Child labor is such a common sight in Myanmar that news stories about child labor receive little to no attention.
What can you tell readers, when they see it every day in teashops and restaurants, on the streets of the cities and in the fields of remote areas?
But this footage in Voice of America is different.
It’s one thing for an employer to hire a teenager to serve tea. It’s another for an employer to give a teenager high-powered machinery.
In this video published by VOA, boys as young as 13 are put to work in a Mandalay factory, wielding hand-powered saws and other dangerous tools.
The workers you see in the video make about $3 a day, less than the minimum wage.
Crazy? Yes. Outrageous? Of course. But the problem isn’t so easy to solve. Hard to believe, but the factory owner told VOA that he was actually helping the children.
Otherwise, he said, they would be “slum dogs” and “gangsters.”
His comments may be shockingly blunt, but they were echoed in an interview with the International Labor Organization, which warned about the perils of cracking down on child labor and inadvertently pushing impoverished minors into even more perilous “professions,” such as child prostitution.
Hopes are high that Aung San Suu Kyi’s government will address the problem. But given how endemic it is, how it’s considered the norm, and how many other grievous problems Myanmar faces, it seems unlikely this issue will be at the top of the list.
“Aung San Suu Kyi’s Party Won’t Push for Abrupt Economic Changes in Myanmar,” says a recent headline in the Wall Street Journal.
The story is about businesses connected to the military, but it might as well be about child labor.
