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The Sialkot Story: Making villages "child labour free"
ILO IPEC Programme provides an alternative to working children
(World of Work n. 19 - 1997)
The children in Sialkot - some of them as young as seven - sew the balls together either at home or in small workshops. Some never go to school. But making footballs isn't the only example of child labour there. Sialkot has another large industry employing boys alongside men: the manufacture of surgical instruments, where the youngsters work as filers and polishers. Numerous other children are forced to work the kilns making bricks, or remain unpaid for jobs repairing agricultural machines and collecting garbage.
Manufacturing industries like Sialkot's play an important role in Pakistan's economy. In 1995-96, football exports brought in nearly 1.3 billion Rupees (Rs.) while the value of surgical instruments exported was nearly Rs. 1.5 billion. In 1993-94, when demand was boosted be cause of the 1994 World Cup tournament in the United States, around 35 million balls were exported, to a value of nearly Rs. 3.2 billion. Football production is now rising again in advance of the 199 competition.
Despite the economic importance of the football stitching, surgical instrument and similar industries, Pakistan recently asked the ILO' s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) to develop a new programme to eliminale "hazardous and exploitative" child labour in Sialkot. The request was made by Pakistan's National Steering Committee on Child Labour in response to a study carried out in 1996 with the assistance of IPEC. (Attention was focused on the production of footballs by child labourers following an international campaign launched by the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in 1996).
The IPEC study - a detailed survey of the working children of Sialkot and their lives - found that 7,000 children between the ages of five and 14 years work full-time in football stitching, with 7,700 in the same age brackets working full-time in grinding and polishing surgical instruments. Many thousands more work part-time in both industries outside school hours.
The children come from large families, with often two or more children working in the same industry. In 12 per cent of cases, the children's parents had taken an advance equivalent to two to three months of the child's future earnings, although child bondage is not considered to be prevalent in these two sectors.
The children make up 17 per cent of the workforce in football stitching and around 31 per cent in the manufacture of surgical instruments. For between eight and nine hours of work every day, the child football stitchers earn roughly half the adult minimum wage of Rs. l,650 per month for unskilled work, and the instrument polishers an average of nearly Rs. 1,300. These proportions compare favourably to other sectors of child labour in Pakistan.
The stitching of footballs and the filing of surgical instruments are the most labour intensive and time-consuming phase in the manufacturing process. Both skills take on average one year to learn. The work is subcontracted to villages around Sialkot, where it is done in homes and small workshops by men, women, girls and boys, though exclusively by child and adult males in the case of the filing of instruments.
The large quantities of metal dust generated by grinding and polishing is a definite health hazard for the children employed in the manufacture of surgical instruments. On the other hand, child football stitchers, who work on average one hour more per day for far less pay, appear not to face any major health and safety problems. Only minor injuries from the needles and othertools used in stitching are reported.
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