Child Labour Still Blights Kazakstan

Too little being done to eliminate the exploitation of minors, new report says.

By Anton Dosybiev in Almaty (RCA No. 537, 13-Mar-08)

Every evening, 12-year-old Farkhat sits wrapped in a blanket behind a stall set up on a busy street in Almaty, the largest city in Kazakstan.

He works here, selling cigarettes, chewing gum and other small items, every day after finishing classes at school.

“My mother is here in the daytime,” Farkhat explains, “but in the evening she has to be at home with the baby and I take her place.”

Farkhat is one of many child workers in Kazakstan, an energy-rich country that still has serious problems with the exploitation of minors, according to a new study called “Child Labour in Kazakstan: Informing the Public”, published under the auspices of the International Labour Organisation, ILO. The report was produced as part of the ILO’s Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour, known as IPEC.

One area of particular concern highlighted in the report is the cotton and tobacco fields of southern Kazakstan, where child labour remains widespread. Here children start working in the fields in difficult and hazardous conditions when they are as young as eight or even six.

The report, which defines a child as a minor aged under 18, points to serious problems in the bazaars, and also in the sex industry.

These children – or rather, their parents - are breaking Kazakstan’s laws which set the full working age at 18 while allowing minors over 14 to do some paid work as long as it is part time, does not involve strenuous manual labour, and is undertaken with the permission of the child’s parents. Forced labour of any kind is outlawed.

Kazakstan has ratified several international agreements on eliminating the exploitation of children. These include the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and protocols covering trafficking, prostitution and pornography involving minors. In 2006 the country also ratified the ILO Convention on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour, which has set a target of 2015 for ending such abuses.

But in spite the body of national and international legislation in place, critics say Kazakstan has some way to go.

The authors of the ILO study say that while officials admit more needs to be done to end bad practice, they appear unaware of the scale of the problem and of the worst forms of child exploitation still occurring in the country, including virtual slavery, bonded labour to repay debts, child prostitution and recruiting minors to sell drugs.

Officials say they are doing their best. Janat Omarova, head of child development at the education department of the South Kazakstan region, says staff are working with non-government organisations to tackle this issue, for instance running programmes to alleviate need among the vulnerable sections of society where children are most likely to be sent out to work.

“We conduct national actions under which children from low-income groups receive a complete set of clothes, shoes, books, school materials and food,” said Omarova.

Sholpan Esentaeva, who heads the national labour ministry’s department for labour law observance, said it was tackling the problem from a different angle – conducting spot checks at workplaces and markets to identify breaches such as the involvement of minors in arduous labour.

But Maria Pulman, a lawyer and human rights activist, told IWPR that official campaigns to stamp out exploitation of children were far from satisfactory, and the practice remained common.

“Kazakstan was one of the first countries to ratify the Convention on the Rights of the Child that prohibits child labour,” noted Pulman. “So wherever hard labour involving children still occurs, our government is violating international conventions as well as its own legislation.”

Elena Kormogolova, head of a children’s welfare centre in the capital Astana, said international organisations had helped increase legal awareness of the issue but government programmes were still rudimentary and unsystematic.

Eduard Poletaev, a political analyst in Kazakstan, claimed the problem was, if anything, getting worse. Minors were increasingly being used for the hardest forms of physical work because of the continuing low level of awareness of their rights and the financial vulnerability of their families, he said.

Employers were naturally drawn to the idea of paying the bare minimum for unskilled child labour.

“This problem is typical of regions in the south, where the work is agricultural,” he said. “And that’s even though these southern areas have a surplus of [adult] labour.”

Whatever the law says, many small businesses are tolerant of the practice, even if they will not admit to doing it themselves.

Maksat, a baker from Almaty, does not hire child labour but feels it would be wrong to try to suppress it.

“I make flat bread near the market place, and young guys sell it,” he said. “They might be 13 or 15 and the work isn’t hard for them. They need this money because their families are not rich.”

Not all traders agree, though. Zaur, who owns a car wash in Almaty, never employs children to clean his customers’s cars. “I don’t believe a child can cope 100 per cent with the work,” he told IWPR. “That is why I hire only adults”.

Zaur said that many other car washes do use children, but said, “I don’t need problems with the law.”

Omarova says there should be tougher penalties for employers who ignore labour laws, although she admits it will be hard to stamp out the tradition of families in rural areas using their own children as farm labourers.

“It’s a fact that many parents don’t let their children go to school and force them to help out in certain seasons,” she said, adding that such work “should not come at the expense of study and the pursuit of knowledge”.

Meanwhile, Farkhat stays at his small stall every evening till late in the night, when he gathers up whatever is left unsold and takes it home.

“It’s too bad I don’t have enough time to do my homework,” he says. “I have to copy [others’ work] at school every day and I often only get a two [out of five].”

Anton Dosybiev is journalist in Kazakstan who contributes regularly to IWPR.