We understand that the Free Trade system is broken. We know that sweatshops are bad. We do not want to support child labor. And yet we do so often. Why? Perhaps because they are removed from our immediate awareness. Terms like slave & child labor carry with them horrible images, understandings of atrocities. But frequently these are generalized, the faces of the individuals subjected to them blurred through distance.

World of Good, the developers of the Fair Wage calculator and Fair Trade retailer, has sent Emily to visit various Fair Trade co-ops to demonstrate the calculator and evaluate the co-ops. She even visited one of our own suppliers, Tara Projects, and is blogging her experience.

To gain perspective she also visited some child labor sweatshops. Her account of what she saw made me cry. The descriptions are neither sentimental nor sensationalized. They are simple, as the horrors are simple.

From Emily’s World of Good blog:

6/24/07

I hardly know how to write. Today I visited a hidden slum in New Delhi that is home to a dozen handicraft sweatshops that use child labor. Joshi, the Director of Social Programs for Tara Projects (the fair trade organization I am working with here) took me to see the sweatshops so I could better understand the difference between a fair trade and a non-fairtrade workshop in Delhi. Dressed in traditional Indian clothing and posing as a student, I accompanied Joshi and Shankar, Tara’s intern from France, to the slum. Naseer, our driver, dropped us off on a seedy street teeming with people. At first I thought this was the slum, but Joshi shook his head and motioned us across the street, where we met up with the man who oversees the sweatshops. He is about 20. Joshi has somehow convinced this man that we are not a threat to him, and he had agreed to show us the workshops under the impression that we were interested in the crafts they produce. Joshi and our guide led us through some back streets to a slit in a wall. We passed through this slit and entered into a shaded maze of squalid passages and hovels: the slum.

The flies were thick in the air and speckled my arms and face if I stood still in the alleyway. In places, there was only enough space for my shoulders to pass between the walls, yet the passageway was filled with people—tiny children with few clothes and almost no shoes, small women, small men, everyone small. Not very many teeth on the older ones. People sitting, squatting, leaning, standing, and lying down in every crack and space and opening inside the bowels of this slum. The small children smiled, curious. The narrow ground between the buildings was dirty cement that disintegrated into a winding trough of mud, standing water, dirt, trash, and rocks. The stench of urine and vomit danced into my nostrils as I picked my way through this labyrinth of filth.

Joshi kept close to my side, stopping to wait when I fell behind—navigating the uneven ground and the children pressing in to see me made it slow-going. Our guide stopped and gestured, with a trace of pride, at an opening into a black hole. No light shone from inside. I squinted into the darkened, silent, empty room and blinked. And then my eyes adjusted. 8 children looked back at me, silently gluing bits of mirror onto small black boxes.

They were too thin. They sat in the dark, cross-legged on the filthy tiled floor amidst piles of blank black boxes, rolls of decorative piping, and mirror pieces. They did not talk or smile. Since I was posing as a student interested in Indian handicrafts, I cooed over some of the boxes as I snapped photo after photo, trying to suck some of the injustice of it all into my camera.

On shelves suspended above the children there were a few dirty sacks and one small, dusty suitcase, probably remnants of their initial journeys from their villages to Delhi to come work and live in this sweatshop. I understood later that these children also sleep and eat in the same tiny room where they work. They are not orphans—they come from Bihar, a very poor region in North-East India. The primary economic activity there is agriculture. When I later asked one of the little boys about his family (via Joshi, who translated), he told me both his parents are agricultural laborers, and between them they cannot make enough to support their 5 children. So when they had an opportunity to send their small son to Delhi to work, they did. These children will live and work in this room indefinitely, thousands of kilometers from their families. They do not attend school. They send money home every week to their villages. Their parents have never visited them here or seen the conditions in which they are living and working.

Our guide led us up to a crack in the wall that turned out to function as a doorway, and we followed him up steps that were 3 times as steep as they were deep. I was too slow—Joshi had to wait—there was nothing to hold onto as I climbed up this worm hole except the step ahead, but each step was crusted with dirt, sometimes with unidentified stinking liquids pooling and dripping from the floor above. I came to the landing and sidestepped a large pool of vomit. The flies swaggered.

At the top of the stairs and abutting the open rooftop to the building below was a second workshop. The conditions here were slightly better: the walls were filthy, but the five boys working here were somewhat older, and they appeared to have fairly clean clothes. The floor was covered with a dusty but otherwise unsoiled cloth. The boys were beading glass necklaces. The beads, Joshi told me, come from the local market. They were tear-drop shaped, handmade glass beads in funky jewel-tones—you could imagine these necklaces on a display at Claire’s Accessories or Forever 21.

Back out on the roof, scraps of corrugated tin, crumbling brick walls, and drying laundry competed for my attention. Two tea kettles and seventeen tiny cups were perched on the roof near the staircase, suggesting that perhaps the children get a tea break during their work day. A luxury, indeed.

A very small girl whose flip-flops were 3 inches too long for her stood pumping water into a dirty cannister as we emerged back into the alleyway. She stared as we passed. A few yards further, the click of my camera attracted a crowd of children who began to shove and shout, trying to get into the picture. I put my camera away until we left the alleyway.

The third workshop was worse than the first. I peered over the goat that was lying across the workshop’s entrance, tied to the door. The tiny space held three workers, only one of whom looked very young. Walls, clothing, and floor were brown with dirt and soot—this was a welding workshop. With no proper ventilation system, these workers weld complicated metal pendants for necklaces. Their “work table” was nothing more than an ancient piece of plywood perched on a bucket, and the littlest boy sat with his back a few inches from a large tank of propane. The proprietor of the workshop, 35-ish, showed me photos of finished necklaces and some pendants the children had already made. Joshi promised him that if I decided I wanted to order one, he’d let him know.

These pendants and necklaces and boxes will end up in what Joshi calls “the mainstream commercial market”—that is, they will show up in department stores, malls, and gift shops in the American and European markets. The way it works is this: large multinational companies who want to sell handmade gift items will hire a smaller contractor who deals in commercial-market handmade crafts, and that contractor has a subcontractor, and so on, until you reach the level of these sweatshops. Children will work for half the pay of an adult, and their quick fingers are more efficient for assembling intricate items like beaded necklaces or inlaid mirror work. So the subcontractor’s subcontractor’s subcontractor will travel to the villages in Bihar and visit poor families there, offering to give their children jobs. They say yes. For many of them, apparently, there is no other way to stay afloat.

In general, manufactured items like clothing and electronics are assembled in documented factories that can, at least in theory, be monitored by the owner company or by local officials. Handcrafted items, on the other hand, are part of the informal (or “unorganized”) sector, which means that they are not documented with anybody and therefore are not protected by government laws. I don’t yet understand why multinationals aren’t required to document their supply chains for handicrafts as they are for their factories—but I intend to find out.

A small boy sat and kneaded glue powder and blue dye together in a wide bowl in the fourth workshop. As we watched, the mixture turned to a viscous glue that the boy spread on the top of a candle holder. A second boy trimmed the excess glue with a rough paring knife. A six-year-old knelt at the work table on the other end of the workshop—the youngest boy I’d seen. He was tiny, and his small fingers worked quickly as he and another young boy attached decorative embellishments to the candle holder’s sticky glue coating. The last step—two older boys covered the still-sticky glue surface with green glitter. Christmas decorations.

Behind the boy kneading glue was a tiny ancillary space the size of a small closet. Its floor was crusted with grime, bits of trash, a stray flip flop, and a pool of standing liquid. This is where they do their cooking and where they go to the bathroom, they told me. On the left side of this space is a dye-stained tank of fetid water—apparently their drinking water?—and a stack of aluminum plates sitting on a propane tank, suggesting a meal. On the right, through a plywood door, was a squat toilet, coated in raw excrement.

An exhaust fan sat, motionless, in the window. Overhead was a shelf with the children’s personal effects. One dusty suitcase announced its brand name on the buckle: “IDEAL.” The workshop’s overseer proudly pointed out the dark, tiny television set in the corner of the room. I don’t know whether it works or not. How long do you work every day, I asked one of the boys. Fifteen hours a day, I was told.

Drained and feeling my poker face nearing its breaking point, I followed Joshi, Shankar, and our guide to the fifth and final workshop, where 8 children (some of them quite small) were cutting mirrors into small pieces and attaching them to star-shaped Christmas tree ornaments. They sat, barefoot, on a floor strewn with bits of broken mirror. The walls were draped with exposed wires—stolen electricity, I later learned—almost like decorative streamers. The working hours here were shorter, Joshi told me—only 12-13 hours a day. These were the lucky ones.

In the vestibule next to this workshop, an emaciated boy was preparing lunch for the group. Two large pots containing curried potatoes and rice sat on the floor, amidst grime and some crumpled old plastic bottles. Next to pieces of trash, rotting bits of food and some stray electric wire clips, an aluminum plate containing tomato slices sat on the floor, tempting the flies. Next time, Joshi translated to me from our guide, we should come and stay for lunch. Yes, I said. Yes, thank you.

I held back the tears until we were in the van, but there they flowed silently. Joshi spoke gently: Em’lee, I know, when I first was seeing this, I cried also, but now my heart is very strong. But this is the reality. Now you can see for yourself how fair trade is different. Em’lee, please do not worry. You cannot change it in one hour or one day or one year. But you can make changes slowly.

I nodded, unable to respond. Shankar, silent until Joshi asked if he was all right, put it best: “I have no words.” But I have tried to coax this experience into words here so that you could all access what I saw today. This is the reality in these slums, and it is enabled by our own consumer economy. There are hundreds of workshops like these in Delhi alone, Joshi told me. I sat in the car, numb, as Naseer drove us to the Delhi Zoological Garden—Joshi’s idea to cheer us up a bit—thinking about all the necklaces and Christmas ornaments I’ve bought over the years, wondering who made them. What I saw today will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Thank you Emily.