Advocates force ouster of Uzbek official from Fashion Week over child labor issues

By Reid Maki, Child Labor Coalition Coordinator and NCL Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards

It’s not every day that you get your message through to one of the world’s most notorious dictators, but some of us in the child labor advocacy community think we may have just done that last week during New York City’s Fashion Week.

For several years, the Child Labor Coalition, 28 organizations working to end the labor exploitation of children around the world, has been deeply concerned about the forced use of child labor in Uzbekistan, where Islam Karimov has ruled with an iron fist for 21 years. Each fall, Uzbek school children and their teachers are forced to leave their classrooms and perform arduous hand-harvesting of cotton for up to two months. The children—estimates of their numbers range from several hundred thousand to almost two million—receive little or no pay and often perform this back-breaking work from young childhood and through college. The workers are charged for shelter and food and by the time those expenses are deducted their compensation is so small it would be fair to say they worked for little or no pay or “slave wages.” The profits of this labor tend to flow to Uzbekistan’s ruling elite. Unlike child labor in most countries, Uzbekistan’s occurs as a result of national policy filtered down to local government authorities.

Recently, members of the Cotton Advocacy Network and the Child Labor Coalition, led by the International Labor Rights Forum and other CLC members like the American Federation of Teachers and the Human Rights Watch highlighted this issue by targeting advocacy at Karimov’s daughter Gulnara, who in addition to being Uzbekistan’s ambassador to Spain is a fashion designer who was participating in Fashion Week, where designers from around the world hold shows to reveal their new clothing lines.

Since Gulnara Karimov has bragged about the use of “high quality” Uzbek cotton and is a member of Karimov government, the advocacy community felt that she could fairly be used as an advocacy target.

As ILRF and the Cotton Advocacy Network planned its protest, IMG, Fashion Week’s organizer, washed its hands of Gulnara’s controversial show by cancelling it. Gulnara then moved her fashion show to the stylish Manhattan restaurant Cipriani on 42^nd Street for a private show on September 15^th. About two dozen of us followed the show to let attendees know about Uzbekistan’s child labor problem. It appears that our efforts scared away Gulnara, who according to media reports, was nowhere to be found.

We shouted things like “Hey, hey, ho, ho—Child Labor’s got to go” and “Uzbek cotton is mighty rotten.” We were joined by several Uzbek nationals, including one who had been forced to work in the fields himself as a child. Another Uzbek man said his daughter is a college student in Uzbekistan and that she is forced to harvest cotton every afternoon. He told a reporter from the Guardian that “it is back-breaking work, very, very hard, and most children have to work from sunrise to sunset every day until the harvest is finished. No weekends, nothing, for two or three months.” One protestor, an American woman from Connecticut, carried a sign that said, “Free Abdul,” who she explained was an Uzbek exchange student that she hosted who has subsequently been jailed by the Karimov regime as a political prisoner. Photos of the rally can be found here.

We handed out hundreds of leaflets and our protest received wide coverage about a dozen journalistic organizations including the New York Post, and Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

Members of the CLC conducted a similar protest outside the Embassy of Uzbekistan in 2009. At that time, some of us wondered if word of the protest would filter up to Karimov. With the ouster of his daughter from Fashion Week, we’re pretty sure Islam Karimov got the news this time.

If you would like clothing retailers to know about your concerns regarding Uzbek cotton, please consider adding your name to this Change.org petition (one of several targeting specific retail chains).

‘Uzbek Cotton Is Mighty Rotten!!!’

By Reid Maki, CLC Coordinator & NCL Director of Social Responsibility and Fair Labor Standards

Rally against forced child labor before the Uzbekistan Embassy in Washington, DC.

There are a lot of countries in the world with egregious forms of child labor but only one where that child labor is forced by the central government. That country is Uzbekistan, where the government requires school children to suspend their education, leave school, and harvest cotton for several weeks each year. The work is arduous and the pay is miniscule.

Decades ago, Uzbekistan had tractors to harvest the cotton but the tractors fell into disrepair and instead of buying new machinery the government decided that it could save money by conscripting children to do the work.

On Wednesday, about 50 advocates and supporters gathered outside the Uzbekistan Embassy in downtown Washington, D.C. for a rally to tell the government of Uzbekistan that it’s time to stop exploiting its children to harvest it’s cash crop. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the International Labor Rights Forum (ILRF), and the Child Labor Coalition (CLC) helped organize the event. The CLC, which has 22 members including the ILRF, is co-chaired by the AFT and the National Consumers League (NCL).

“Today, we are here to remind consumers that the cotton that goes into the clothes they wear may have been harvested by school children in Uzbekistan, where the government has replaced mechanical harvesters with the sometimes bloody fingers of small children and teenagers, who are forced to leave school and pick cotton,” noted NCL’s Sally Greenberg, also the co-chair of the CLC.

In a September LA Times editorial about Uzbekistan’s unacceptable use of children to harvest cotton, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) noted, “Consumers and companies in the West prop up this monstrous system by unwittingly purchasing cotton harvested by forced child labor. Supply chain analysts have determined that most Uzbek cotton is sold to countries in South Asia and Eastern Europe.”

Some of that may eventually end up in garments sold in the United States, Canada, and Europe, noted Greenberg, who acknowledged that some major companies—Gap Inc., Levi Strauss & Co., Limited Brands Inc. and Nike Inc., among them—have taken steps to eliminate Uzbek cotton from their supply chains.

The rally was timed to coincide with the cotton harvest season in Uzbekistan and with an Uzbek cotton fair, where the majority of cotton contracts will be signed this year, Bama Athreya, executive director of the ILRF told reporter Liza Casabona. “We are taking this action today to send a message to all those buyers,” Athreya said.

Antonia Cortese, secretary-treasurer of AFT, reminded listeners that Uzbekistan is violating the International Labour Organization’s conventions against the worst forms of child labor even though it has agreed to honor them. Cortese noted that teachers are conscripted to harvest the cotton along with the children.

Among the supporters at the rally was a young Uzbeki man who carried a hand-written sign that said, “I was a slave.” As a college student in Uzbekistan, he and his classmates had been forced to enter the fields. He spoke passionately about his memories of harvesting cotton, remembering clearly the painful fingertips from getting pricked as he picked the cotton. He said he’d heard about the rally while driving that morning and decided he had to take a stand against his government’s repressive policies. His sister who joined him initially became afraid of reprisals from the Uzbek government and retreated to the car, he explained.

Cortese and Greenberg tried to deliver hundreds of postcards of concern to the Embassy staff but no one would answer the door. The protest, which lasted about an hour, also featured speeches from and the AFL-CIO and the United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society.

If you’re interested, you may want to check out the following links:

• Video from the rally
• More photos from the rally
• AFL-CIO NOW Blog post

The 22 members of the Child Labor Coalition have named the elimination of child labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest as one of its priority areas for the year.