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Bring Christmas Cheer to the World
Justin Killcullen, Trocaire's Director, examines the issue of child labour. Click onto Trocaire's Website to read more about the work of this charity organisation.

Fact File
Plight of Children Today
What your money can do

This year, we are facing the last Christmas of the millennium and our thoughts will be turning to Santa Claus, toys and New Year resolutions. Yet one of the tragic ironies of our times is that the workers who give our children so much joy on special occasions are themselves living miserable lives. Indeed, most of the world's children will not be playing with toys at all at Christmas. They are too poor to be able to afford such luxuries. Putting food on the table is hard enough for their parents. Trocaire and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) have launched the 'Fair Play for Toy Workers' campaign in a bid to bring Christmas cheer into the lives of thousands of Asian toy workers. We are not calling on Irish people to boycott toys or particular companies. We want people to use their clout as consumers to call on companies to respect and guarantee the basic labour rights of their workers.

Santa Claus has a great reputation as an employer with his elves being paid good wages, working in healthy conditions and being allowed to join trade unions - it is understood Santa's elves are members of SIPTU! However, not every toy worker enjoys these basic rights. In the run-up to Christmas, toy workers in Asia will toil for up to 14 hours a day. This routine goes on seven days a week with workers pushed to the point of exhaustion in a bid to provide toys for the American and European markets. The wages are pitiful with workers in China earning as little as £1.20 a day. No matter how hard they work, the workers cannot afford to meet even their basic needs. On average, a Chinese toy worker is coming home with less than one quarter of what his/her family needs, a mere £5.03, to survive.

Irish parents will splash out an estimated £85 million on toys in Ireland this Christmas. Each Irish child under the age of 12 will have an average of £103 spent on him or her. This figure (£103) is equivalent to the wages earned by a toy worker for working 85 days. Then there are the children for whom Christmas day is just any other day. Half of the world's poor are children and face an early death from preventable disease, illiteracy or conflict. In fact, more children are being born into poverty now than ever before. A child born in New York city, Paris or Dublin today will consume, waste and pollute more in a lifetime than as many as 50 children in a developing country. Some 35,000 children die each day from preventable disease. On December 25th 1999, 100 million children will be engaged in child labour, another 100 million will be living on the streets and two million will be working as child prostitutes.

Two children who will not be celebrating Christmas will be Yaguine Koita and Fode Tounkara. Last August, these two youngsters were found dead in the landing gear compartment of a Sabena Airbus. They had stowed away on a flight from Guinea-Conakry to Brussels. They knew their chances of survival were slim and wrote a letter in French addressed to the leaders of Europe. They wrote about 'the suffering of us, the children and young of Africa.' Yaguine wrote: 'So if you see that we have sacrificed ourselves and risked our lives, it is because we suffer too much in Africa and we need you to fight poverty and put an end to war.'

These children became known as the Martyrs of Africa. Reading these statistics can be depressing. However, let me assure you that, thanks to your support, much progress has been made over the years. Trocaire and ICTU have organised the toy workers campaign since 1996. There have been some significant developments with multinational toy companies producing Codes of Conduct outlining their commitments to their workers rights. We must now work to ensure all companies implement their Codes and monitor conditions.

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• 73 million children under the age of 15 are engaged in child labour.
• There are an estimated 100 million street children.
• Two million children work as child prostitutes.
• Some 13 million children die every year in the developing world often due to lack of immunisation.
• Measles, not a child killer in Ireland, claims more than one million lives.
• During the last decade, 2 million children have died in wars.
• Up to 5 million were physically disabled in conflicts.
• Experts put the number of psychologically traumatised children at 10 million.

What your money can do

• £5 could teach a child worker in India to read and write.
• £10 would buy a hoe, seeds and fertilisers to enable a Rwandan family to farm for a year.
• £12 would provide rice for a family for one month.
• £15 would provide a basic health kit for a community health worker in Mozambique.
• £70 would provide a well for a community in Cambodia.

Many children have lost their parents and families as a result of famine and civil war in Africa. Trocaire provides food, health care and credit funds to families fostering orphans and displaced children. Photo above shows a child in Zambia.

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