Fisking Darien Fenton

Smack-head Darien Fenton has written a post about child labour that is a travesty of contradictions, so uch so that it is deserving of a fisking as only a right winger can do.

A Bangladeshi boy works in a shipbuilding factory in down town. These factories employ young boys as apprentices without pay for the first few years.

Well done, enterprising lad, getting some hard earned skills in boat building and repair. Perhaps he could come down here after his apprenticeship and show our overpaid buffoons in the trade a thing or two. Not so worried about the no pay, they probably get a shipping container to live in and free food in return.

They work in extreme conditions without safety tools like gloves, goggles, and other protective gear.

There is evidence to suggest that workers without safety gear are actually more careful than workers decked out in all the safety gear under the sun.

In exchange, they learn the skills of the trade. But this costs them loss of health and education.

Hang on a minute. She says the learn skill of the trade in return for their free labour, how does that reconcile with a loss of education? Not everyone can be a university lecturer or a unionist and then go on to be a Labour Party MP, we need trained, skilled workers in industries like boat building. I fail to see the problem here.

We should remember that there’s a whole other world of exploitation and abuse of workers out there.

Now hang on a minute here. There is no evidence to suggest that this young boy is being exploited, did Darien pop her head out of the air conditioned limo to actually ask the chap if he was being exploited or if he was unhappy. I bet she didn’t. The pong of hard working poor people would have been too much for her socialist patricians nose.

I was at the ILO in Geneva in 1998 when the Child Labour Convention was passed.  The Global March against child labour travelled over 80,000 kms through 62 countries, with a core group of marchers, rescued from mines, sweatshops and servitude.  They carried the message that the time has come to guarantee every child their childhood, that no child should lose their chance to learn and develop to work all day long.  The march was led into the UN by 11 year old Basudev Bhattarai, a former domestic servant from Nepal.

Eleven years on, I’m horrified by this picture, but thanks to Labour Start for reminding us that child labour is still a black spot on the face of humanity.

Oh come on, she has just contradicted herself again buy saying that the boy isn’t learning and developing. He most demonstrably is “learning and developing” skills in the boat-building industry. She calls child labour a black spot on the face of humanity yet is was off the backs of child labour in the industrial revolution which many in the third world are yet to experience that saw kids doing fine works as chimney-sweeps and pit-pony drovers and coal mining. Good honest work, an excellent work etthic and keeping them out of trouble and off the streets.