Special Report

Tender hands that toil
Unprotected by Government
Second of three parts

Sixteen-year old Harold, a kargador (pier workhand) for five years, is one of the children that frequent Bacolod’s port. He is among the millions of Filipino children working without papers. While there are laws that clearly ban the employment of children like Harold whose ages are below the mandated employment age, the laws in this case are made to be broken.

BY Karl G. Ombion
Bulatlat

BACOLOD CITY - Children are supposed to enjoy their childhood, develop themselves mentally and physically, under the care of their parents. But millions of Filipino children work. Lack of livelihood and low wages force parents and older relatives to look the other way when their children work.

Being minors put the children in extremely vulnerable situations, paving the way to exploitation and other forms of abuse. Most of them, regardless of their young age, do back-breaking and hazardous work, with meager pay and their names hidden from the payroll list. In many instances, the children are simply nameless faces because they are hired by subcontractors.

Employers often capitalize on the children’s docility and illiteracy to make them do dehumanizing and hazardous work,  with starvation pay. The systematic exploitation and manipulation result in the stifling of their development, rendering them physically and mentally imbalanced. 

Law makers, enforcement agencies and even some non-government agencies fight for the enforcement and protection of children’s rights. Others lobby for the abolition of child labor.  Yet, the millions spent for these various programs are seldom felt, especially in the community.

The Philippines is a signatory to many international laws and declarations related to child labor, among them the ILO Convention 138 which sets 16 as the minimum age for employment, ILO 182 which prohibits all forms of child abuse. The Philippines also has Republic Act 7658 which prohibits the employment of persons below 15 years old, while the Department of Labor and Employment prohibits, through Department Order No. 4, persons below 18 years old to engage in type of hazardous work.

While the country has many laws that address child labor, children’s rights advocates see these as toothless and the ratification of international declarations meaningless.

The root of the issue, they say, are the socio-economic and political circumstances that force children to work. Incontrovertible proof is the mounting incidence of child labor.

As the country’s economy further sinks due to the fiscal crisis, more and more children will likely be forced to engage in economic activities for their families’ survival.  This creates serious implications in the enforcement of laws against child labor and to the on-going campaign of ILO and national government on the elimination of child labor.

Child labor in sugar plantations

Meanwhile, the CIRMS study also reveals that child labor within the sugar hacienda system has its own particularities. While it recognizes that it is mainly poverty that pushes children to work, CIRMS study says that child labor in the context of the hacienda system is not simply explained by poverty factor, but by the exploitative character of the sugar hacienda system.

Sugar landlords have been relying not just on parents, but on every “productive family” residing in the hacienda. This is proven by the fact that 92 percent of the sugar working family respondents said that “their children do not just work as replacements, but as regular working force just like the parents.” That “for decades, their families have been treated by their employers as a productive unit which have to render service regardless of their age and gender.”

In the sugar plantations, whether the parents are able to work or not, the children must also render service to their amo (masters). Because the entire sugar worker-family has been indebted to them for years, the rest of the family members, including the children, must also work for the amo.

Previously conducted sociological studies in Negros revealed that the phenomenon above is part of the “slave making” character of the sugar industry.

Slavery is a reality in an expeditious system of sugar plantation because of the peculiar labor needs of planting and harvesting cane. The planting and harvest season is very tedious, expansive and busy and only a large, well-disciplined labor force capable of toiling in the tropical heat can meet its demands. Sugar farming tended to find a niche in regions where abundant labor could be turned to or coerced into doing field work for low wages. Henceforth, production became associated with extremes in social structure: the very poor who cultivate and cut the cane, and the estate owners and millers who control the process of converting canes to sugar.

Solutions

Government responses to the issue of child labor have always been minimal, limited to monitoring and documentation of abuses often done primarily for media publicity.

National laws and local ordinances on child labor have mainly been exhortation and regulatory in character, and seldom penalized the abusers.

Ranie Lava, organizer of the National Federation of Sugar Workers (NFSW), who has also handled problems of child laborers said in Ilonggo, “Government has been boasting that they are gaining ground in their campaign to protect the child rights from abuses, but in reality they have mainly limited to monitoring and documentation.”

He said, in many sugar haciendas children are given back-breaking work for hours under the scorching heat, and are given only P30-40 a day. Worse, they are not listed in the payroll, so they could not complain, or if they did, they would likely lose in the argument. And the government has not done anything about this, he added.

Meanwhile, Bacolod City councilor Jocelle Batapa said in interview with Bulatlat, “We have some good laws but they are not effectively enforced.” She added that people in the government make laws and programs which only consider their effects on the adult citizens, but seldom on the children, thus there is always a gap between laws and reality, especially on child labor.

Human rights lawyer Archie Baribar also told Bulatlat that “unless we criminalize the offenses against child laborers, the problem on child labor will just keep on rising and breed more problems.” He urged the government to show sincerity and be more decisive. Bulatlat