give me a narrative story about a child labour
Answers
At 12 years old, Bithi was sent by her family to work in a garment factory. She is one of the millions of children toiling away in the $284-billion global textile and apparel sector.
The needle hums, fingers fly and piles of cloth are stitched together at record speed.
“60 pockets an hour,” the 15-year-old behind the sewing machine explains.
Squished inside a second story room with 20 other Bangladeshi women, the girl hunches over her machine while fluorescent lights beam hard overhead.
Bithi is one of millions of children around the world toiling away in the $284-billion global textile and apparel sector. From children working in high-pressure garment factories in Bangladesh to young girls working in Indian yarn and spinning mills, child labour is rife in these industries. Many of these children work in fields harvesting cotton; small, informal and unauthorized factories performing duties such as sewing pockets and buttons, cutting threads or running materials; or in homes, performing fine needle and embroidery work.
“The first day I felt bad, I thought it wasn’t good. I was too small. I was surrounded by other older people. That first day, I cried,” she remembeed.
But that was three years ago, when Bithi was 12. Now, it’s routine — no more tears are spilled. Every day, Bithi helps create a minimum of 480 pairs of pants for 83.3 taka [1.07 USD].
The cost of fast fashion
In Bithi’s case, abject poverty and a sick father forced her parents to send her to the garment factory to sew designer clothes with a destination of shops in high-income countries like Canada.
In 2014, more than 406 companies imported textile and apparel goods, similar to the products Bithi works on, into Canada. Fast fashion has driven a race to the bottom, allowing companies to find cheaper sources of labour. Desperate, girls like Bithi are pushed to work for very low prices and some are brought into these industries under the false promises of earning decent wages, meals, training and schooling.