
Issue No 102		13 July 2001

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International

Child's Play

Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA has recently entered a new alliance with the Child Labour Schools Company to support a project for child labourers in India.

There are an estimated 100 million child labourers in India - children under the age of 15 working full-time in work that interferes with their education and damages their development. This project grew out of the need of village communities to confront the root causes of long-term impoverishment and related exploitation of their children as labourers. Brick kiln workers involved in the project recognised that education would be a keystone for the future benefit of their children.

The project involves building schools for the teaching of children currently engaged in child labour and employing teachers to work in these schools. It also enables parents to develop their own capacities to organise and maintain a community project, and develops the skills of teachers for use with future groups of child labourers and in other education and training. Through the project, parents can develop awareness and negotiating skills to confront the root causes of economic hardship and poverty in their communities.

The child labour schools are now becoming an accepted part of the community and are seen as a major step towards recognition among workers and the community that child labour is a form of exploitation and therefore a problem. It is clear that if these schools did not exist, the children would be working as part of their family unit and would have no access to any education.

For a child labour project to be successful in breaking the cycle of child labour, activities such as these need to be combined with strengthening local trade unions and lobbying government to increase spending on education. The India Schools Project has already become a focus for mobilising workers in the local brick-kiln industry into trade unions, and union membership has increased. The intention in the project is not for unions to permanently run the schools, but that the schools can serve as an indicator of the demand for education and that they would be taken over by the government in the long term.

Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA has conducted educational campaigns on the child labour issue for a number of years now. This alliance gives us a new avenue for directly supporting child labour projects in a country where child labour remains a serious problem.

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  Issue 102 contents

Interview: Jolly Green Giant
Senator Bob Brown on the upcoming federal poll, balances of power and what the Greens can teach the trade union movement.

Workplace: Call Centre Takeover
Theresa Davison brings us this real-life story from the coal face of the call centre industry.

E-Change: 1.2 Community � The Ultimate Network
Peter Lewis and Michael Gadiel look at the potential for network technologies to reconnect communities.

International: Child's Play
Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA has recently entered a new alliance with the Child Labour Schools Company to support a project for child labourers in India.

History: Flowers to the Rebels Faded
With the departure of our own Wobbly, a look at the development of the Wobblies in Australia and their view of Labor politicians and the work ethic seems timely.

East Timor: A Dirty Little War
In this extract from his new book, John Martinkus recounts the scenes in Dili immediately following the independence ballot.

Satire: Telstra Share Failure Ends City-Bush Divide: Everybody Screwed Equally
Communications Minister Richard Alston today claimed that the government had fulfilled its promise to ensure that the bush was not disproportionately disadvantaged by Telstra's privatisation.

Review: Cheesy Management
Currently climbing Australian best-seller lists is the 'life-changing' motivational book 'Who Moved My Cheese?' Rowan Cahill has a nibble but doesn't like the taste.

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