child rights

Jivaj, who is from West Bengal and looks around 12, told The Observer that some of the boys in the sweatshop had been badly beaten. 'Our hours are hard and violence is used against us if we don't work hard enough. This is a big order for abroad, they keep telling us that.

'Last week, we spent four days working from dawn until about one o'clock in the morning the following day. I was so tired I felt sick,' he whispers, tears streaming down his face. 'If any of us cried we were hit with a rubber pipe. Some of the boys had oily cloths stuffed in our mouths as punishment.'

I was bought from my parents' village in [the northern state of] Bihar and taken to New Delhi by train,' he says. 'The men came looking for us in July. They had loudspeakers in the back of a car and told my parents that, if they sent me to work in the city, they won't have to work in the farms. My father was paid a fee for me and I was brought down with 40 other children. The journey took 30 hours and we weren't fed. I've been told I have to work off the fee the owner paid for me so I can go home, but I am working for free. I am a shaagird [a pupil]. The supervisor has told me because I am learning I don't get paid. It has been like this for four months.

In Cuba, life expectancy is 6 years longer than the rest of the continent. Under-five mortality is 4 times below the average. If Latin America could show the same results as Cuba, 250,000 children's lives could be saved every year. There are 5.7 million working children in Latin America. For the whole continent, there are 50 million street children. None of these situations are to be found in Cuba, where all children go to school.

"Gap may be one of the best-known fashion brands with a public commitment to social responsibility, but the employment of bonded child slaves as young as 10 in India's illegal sweatshops tells a different story. The reality is that most major retail firms are in the same game, cutting costs and not considering the consequences. They should know by now what outsourcing to India means.

It is an impossible task to track down all of these terrible sweatshops, particularly in the garment industry when you need little more than a basement or an attic crammed with small children to make a healthy profit. Some owners even hide the children in sacks and in carefully concealed mezzanine floors designed to dodge such raids."

NB: Glenn Murphy, the CEO of Gap pays himself $1.5 billion a year.

Amitosh concentrates as he pulls the loops of thread through tiny plastic beads and sequins on the toddler's blouse he is making. Dripping with sweat, his hair is thinly coated in dust. In Hindi his name means 'happiness'. The hand-embroidered garment on which his tiny needle is working bears the distinctive logo of international fashion chain Gap. Amitosh is 10...

The derelict industrial unit in which Amitosh and half a dozen other children are working is smeared in filth, the corridors flowing with excrement from a flooded toilet. Behind the youngsters huge piles of garments labelled Gap lie completed in polythene sacks, with official packaging labels, all for export to Europe and the United States in time for Christmas.

One internal audit of 25,000 employees in 128 Wal-Mart stores in the USA found 1,371 violations of child labour laws, including minors working too late, too many hours a day and during school hours. It also found 60,000 instances where workers were forced to work through breaks, and 16,000 where they worked through meal times. A 2002 lawsuit in Texas estimated that Wal-Mart short-changed its employees $150 million over four years in missed breaks.