Lack of deterrents, left-behind children fuel underage worker recruitment
The sudden death of a 14-year-old laborer in Foshan, South China's Guangdong Province resulted in the child's employer being fined 10,000 yuan ($1,540), a penalty that exemplifies the leniency observers believe is a key factor in child labor's persistence in China.
Wang Pan, born in June 2001 in Central China's Hunan Province, was a worker at a Zhiya underwear factory in the Nanhai district of Foshan. Wang was found unconscious on the morning of April 11 in the apartment he and his mother rented and was declared dead after emergency first aid failed to revive him, Guangzhou Daily reported Sunday.
The report also stated that Wang had to work 11 or 12 hours a day in the Zhiya factory since he signed a contract with the company on March 5.
The company has reached an agreement with Wang's family to pay 150,000 yuan in compensation, the newspaper added.
The punishment currently imposed on employers of child laborers is not a sufficient deterrent, Wang Jiangsong, a professor at the China Institute of Industrial Relations told the Global Times.
Though the Labor Law of China bans the recruitment of juveniles under age 16, violators are only required to pay a fine and rectify their crime, while a company's licenses can be revoked under "serious circumstances."
Under a 2002 State Council regulation on the prohibition of child labor, employers can be fined 5,000 yuan per month for each child laborer they hire.
"The phenomenon is mainly due to companies chasing capital benefits, as using child labor can lower labor costs," Wang said.
In an article published in the Chinese Journal of Sociology in 2010, Lu Shizhen, a vice president of China Youth and Children Research Association estimated that China's cities were home to between 2 million and 3 million child laborers.
In January 2013, Apple said it terminated its relationship with a component maker in Guangdong after discovering 74 cases of employment of underage workers, Reuters reported. Apple also reported discovering that an employment agency was forging documents to allow children to illegally work at its supplier.
Hu Xingdou, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said that many child laborers can easily obtain fake ID cards, Investor Journal reported. "Such hidden labor relations could make already vulnerable child laborers more disadvantaged. For fear of losing their jobs, they will not bargain for more payment," Hu was quoted as saying in the report.
China still faces a severe child labor problem, which is exacerbated by the huge population of children left behind in less-developed regions by parents who migrate to urban areas to find work, Chen Lan, founder of a child abuse prevention nongovernmental organization, told the Global Times.
She also called for more balanced education resources to better educate such children.
There are an estimated 61 million left-behind children in China, according to a survey conducted in 2015 by a Beijing-based NGO, together with Li Yifei, an education professor at Beijing Normal University.
