Tempo Boy

CHILD LABOUR IN BANGLADESH

This book gives voice to a handful of small boys aged from 8 to 13 who are engaged in the transport industry in Bangladesh as conductors on tempo buses. They talk to Shah Ahmed Sadeque about their jobs, their family situations, and their dreams. His evocative photographs give us a glimpse into their working lives and their struggle for survival.

According to the International Labour Organisations, the phenomenon of child labour is most widely found in the countries of Asia. The international growth of child labour in recent years has been matched by a growth in statistics and learned papers on the subject. Bangladesh is picked out as one of the countries where it flourishes. In the ILO's worldwide listing of child labour statistics only Mail and Bhutan show a higher proportion of children in employment than Bangladesh.

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world. Per capita income is about £85 and is dropping. Child labour is at its height in a situation of chronic adult unemployment and underemployment.

 Article 20 of the Bangladesh Constitution defines work as "a right, a duty and a matter of honour for every citizen capable of working". The tempo boys in this study are a fragment of the huge and growing army of the child labourers of Bangladesh – 13% of the total labour force. The phenomenon occurs particularly in the rural areas where 90% of the people live and in the informal employment sector in the cities. Government statistics indicate that there are currently some 4 million children under the age of 14 in the labour market.

THE DRAFT TO THE CITY
 
 In the rural areas millions of children, particularly those from landless families, are engaged in wage-earning activity, such as looking after goats, cattle and chickens, fishing, working in the fields or on plantations.

Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of rural families, like some of those described in this book, overwhelmed by poverty, natural disaster, or domestic tragedy have left to seek their fortune in the urban areas.




The brief accounts in this exhibition resonate with experiences that are common to many child workers in the cities of Bangladesh. For destitute parents the child is seen as an essential commercial asset. The sale of his labour may be key to the family's survival. In other cases the family may no longer be able to house and feed their children. Father may have died, or a second marriage may have created conflict in the home.


The family breaks up. The children are abandoned or driven out to search for work in the city. Orphans or deserted children may end up with relatives or friends, or find themselves living on their wits on the dangerous city streets. They are completely dependent for food, clothing and shelter on what they earn. Two thirds of primary age children in Bangladesh are not at school. It can be surmised that most of them are working at home without remuneration, or outside the home for wages.

Employers view child workers as more compliant, cheaper and less organised than adult workers. They demand little and tend to work very hard. In the cities children under the age of 15 make up as much as a quarter of the workforce. They are employed as domestic servants in the homes of the well-to-do, as waiters and dishwashers in hotels and restaurants, pulling rickshaws, picking rags, collecting and selling scrap, working as sweepers and garbage collectors, shining shoes, hawking, selling newspapers and magazines, working as porters, binding books, weaving cotton, selling betel nut, working on tea stalls and as shop assistants, breaking stones and bricks, labouring on construction sites, and working in factories and machine shops.

The use of children in criminal activities is seen by those who exploit them as a means of avoiding the full penalty of the law. Thousands are involved in thieving, peddling drugs and child prostitution.