Child Slave Labor in the Philippines

source: Kristin Heineman

Child slave labor refers to the illegal employment of children below 18 years of age in hazardous occupations. Underage children are being forced to manual labor to help their families mainly due to poverty. About 2.06 million all around the Philippines are compelled to do labor, such as in crop plantations, mining caves, rock quarries, and factories.

Child labor has many ill effects in children who are supposed to be in the environment of a classroom rather than roaming the streets and risking every chance, time and time again, to earn money. Although most do get the privilege of education, most end up being dropouts and repeaters because they are not able to focus on their studies. Because of child labor, children suffer from malnutrition, hampered growth, and improper biological development.

The Philippines is literally a young nation with a high percentage of young people in its overall population. Children between ages five and seventeen number 22.4 million, comprising a third of the overall Philippine population. Working children represent sixteen percent of the overall population of children between ages five and seven. That means that one out of every six children work (Working Children 1). In the last twelve months, 3.7 million children ages five to seventeen worked. Children from rural households make up 67.1 percent of this amount and almost half are between the ages of five and fourteen. In addition, in the last week, 2.85 million children between the ages of five and seventeen worked. Of this number, half are between the ages of five and fourteen, consisting of approximately 1.4 million children. These working children consist of largely of boys, who account for 65 percent. As far as the locations where these children work, 60 percent perform unpaid family work in their own households, 17.2 percent work in their own homes and 53 percent work in family farms.

One of the most common jobs for a child slave to carry out is fishing. Forty years ago, fish were so plentiful in the Philippines that one could fish just a stone's throw away from its shores. Today, fisherman sail far and often stay long in the sea to be able to bring home anything. And a net is sometimes more than what they need. Dynamites, Molotov cocktails, and cyanide are frequently used. But others use something else. They use young enslaved boys who are usually brought home dead along with their catch.

This illegal fishing practice, called muro ami, is widely practiced in the Philippines, and requires children to dive to dangerous depths to pound the easily broken corals with rocks or pipes to scare fish into a large waiting net. Young divers often drown and the coral reefs become devastated. A similar fishing process which is as destructive and as dangerous is paaling, which compels young divers to use hoses attached to a surface air compression to form a virtual bubble curtain which forces fish into the nets. Typically, a paaling operation uses four boats, each carrying 25 divers.

The Palawan-based Environmental Legal Assistance Center (ELAC) has documented statements made by 129 children who escaped from a fishing vessel using muro ami and paaling methods in July 2000. Eddie, 14 used to help his father farm but ran away wanting to earn money. "On July 3, 1998 I started my work as a diver on the FB Unity. The boat has 350 divers with four managers. We had a ten month contract to work with the company. The company said we would be paid at the end of the contract. Our food was deducted from our salary. We were treated like animals and when we committed mistakes were whipped and beaten. Workers were compelled to work despite illness. We made seven dives a day and could catch fifty to seventy tubs of fish in every dive.

June 17, narrated "We had to work from 6a.m. in the morning until 5p.m. in the evening. Sometimes when we made mistakes, our supervisor whipped us with a rope almost the size of a wrist. On one occasion I was whipped because I misplaced the hose. Due to the maltreatment we suffered we decided to escape. While we can endure the diving we cannot withstand the lashing and physical brutality.

ELAC's document is long. It talks of miserable life, suffering and death in the sea often unknown by authorities. The fishing practices in the country have not only become desperate but dangerous.

Besides the practices of muro ami and paaling, children in the Philippines are used to perform other tasks as well. Nicreto, a fourteen year old boy who works in the sugar cane fields in addition to his job as a fisher-boy decided to try his hand in the coastal area of Tagda, Hinigaran, Negos Occidental. Without proper training or education; at the age of twelve, he went to sea. He had to go to work at 4a.m. and would come home, with or without a catch, at three or four in the afternoon. If lucky he would have a good catch, and earn 10 to 15 pesos a day. But when fishing became bad, he was forced to go back to take odd-jobs in the sugar cane farm to earn at least one kilo of rice. Nicreto suffers from anemia and in his present situation, cannot even think about life in the future. For him every day is lived only on whatever there is.

Rosie, a nine year old sugar cane worker states "I am Rosie Baroquillo. I started working on the sugar cane field when I was seven years old. Now, I am nine and I will still work in the field. I stopped going to school because my family could not afford to spend the money. My father is already dead. The money I earn is not enough to buy food. I am tired and hungry doing my work in the field. I wish I could have soup to go with the rice I eat because without soup it is hard to swallow.

United States Deputy under Secretary for International Labor Affairs Thomas B. Moorehead, Philippines Secretary of Labor Patricia Santo Tomas, and Philippines Secretary of Education Raul Roco signed a collaborative agreement on a Timebound Program to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in the Philippines on June 28, 2002. The agreement commits both countries to work together on a number of initiatives to remove children from work, provide them access to quality and relevant education and offer families viable economic alternatives to child labor.

The U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL) will provide $10 million for child labor action programs and education initiatives. $5 million of this will go through the International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO/IPEC) and $5 million will be competitively bid and funded by the USDOL to be a nongovernmental organization. This Timebound Program will be implemented in communities with a high incidence of child labor with a particular focus on children in mining and quarrying, domestic work, pyrotechnics production, agriculture plantations, commercial sexual exploitation, deep-sea fishing and other priority groups to be determined in the Philippines.

With confidence, this program, along with the help of other nations like the United States, will begin putting an end to child slave labor in the Philippines. Although they may seem like inevitable occurrences, it is possible for a conclusion to the tremendous problems which result from child slave labor.

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