Beneath the Barcode

This girl is a modern slave, and after she has worked hauling rocks for her entire childhood, once she weakens or sickens, she will be discarded and replaced.
Millions of children are human slaves in mines, gravel quarries and artisanal mines around the world. They mine the rare metals used in our electronics, they grind stone into gravel used in global building projects - often funded by governments and international lenders - they even mine the tombstone marble we use to bury those we love.

The poverty sending babies and families to dumps for food can only be addressed by addressing the growing inequality that sees 80 people with more wealth than half of the world's population and every other child worldwide living in poverty.
Taxes on financial transactions hold out hope for raising significant aid from an under-taxed global financial sector. The Same Heart, Media Voice's documentary feature on this subject, examines the pros and cons of development aid and financial transaction taxes. There are bills before Congress supporting the idea and it has bipartisan interest.

While child labor around the world has decreased by 100 million in the past twenty years, the number of children working to harvest the world's cocoa supply has dramatically increased. The Ivory Coast and Ghana are the two of the worst places to be a child in the world today, countries where 800,000 small stake-holders receive a pittance for their crop and poverty drives families to send their children off with traffickers to work.
The major chocolate suppliers maintain they have done the best they can by these children, while making over half billion dollars from their labors in the last decade.

The future could belong to model cooperatives that pay fairly for the cocoa and have an interest in the communities where they do business. Divine Chocolate is such a brand, available online.
Meanwhile, big chocolate companies should be pressured to do more to support the farmers at the head of the supply chain with higher prices, schools, and training to end child labor.

The coffee being harvested by this young girl was sold for 35 cents a pound to the five multinationals that control 80% of the international market... the mark- up in our stores ranges from three to eight thousand per cent. Her work kept her out of school. The pesticides made her cough and her eyes burn.
While children continue to work picking tea and coffee in 16 countries, this girl was removed from the plantation and sent to school by the Kenyan School House program, established by Media Voices 17 years ago.

She has traveled from her mountain village with her family to work as a migrant harvesting tobacco on the Pacific coast of Mexico. She is Huichole. She lives under a large tree with no clean water, no toilet, just a few stones and cook pot. She will work from dawn to dark in this same spot, stringing tobacco leaves while exposed to hundreds of deadly pesticides and nicotine poisoning.
Tobacco continues to be picked by children in 16 countries today, including the American South, where migrant children are able to go to school only part of the year.

A tobacco field is a deceptively beautiful place, deep green as far as the eye can see, gorgeous in the sun. This ten-year old boy gathers the tobacco leaves with his brothers and will also run and play with his friends throughout the fields. But the smell of pesticides is everywhere and the empty boxes, burned on site after being sprayed on the plants send smoke everywhere.
The smoke and the spray are a death sentence for this little boy whose nervous system and brain will never recover from the prolonged exposure to chemicals strong enough to cause cancer.
Pressuring multinational corporations to take responsibility for the sourcing of their tobacco is essential. Child labor in the U.S. tobacco industry is currently permitted under U.S. law. This needs to change, and the Child Labor Coalition is working towards that goal.

Tricked into leaving home by traffickers who promise education and money for the family, this young boy's story illustrates the core nature of human trafficking – a multi-billion dollar organized crime committed in every corner of the world.

A smile is worth a thousand words. Arezoo, who worked in the carpet sector, before GoodWeave removed her from work and sent them to school.

Four children at a chalkboard, all intent on getting their lessons right. Compared to our schools, these circumstances are dismal, but that hasn't stopped the desire and will to learn in a country where over 2 million children pick the cocoa beans for our favorite chocolates.
No single remedy for child labor is more powerful than education. A child in school is a child unavailable for child labor.

Clara's fifteen years of age and has already lived a lifetime of 7 years on the streets of Mexico City. She ran away from an abusive uncle in her village home outside the capital. She lives with a small street family in a dry sewer in the center of the city, hidden in plain sight, one of over 100 million children living on the streets of towns and cities around the world.
Clara is a drug addict and turns to prostitution when necessary to support herself. She has a boyfriend for love, but also for protection. She does not attend school and has no birth certificate, health or school records to prove she exists.

This little girl works in 100º heat picking onions with her family all day long. This is legal in America today, because of a loophole in the 1939 Fair Labor Standards Act you could drive a truck through.

Poor people’s children are frequently trafficked in India to work as domestics or in small stores. His family may think he’s off getting an education. Laws in India have recently changed, and children rescued from child labor are given reparations for years of unpaid labor.

The first photograph in a series of two, shows trafficked children forced into the carpet-making industry in Pakistan.

The second photograph in a series of two, shows girls rescued by Goodweave, an organization dedicated to ending child labor, forced labor, and bonded labor in global supply chains.

This photograph, over a hundred years old, was taken of child labor in the fields of Massachusetts and include children picking cranberries on the Cape. By 1939, the Congress had passed laws outlawing all forms of hazardous child labor in mines, factories and mills but made an exception for children working on family farms. (photograph by Lewis Hine)

A century later, a half million children continue to work as migrant laborers in American agriculture because Congress has not acted to update the law and provide proper protections from abuse. (photo by U.R. Romano)

Robin took this picture of these four girls after purchasing their freedom. Some people criticize this practice claiming it only encourages traffickers to ransom more children.
Look at this picture and ask yourself if the outcome matters to these girls? Then a find a program to support that will put a girl in school.