Old Habits Die Hard: Banning Child Labor Practices in the Uzbek Cotton Sector

The issue of child labor strikes an emotional chord with a vast majority of consumers. When the BBC released a segment detailing the ongoing horrors of child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry in October 2007, massive public attention was drawn to the world’s third largest exporter of cotton and its unsettling child rights abuses. The Uzbek government’s continuing reliance on forced child labor for the cotton industry, which yields its largest export revenue, generated international outrage and put pressure on the world’s textile giants to take action. The threat of a global ban on Uzbek cotton naturally motivated the Uzbek authorities to take some immediate, internationally visible steps to convince textile companies that they were cracking down on the use of child labor according to the mandates of international law. Numerous reports, however, reveal that the government already summoned children and other uncompensated workers to the fields for the autumn harvest in September 2008, indicating that the administration has no real intention of altering the old practices of its most lucrative industry. Image source: asianews.it. > Continue.

Publications: Covalence Analyst Papers | Country: Uzbekistan | Company: Tesco, Hennes & Mauritz, C&A, Wal-Mart, JC Penney, Target, Gap, Levis and Marks & Spencer | Source: Katherin Machalek