and then it proves not to be so.
posted by Frowner at 3:04 PM on October 24, 2016 [4 favorites]

I think it is possible to address more than one specific problem at any given time.
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 3:09 PM on October 24, 2016

state support for kids without parents/caregivers…This is a doable thing for a country like Turkey.

OK, I agree with this, and it's not like Turkey is really a developing nation, it's 72 out of 188 on the Human Development Index. Though it seems to be going through some government turmoil right now.
posted by melissam at 3:12 PM on October 24, 2016