We Live Subject to their Orders.

http://www.laborrights.org/sites/default/files/publications-and-resources/UzbekCottonFall08Report.pdf

1
Initiative of a group of Uzbek human rights activists and researchers in partnership
with the International Labor Rights Forum
“We Live Subject to their Orders”:
A Three?Province Survey of Forced Child Labor in
Uzbekistan’s 2008 Cotton Harvest
Tashkent – New York, 2009
2
Table of contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….3
INTRODUCTION ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5
BACKGROUND………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..5
METHODOLOGY ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..9
CHILDREN’S WORK ON THE 2008 HARVEST…………………………………………………………………………………….10
‘FIRST WE FORBADE THE CHILDREN FROM GOING OUT INTO THE FIELDS, AND THEN WE CHASED THEM OUT THERE TO
PICK COTTON’ ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………10
CHAIN OF COMMAND …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….13
COERCION……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………15
CONDITIONS IN THE FIELDS …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….20
CONSEQUENCES ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………24
SOCIAL ATTITUDES ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….25
CONCLUSIONS…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….27
APPENDIX: …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..29
QUESTIONNAIRE FOR INTERVIEWING SCHOOLCHILDREN………………………………………………………………………………29
RESOLUTION OF THE CABINET OF MINISTERS, NO 207 ………………………………………………………………………………..31
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Executive Summary
Uzbekistan is the world’s sixth largest producer of cotton, and the third largest exporter. For
decades, it has used the forced labor of its schoolchildren starting in the early primary grades, college
and university students, and civil servants, to harvest that cotton by hand. Unlike child labor in
agricultural sectors in some other countries, this practice is organized and controlled by the central
government. Each fall, shortly after the start of the school year, the government orders schools to close
and school administrators to send the children out to the fields, where they remain until the cotton
harvest is brought in. The current report is based on seventy?two interviews in three different provinces
with participants in the fall 2008 harvest.
Since gaining independence in 1991, Uzbekistan’s authoritarian government has become more
reliant on the use of forced child labor to harvest cotton due to lack of investment or economic reforms
in agriculture. The international community paid little attention to this issue amidst Uzbekistan’s other
severe human rights problems, until local activists in 2004 and 2005 began to call on the world to
boycott the cotton, harvested by children, which is exported and sold around the world. These calls
began to have an effect in 2007 and 2008, with international brands and retailers including Tesco,
Walmart, Target, Levi Strauss, Gap, Limited Brands and Marks and Spencer agreeing to ban Uzbek cotton
from their supply chains. In 2008 and early 2009, Uzbekistan signed two ILO conventions against child
labor in response to this international campaign.
A further sign that the international campaign is bearing fruit are the government’s efforts to
convince the international community that it is taking measures to end child labor. In the fall of 2008,
Uzbekistan even delayed for a short period the closure of many rural schools in the early primary grades,
for about ten days to two weeks past the start of the seasonal harvest. After September 21, however,
schoolchildren as young as fifth grade (eleven years old) in the three provinces surveyed were sent out
to pick cotton, and most remained in the fields into November. Orders clearly came from provincial
governors (khokims) to district governors, and from there to district education departments, to
individual schools. Schools were assigned quotas to fulfill, and principals of schools that did not meet
the quotas were threatened with dismissal. The consequences for children and families who objected to
taking part, or for children who did not work to their teachers’ satisfaction, were severe: beatings were
commonplace. Community government officials, local police officers, and even local prosecutors all
pressured parents with an array of tools: denial of pensions or social welfare payments, cutoffs in
4
electricity, gas or water service, arrests, beatings, temporary detention and even threats of criminal
prosecution.
In the fall 2008 harvest children as young as nine, but mostly age 11?14, performed arduous
work under hazardous conditions for full work days and then were transported back to their local
schools and allowed to go home for the night. Children fourteen and older were housed in unsanitary
field sheds for the duration of the picking season. There were no days off. Though the government set
a recommended rate of pay, farmers often underpaid the pupils, and school administrators withheld
portions of it with impunity. Children were largely responsible for bringing their own food and water;
many drank from irrigation canals in the fields. Injuries and illnesses were commonplace, and those
reported by survey respondents included viral hepatitis infections and other diseases transmitted by
contaminated food and water, and injuries sustained while children were transported to the fields in
unsafe tractor?pulled carts intended to transport raw cotton. No compensation was provided to the
families of injured children; on the contrary, those that complained were threatened with repercussions.
Aside from the risks to children’s health and well?being, rural children’s education was severely
curtailed.
The field interviews clearly show that parents, children, teachers and even farmers whose
livelihoods are aided all deplore the forced labor of children. This suggests root causes of the problem in
Uzbekistan are not poverty, tradition or lack of schooling, as can be true in other countries. The
problem is rooted in the nature of the industry and state control over rural populations. Respondents
noted that the large numbers of unemployed people in their communities could be mobilized to pick
cotton only if it paid a reasonable wage; thousands of Uzbek citizens migrate to neighboring countries
each season to do the very same work that they disdain at home because it is so poorly paid. Children,
however, are more easily subject to state pressure.
The government’s action in delaying its mobilization of children in the 2008 harvest clearly
shows that the practice, if the government so desires, can be stopped. Efforts that suggest the need to
educate farmers, parents or teachers are misguided and risk deflecting attention from the problem’s
real root causes. The international community needs to vastly increase its efforts to monitor the cotton
harvest and hold the Government of Uzbekistan accountable to end forced adult and child labor.
5
Introduction
Background
The practice of mobilizing schoolchildren and university students to harvest cotton began in
Soviet times. As the Soviet state industrialized, demand for cotton grew, and the acreage planted under
cotton expanded greatly. By 1991, 65% of Uzbekistan’s arable land was planted with cotton. From the
post?1945 period observers classified Uzbekistan’s agriculture as a monoculture; Uzbekistan’s major
function within the autarkic Soviet economy was to supply cotton. Cotton not only dominated the
economy but prevailed as a leitmotif of the region’s culture. State propaganda cast each harvest in
military terminology, and emphasized the importance of each citizen taking part in the battle on the
cotton front. Below are two state emblems adopted for the Uzbek SSR and for contemporary
Uzbekistan. In both cases cotton occupies an essential part of the national symbolism and is supposed to
be the subject of national pride.
The ecological destruction wrought by the cotton monoculture as well as the use of forced labor
to harvest it became subjects for media discussion and public discontent during the late Soviet period of
liberalization, or glasnost, under Mikhail Gorbachev. At the same time, the famous “Cotton Affair” of
the mid? and late?1980s which led to the arrest of current and former Uzbek leaders exposed the
massive falsification of harvest figures and private profiteering reaching into the highest echelons of the
Soviet government. By the turn of the decade, public pressure was building to reduce the role of cotton
in the regional economy.
6
However, after 1991, the loss of subsidies from the collapsed Soviet state made newly
independent Uzbekistan even more dependent on the hard currency it could earn via cotton, its
dominant export. Currently, Uzbekistan is the world’s sixth largest producer of cotton, and its second
or third major exporter.1 In addition, incomplete economic reforms since independence have if anything
deepened the reliance on manual labor, and particularly on forced child labor. Investment in the sector
has lagged and Soviet?era harvesting machinery has fallen into disrepair, leaving nearly all of
Uzbekistan’s cotton harvested by hand. The process of partial privatization, while formally breaking up
collective farms and creating nominally independent farmers, has not removed the system of mandatory
state orders that farmers must fulfill. These orders usually equal to or exceed the amount farmers
produce; farmers cannot opt out as the state controls the distribution of land as well as other inputs
(such as water, seed, fertilizer and fuel). As the farm?gate price for cotton is set artificially low, the state
deploys forced labor, of schoolchildren, students and state?sector workers.2 This practice not only
obviates the need to pay adult wage laborers, but also serves to ensure that farmers do not seek to
increase their profits by withholding cotton for sale across borders where it might command a better
price. The central collection of cotton by captive workers ensures the state?owned companies fully
control collection and distribution of all cotton harvested.
These practices are at odds with national law. Uzbekistan’s independence?era constitution and
domestic labor codes prohibit child labor and forced labor. Article 17 of the labor code establishes the
minimum age of labor as 16. Uzbekistan has also since independence become a signatory to
international treaties and conventions that prohibit the use of both child and forced labor, including the
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1983, ratified in 1994). When confronted with the evidence it
routinely breaks these laws, Uzbekistan’s government tends to deny the problem outright or claim that
it has already been resolved.3
1 UNCTAD statistics, http://r0.unctad.org/infocomm/anglais/cotton/market.htm. According to the Gdynia Cotton
Association, Uzbekistan in 2007 produced nearly a million tons of cotton lint, used 300,000 tons in domestic
industry and exported the rest. Press release, October 12, 2007. http://www.gca.org.pl/x.php/2,440/International?
Cotton?Conference?and?Cotton?Fair?in?Uzbekistan.html
2 Kandiyoti, Deniz. Invisible to the World? The Dynamics of Forced Labor in the Cotton Sector of Uzbekistan.
London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 2008.
3 Reacting to Switzerland and the Netherland’s recommendations at the 2008 Working group on the UN Third
Universal Periodic Review that the government take measures to eliminate forced child labor, Uzbekistan’s
delegation claimed that “[those] recommendations are pertaining to measures already being implemented or
7
Though the international community has consistently scrutinized Uzbekistan’s weak record on
human rights, and challenged the government on such issues as torture and the large numbers of
people it imprisons for political and religious dissent, the mass mobilization of children for hard
agricultural labor escaped without much comment for over a decade. International financial institutions
and partner governments created aid programs to assist with agricultural reforms without confronting
the issue; UNICEF, present in the country since 1994, published several large survey reports on women
and children’s status without mentioning that nearly all rural schoolchildren are taken out of school for
weeks or months at a time and forced to pick cotton.4 As late as 2006, international organizations could
address the question of children’s rights without even noting children’s forced labor in this sector.5 The
phenomenon was truly, as noted in one recent scholarly publication, “invisible to the world.” 6 This
began to change as Uzbekistan’s journalists and human rights activists started to draw world attention
to this widespread violation of children’s rights. A group of eighteen organizations and activists first
called on the international community, in late 2004, to boycott cotton from Uzbekistan.7 Other rights
groups, both those in exile and based in Uzbekistan, renewed that call in 2008.8
As international attention to Uzbekistan’s use of forced child labor has mounted in recent years,
particularly after the airing of a BBC documentary in October 2007,9 major international retailers have
responded to activists’ calls, and several, including the UK?based Tesco and Marks and Spencer, and US
which had already been implemented and will be further considered by the Government.” Child Rights
Information Network, http://www.crin.org/resources/infoDetail.asp?ID=19626
4 UNICEF, Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey, 2006.
http://www.unicef.org/ceecis/MICS3_Uzbekistan_FinalReport_2006_en.pdf
5 OMCT, “Rights of the Child in Uzbekistan,” alternative report submitted to the UN Committee on the Rights of
the Child, http://www.omct.org/pdf/cc/2006/report/report_children_uzbekistan_eng.pdf
6 Kandiyoti, Deniz, op cit.
7 IWPR, “Further growth in Uzbek child labor,” June 18, 2004,
http://www.iwpr.net/?s=f&o=175886&p=rca&l=EN&apc_state=henacotton%
20uzbekistan_3______publish_date_1_10_compact_81; IWPR, “Investigation: ‘Patriotic’ Uzbek child
laborers’, December 10, 2004. http://www.iwpr.net/?s=f&o=162102&p=rca&l=EN&apc_state=henacotton%
20uzbekistan_3______publish_date_1_10_compact_81
8 http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40679
9 Child labour and the High Street, Newsnight, 30 October 2007, 18:12 GMT,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/7068096.stm
8
based Walmart, Gap, Levi Strauss and Limited Brands have made public commitments to keep
Uzbekistan’s child?harvested cotton out of their supply chains. In turn, Uzbekistan has increased its
efforts to portray itself in a better light. In 2008, it acceded to two important International Labor
Organization (ILO) conventions: 138, on The Minimum Age for Work, and 182, on Prohibition and
Immediate Action on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child labor.10 Nevertheless, these efforts
could not blunt the effect of reports from the region that children were still being forced out into the
fields. In late 2008 several more major international retailers and US and European retail associations
appealed to the Uzbek government to stop the use of forced child labor, and to the ILO to monitor the
government’s adherence to its commitments.11
This is the third in a series of reports documenting the mass mobilization of schoolchildren by
the government of Uzbekistan for forced labor in the country’s cotton agriculture. A network of
Uzbekistan human rights activists, and researchers joined together to produce this report. For their
safety, they have elected to remain anonymous, publishing this report in cooperation with the
International Labor Rights Forum.
The first two reports detailed forced child labor practices in the fall 2007 harvest and the spring
2008 planting season.12 The authors produced a brief update in the fall of 2008, when initial testimony
from the fields clearly showed that the Uzbek government’s claims to have halted the practice were
false. The current report uses extensive interview data to show that the forced mobilization of
schoolchildren by the government in the 2008 harvest season was a massive, centrally?orchestrated
state effort which did not substantially differ from those in years past.
However, international attention to Uzbekistan’s use of forced child labor and pressure to stop
the practice has clearly had some effect. Rather than closing schools shortly after the commencement
10 Uzbekistan completed its deposit of ILO 182 with the International Labour Organization in July 2008; ILO 138 was
signed in 2008 but not deposited until March 2009.
11 http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1362991c?8f07?11dd?946c?0000779fd18c.html; also letters from Business and
Social Compliance Initiative and US retail associations to President Karimov and ILO Director General Juan Somavia,
on file at ILRF.
12 Survey Report on Child Labor in Uzbekistan, April 01, 2008, Uzbek Human Rights Activists and Journalists,
http://www.laborrights.org/stop?child?labor/cotton?campaign/resources/1685; Forced Child Labor in Uzbekistan’s
2008 Spring Agricultural Season, October 10, 2008, International Labor Rights Forum and Human Rights Defenders
in Uzbekistan, http://www.laborrights.org/stop?child?labor/cotton?campaign/resources/1751; Child Labor in Fall
2008 Uzbek Cotton Harvest, November 11, 2008, International Labor Rights Forum,
http://www.laborrights.org/stop?child?labor/cotton?campaign/resources/1843
9
of the academic year in the first half of September, as is the usual practice, the government delayed
children’s mobilization by two to three weeks. Having in early September instructed the localities that
children were not to be used in this year’s harvest, the provincial governors notified local education
departments around September 21st that school should be closed for children in the upper elementary
grades, and that those children should be sent to the cotton fields.
Methodology
Researchers chose four rural districts within three provinces in which to monitor the use of child
labor: one each in Samarkand and Bukhara and two districts in Khorezm province. To protect the
identities of the respondents, the districts and specific locations will not be identified. These three
provinces have not been surveyed in the past and therefore were chosen in order to develop over time
a comprehensive picture of practices country?wide. Samarkand, Bukhara and Khorezm are all significant
cotton producers among Uzbekistan’s regions; in 2004 they were the third, fifth and seventh of
Uzbekistan’s twelve regions by gross regional product.13
In each of these localities, the authors took semi?standardized interviews from at least five
representatives of the major stakeholder groups in this process: farmers, parents, teachers, and the
schoolchildren themselves, seventy?two interviews in all. Though due to the number of interviews
taken the report cannot claim statistical validity for the data, comparisons with news sources and other
anecdotal reports from the 2008 harvest suggest that they are broadly representative of the country as
a whole. A translation of the questionnaire is included at the end of the report as an Appendix.
Interviews were conducted at the very end of, or just shortly after the end of the season’s cotton
harvest, rather than while cotton picking was still in progress, in order to avoid official suspicion.
Interviewers informed the subjects, who were chosen both at random and via interviewers’ social
networks, of the purpose of the discussion. Subjects were promised anonymity, though the interviews
were carried out in public places. Local researchers, including human rights activists, then compiled and
summarized that interview data; the final report was produced with the assistance of an international
editor. The photographs in this report were taken during the fall 2008 harvest by the research group,
with the exception of that on p. 12 which belongs to the Alliance of Human Rights Defenders of
Uzbekistan.
13 “Uzbekistan in Figures,” UNDP, http://www.statistics.uz/data_finder/257/
10
Children’s work on the 2008 Harvest
‘First we forbade the children from going out into the fields, and then we chased them
out there to pick cotton’
On September 12, at a time when in years past schoolchildren might already be in the fields, the
Cabinet of Ministers issued a resolution on the implementation of two ILO conventions signed earlier in
the year: “On measures to implement the Conventions on the Minimum age for Work and On the
Prohibition and Immediate Action on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor.”14 The
resolution itself simply noted instructions to create governmental working groups to carry out a socalled
National Action Plan to put the obligations undertaken in the Conventions into practice. The
publication of the resolution, however, was one of the first public signals in Uzbekistan that the
government was engaged in any sort of review of this practice.
14 Convention 182, on the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment, was signed and ratified in March, 2008.
Convention 138, on the Prohibition and Immediate Action on the Elimination of the Worst forms of Child Labor
was signed in March but ratified only in late 2008 when the National Action Plan was filed with the ILO. The text of
the Cabinet of Ministers resolution is attached to this report as Appendix B.
11
Correspondingly, provincial governments held meetings to discuss what seemed to be a new
policy: to avoid using schoolchildren, at least those younger than 16, in the harvest.15 State officials
transmitted those instructions via education departments down to the level of local schools.
Many pupils were overjoyed at the fact that this year, their only responsibility would be to learn
their lessons well. “On the first day of the school year, the Day of Knowledge, our school principal told
us that this year schoolchildren would not take part in the cotton harvest, and that there was a state
decree… He even criticized students who went out to pick cotton after school,” reported one. 16 “At
first we were so happy that this year, it seemed, there would be no cotton picking for us,” said another
young pupil. “At the meeting which marked the beginning of the school year, the director of our school,
[name withheld] wished us good luck in our studies, and also said that this year we would not be called
to harvest cotton. Representatives of the district education department who were present at the
meeting also told us that now schoolchildren would not be sent out for cotton picking.”17
For the first two to three weeks of the harvest, respondents stated that for the most part, young
children were not in the fields in the provinces surveyed.18 Press reports from other provinces,
however, indicate that tenth and eleventh graders, and even some younger children were sent out to
the fields at nearly the same time as the decree was issued, in the second week of September when the
harvest began.19
15 Uzbekistan’s domestic law permits children to work after age 16, and from ages 14?16 under restricted hours
and conditions. Tenth and eleventh graders (ages 16 and up) reportedly were not held back at the start of the
season, and so were out picking from September 5 (Samarkand parent 3).
16 Bukhara pupil 4.
17 Samarkand pupil 5.
18 In 2005?2007, Uzbekistan’s state schools largely switched from eleven year comprehensive schools, to nine year
elementary schooling, followed by three years of high school, grades 10?12. Twelve years of education is
compulsory according to law but not universally practiced or enforced. Children start first grade at age six, and
then complete the elementary years to ninth grade by ages 15 or 16. They usually follow on to grades 10?12 at a
“Lycee” to prepare for higher education or more commonly at a technical?vocational high school (often called a
“college”). In the 2008 harvest, the elementary school grades involved in cotton picking correspond to ages 9
(grade three) to age 15 (grade nine).
19“Deti na poliakh Uzbekistana: zaiiavleniia detei raskhodiatsia s delom,” September 16 2008, Fergana.ru,
http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=5856.
12
However, after September 22, schoolchildren in two of the three provinces surveyed were sent
en masse to the fields; October 1 saw the children of the third province also directed to pick cotton. The
about?face was sudden and unexplained. One teacher noted the discomfort caused by this reversal:
At the start of the academic year we were told that this year the children won’t be brought out to pick
cotton. They even told the parents that they shouldn’t let their children go out to the fields to pick it after
school—the government has created this policy, they were told. A few parents even raised a fuss with us,
saying that they are their children and only they should decide what they should do [after school],
whether they will go out or sit at home. After the situation changed, we were ashamed. It was really
strange—first we forbade the children from going out into the fields, and then we chased them out there
to pick cotton. 20
The table below summarizes the length of the harvest season in each province and the ages of the pupils
involved.21
20 Bukhara teacher 4.
21 Only elementary school pupils grades nine and under were interviewed for this research. However, in the
course of interviewing schoolchildren, teachers and parents it became clear that pupils in the final elementary
grades (aged 15?18), in lycees or “colleges,” are universally called upon to take part in the harvest as well as are
students in institutions of higher learning. While schoolchildren to grade nine are usually brought out to the fields
and back each day (one exception was found among schools represented in our survey, where eighth and ninth
graders, or children of 14 and 15, were housed in the fields), upper grades as well as higher education students are
usually housed in barracks in the fields for the duration of the season.
13
Date begun Elementary
Grades mobilized
Date ended Days in the field
Bukhara September 22 8th?9th, 6th?7th
grades after
shortened school
day, 5th graders for
2 weeks
November 1 39
Khorezm A October 1 6th?9th grade; some
5th graders
November 11 41
Khorezm B October 10 4th ?9th grade; 3rd
graders out after
school hours
November 10 31
Samarkand September 22 8th?9th, with 6th?7th
out after
shortened school
day
October 20 or 22 28?30
Any analysis of this about?face must be speculative in the absence of direct testimony from
decision?makers within the central government or those with access to decision?makers. It is possible
that the initial child labor prohibition represented a sincere but inadequately prepared effort to change
long?established practices, which foundered when state authorities had not put in place any alternative
plan to bring in the harvest. It may be that different ministries or figures within the government were
operating at cross purposes. Another possibility is that the Prime Minister issued this decree in order to
convince Western observers that Uzbekistan was indeed eradicating forced child labor at the start of the
harvest when attention was likely to be greater, when in fact the intention all along was to revert to the
habitual exploitation of children. What is clear from testimony is that regional governments were totally
unprepared to bring in the harvest without forcing children’s participation.
Chain of command
What is equally clear is that the same government that ratified ILO conventions months before
directly ordered schools to close and to force children to bring in the cotton harvest. When asked who
gives the orders to send the children out to the fields, teachers answer forthrightly: “It’s the provincial
education department, and the district education department. And the [education] ministry is aware of
this.”22 The province’s educational bureaucracy is directly subject to the provincial governor, or khokim,
22 Bukhara teacher 2, interviewed November 30, 2008.
14
who has near dictatorial powers over all agencies and institutions within his realm, much more so than
the national education ministry.23 Who gives the orders is equally transparent to parents and pupils:
“The khokim gives the orders, and the police and prosecutor’s office, and the provincial education
department, together with the khokim’s office carry them out.” 24
The provincial khokim issues the initial order to the district khokim, who then instructs his
district education department, and through them, each individual school. But ultimately school
principals are called to account before the khokim, and each principal fears being summoned to the
district executive office. Each province must meet the quota for its portion of the national cotton plan,
so each district and its khokim is responsible before the provincial executive. When a district does not
fulfill its harvest quota, as occurred in the rural districts surveyed for this research in Khorezm (a), the
pressure on schools may be intense. Schools in this district sent out third graders (children who are
eight and nine years old) to the fields.
It can be surmised that the district education departments assign a picking quota to each school.
School principals act as though they are responsible for showing that the school as a whole brought in a
certain amount of cotton, as if the school has been assigned a set amount it must achieve. It is the
principals who seek out opportunities to pick cotton, and not farmers who come to schools in search of
laborers. “Our principal went around to the farms and begged them to take the pupils,” reported one
teacher.25 Secondly, the principals are actively involved in monitoring the amount picked by the school;
several teachers reported that their principals brought each day’s totals personally to the district
khokim’s office. By all accounts, 2008’s cotton crop was a poor one, largely due to low rainfall, and so
many districts did not actually fulfill their assigned quotas. This fact in turn increased pressure on
farmers and especially on pickers, assigned to meet quotas for cotton not actually in the fields. Two
teachers reported that farmers “took pity on” their schools, and ascribed to them a larger total amount
than their schoolchildren actually picked.26
23 This same teacher reported raising the question of children’s forced participation in the cotton harvest with the
Minister of Education at a 2002 meeting, and being told “If it was up to us, then we wouldn’t send the children to
pick cotton. But you must understand, this is the policy.”
24 Bukhara parent 1
25 Khorezm B teacher 5.
26 Khoresm B teacher 4; Bukhara teacher 4, interviewed 29 November 2008.
15
Finally, teachers universally report that the principals were greatly concerned with their pupils’
attendance in the fields, and with the pupils meeting their daily assigned totals. In the words of one
teacher, “They yell at the principal in the khokim’s office; the director then yells at us and we yell at the
children. They yell at him so much in the khokim’s office, and threaten to fire him. We are forced to
come out to the harvest because we fear losing our jobs.”27 In the 2008 harvest season relatively few
children, according to respondents, were excused for illness. “If they can walk,” one teacher reported
her principal as commanding, “they should be in the fields, picking.” School principals faced real
pressure not only from their own education department superiors and the district executive, but from
law enforcement officials as well:
I’ve never seen such a cruel cotton harvest. At the end of the season a few pupils from school [name and
number withheld] didn’t come out to the fields. The district prosecutor as a result called a big meeting
and publicly fired the principal. Even though he is over sixty years old, and well?respected. The
prosecutor screamed at the police chief, ‘Send him to jail if you have to!’28
In this atmosphere, principals did not allow even those who had met their daily picking quotas
to leave the fields, for fear of being castigated by khokimiat personnel. Indeed, even when all the cotton
in the fields had already been picked, principals required their pupils to come out to the fields,
presumably in order to demonstrate that the school was making every effort to fulfill the plan. “I picked
about 10?15 kilos at the start of the season, 7?10 in the middle, and 5?8 at the end, that is, when there
was still some cotton. After that we just came to the fields and sat there. The assistant principal came
and made sure we didn’t run away,” one pupil commented. 29
Coercion
The government of Uzbekistan sometimes claims that any children found working in the fields
must be there of their own accord, out of a sense of duty to their nation, or gratitude. Testimony from
teachers, parents, and schoolchildren themselves makes absolutely plain that this is not the case:
27 Khorezm A teacher 1
28 Samarkand parent 4.
29 Khorezm B, pupil 3.
16
Interviewer: If pupils say that they are not going to go out and pick cotton, do the teachers scold them?
Respondent: They beat them.
Interviewer: How do they beat them, exactly?
Respondent: They slap them, or pull their ears. They will hang their pictures up on the Board of Laggard
Pupils. During class they will put them in the corner and make them hold up a chair. They will abuse
them during the parent meeting.
Pupils commonly reported corporal punishment used against those reluctant to report to the
fields as well as those not working to the satisfaction of their teacher?monitors. Teachers interviewed
for this report responded honestly about their use of corporal punishment, sometimes noting that
principals told them directly to “have no mercy” toward children who did not work hard enough.30
In 2008, students and teachers reported for the first time that police and local prosecutorial
officials were seen monitoring the fields, a step that would be unnecessary if the pickers were there
voluntarily.
Despite the chilling penalties exacted against children for non?compliance, there are those
parents who attempt to have their children excused from the harvest, or who simply hold them back.
Those families can expect, at the least, home visits from teachers to persuade them to send their
children to the fields. If this technique does not succeed in convincing parents, principals generally
deploy other means of coercion, reporting the families to the local community organization, or
mahalla.31 The mahalla can revoke social benefit payments, can call parents to be shamed in a
community meeting, or can even cut off water, electricity and gas service to their home. One parent
reported that the mahalla even threatened to plow under families’ garden plots, which are essential to
their survival. 32 Law enforcement officials may become involved:
30 Samarkand teacher 4.
31 The mahalla is traditionally a local community self?government body the nature of which has become
transformed in the period of independence. “Under President Karimov, the Uzbek government has converted
the mahalla committees from an autonomous expression of self?government to a national system for surveillance
and control.” See Human Rights Watch, From House to House: Abuses by the Mahalla Committees (New York:
September, 2003), http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2003/09/22/house?house. Mahallas function as the lowest
rung of the chain of executive power, carrying out orders of the district khokim, who in effect appoints their
personnel.
32 Bukhara parent 1.
17
The local beat cop has many means of influence at his disposal. Last year the grandson of [name
withheld] didn’t come out to pick cotton, a ninth grader. They said that he was sick. Well, his father was
called in to the district center and held there for two days in the police lockup. The police started to
threaten that they would frame him for some unsolved robberies or even as a member of the religious
group the Wahabis. It turns out that the grandfather and the whole family is very religious. Well, the guy
immediately backed down and stopped objecting. 33
In areas where the harvest was poor, pressure faced by education departments and school
principals to fulfill what may have been unrealistic targets led them to subject their pupils to extreme
humiliation. “They berated us in school if we didn’t reach the daily norms. Every morning before we got
on the bus we gathered in the school courtyard and the assistant principal took us to task. The pupils
who hadn’t met the norms had to step in front and get dressed down. They said we were shaming our
motherland in her time of need. We understand that there wasn’t enough rain, and that we’re not at
fault.” 34
Schoolchildren reported that they faced not only beatings and public shaming and humiliation,
but poor grades or even expulsion if they refused to pick cotton or did not meet daily picking quotas.
Some teachers indicated that they assigned grades in pupils’ official school records for the period of the
harvest according to how much cotton the pupils actually picked. 35
Respondents indicated that in the 2008 harvest season, school officials were much more
reluctant than usual to excuse children from the harvest in exchange for bribes, or on the basis of
medical certificates, whether real or purchased, as indicated above. “’Tell your parents not to go out
and get any sort of doctors’ notes,’” one girl reported her principal as saying, “’because everyone is
33 Bukhara teacher 1. Uzbekistan criminalizes religious as well as secular political dissent, and has jailed thousands
of its own citizens, groundlessly accusing them of being religious radicals intent on overthrowing the state. Once
so accused, conviction is assured. “Wahabi” is a reference to the dominant Islamic school of Saudi Arabia, which
the Soviet state feared had infiltrated and radicalized its Muslim population in the 1970s. In current day
Uzbekistan it is a catch?all term encompassing any Muslim believer more devout than is deemed socially
acceptable. See Human Rights Watch, Creating Enemies of the State: Religious Persecution in Uzbekistan (New
York: March, 2004), http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/03/29/creating?enemies?state
34 Khorezm B, pupil 4.
35 Khorezm A, pupil 4.
18
going out.’”36 At least one school held its own special medical commission, to ascertain whether pupils
were genuinely physically unable to participate, or just malingering.37 Even so, some children were
allowed to sit out the harvest, and those included “the children of the people who work in the khokim’s
office,” according to one teacher.38 For the rest, even minor absences could elicit severe recrimination
and retribution from teachers. “One day I couldn’t come to the fields because I had to help prepare for
a family event. Our class director came and started to holler. She shouted that she could be fired
because of me, and who would then feed her children. After that she went to see my dad, and then left
[when it was agreed the girl would go to the field]. But she was mad at me all day and found fault with
everything I did.” 39
The government in some areas was particularly sensitive in the 2008 harvest to avoid the
appearance of coercing labor of those children in grades seven and under, in other words, those
younger than fourteen years of age. Nevertheless, the participation of pupils younger than 14
(including, as noted above, that of children as young as third grade, or eight to nine years of age) was
also coerced. A teacher from Bukhara explained:
Regarding the sixth and seventh graders, the district education office gave orders to talk to parents and
try to persuade them. They said, let the sixth and seventh grade pupils get out to pick cotton for a couple
of weeks, and we will make sure they have good conditions. Therefore we began to work over the
parents. But who wants to take such little babies out to the fields?40
Despite the teacher’s reservations, parents in this teachers’ school were “persuaded” to allow
their children thirteen and under to work picking cotton. Respondents in other areas reported that the
state?sponsored youth organization Kamolot and other government?controlled public associations also
agitated parents on the need to send out sixth and seventh grade pupils.41
36 Samarkand, pupil 2. Reportedly in Samarkand province such medical certificates cost 20,000 sum
(approximately 14 US dollars), just slightly under the minimum monthly wage.
37 Khorezm B teacher 2
38 Khorezm B, teacher 1.
39 Khorezm B, pupil 2.
40 Bukhara teacher 1.
41 Bukhara teacher 3. Kamolot is the post?independence successor of the Komsomol, or Communist Youth League.
19
The relative lack of public protest against children’s forced labor on the cotton harvest can in no
way be interpreted as “social acceptance” of the phenomenon, or as evidence of the voluntary nature of
children’s labor. Children responding to this survey, in conditions where they were reasonably assured
that their responses would be anonymous, uniformly expressed their dislike or even detestation of the
annual ritual. “I hate this work. It would be so much better to study in school and get an education,”
said one. 42 Even those who agreed that the money they earned, though extremely little, provided
some assistance to their families were bitterly aware of the cost to their education. “We would be
learning something in school. We are wasting time here,” said another.43
The parents interviewed likewise felt the injustice of the system that forces their children to risk
their health and lose precious months of schooling. Even those parents who in principle did not oppose
children working (in the hours after school) objected that they should spend their time after school in
activities that benefit family enterprises, not other farmers. The great majority of parent respondents
underlined their bitter dissatisfaction with this system. One outlined the Faustian bargain he made,
sending his small son out to pick cotton, though his health is not good, in order to avoid consequences
for his newly opened business:
If I object to my son’s participation in the cotton harvest, then they can take this workshop away from me.
It’s better to try to live without problems…It’s that serious. The police chief, the district prosecutor, the
khokim are all in the fields all day and night. They meet at midnight in their headquarters to discuss the
results of the day’s work, and call in the farmers. Therefore, we just have to be happy with what we
have.44
Parents recognize their helplessness in the face of official might. When faced with threats to
plow under their garden plots (the critical means of subsistence for rural families) or cut off electricity,
“we can’t say anything.”45 Sheer pragmatism prevents most expressions of protest. One teacher put it
succinctly, “to whom, exactly, should we protest, if at the top of the whole system stand the khokim, the
prosecutor and the police chief? Not to mention those occupying even higher positions! To whom
42 Khorezm A pupil 1.
43 Khorezm A, pupil 2.
44 Bukhara parent 3.
45 Bukhara parent 1.
20
should these unfortunate parents go to complain—to the prosecutor or to the khokim, who are the very
ones who head the whole effort to force schoolchildren out to pick cotton?”46
Conditions in the fields
Overall, children faced hazardous conditions during their work, which they performed for scant
and unreliable pay. As the children interviewed for this report were in the ninth grade and younger,
with one exception they were brought to the fields every morning and sent home at night. We found
evidence that one school in the Samarkand region sent its eighth and ninth grade children to board at
the farms where they worked during the week, sleeping in field storage barns.47 Children and parents
interviewed indicated that the tenth and eleventh graders they knew (the terminal years of high school,
during which children may be 16?18 years of age) were uniformly housed in field barracks for the
duration of the picking season, as were college and university students. The ninth?grade respondent
described the conditions as “unbearable”: the unheated, un?insulated field barracks, normally used to
store crops and/or farm machinery, were filthy and flea?infested, while the biting insects prevented
them from sleeping. Children were fed mostly bread and turnips.
Schoolchildren usually were deployed in fields belonging to different farmers over the course of
the season. Some of those fields may have been reasonably close to the schoolyards where they
gathered in the mornings, others as much as 20 km (12 miles) distant. The greatest distance children
46 Samarkand teacher 2.
47 Samarkand pupil 3.
21
reported walking to the fields was 6?7 km (4 miles); beyond this distance they were usually transported
by bus, or, more commonly, tractor?pulled wagon. The wagons, the same ones used to transport cotton
to the collection points, are not meant for passenger transport and even when in good repair routinely
overturn or cause falls resulting in injuries or even death. In the 2008 season, two injuries from a fall
from these wagons, resulting in permanent disabilities, were reported by our interview subjects (see
below). At times, to save on fuel costs, farmers would provide transportation to the fields, but leave
children to walk home in the evenings. In most cases, farmers covered the cost of transportation
themselves (sometimes passing it on to the pupils by docking their pay), but in some instances, schools
particularly desperate to make their contribution to the harvest arranged for the local education
department or village council to cover the costs.48
In addition to transportation costs, pupils also had their pay docked at time to cover the cost of
meals provided by the farmers, although farmers agreed to provide food only infrequently. A few fed
the children occasionally at their own expense. In the past, before the rapid inflation of food costs in
recent years, collective farms would receive allocations of funds to cover the cost of nutritious meals
containing a variety of foods, including meat. However in 2008, whether or not farmers used their own
funds or deducted the amount from the children’s earnings, the quality of food provided (when it was
provided at all) was poor, and consisted mostly of noodles and cabbage. Most often, children ate only
what their families were able to pack for them; many reported that they had only bread to eat, and
were hungry.49
Children and teachers reported that farmers seldom if ever provided clean drinking water in the
fields, and so children were responsible for bringing their own water with them for the day. When
water was provided, it was not boiled. Rarely was piped water available close to the fields; children
reportedly had to drank water from irrigation canals on a regular basis, though sometimes their teachers
warned them against this.
Respondents reported that schoolchildren worked a full day, usually gathering at eight am in the
schoolyard, and being dismissed at five pm or later. Transportation home from the fields, or walking
long distances meant sometimes children would not arrive home until 7pm, after dark. Children worked
48 Samarkand farmer 1.
49 Samarkand parent 2.
22
without breaks or weekends. In fact, some reported that on Sundays all of the children in their schools,
from every grade, were made to come to the fields to pick cotton.50
The rate recommended by the Cabinet of Ministers to compensate workers on the cotton
harvest, according to respondents, was 60 sum per kilogram picked.51 Those interviewed reported that
farmers paid children this amount, at least at the beginning of the picking season. However, fairly soon
thereafter many farmers paid the children much less, even as little as half that amount. Some farmers
refused to pay anything. Several children reported having portions of their pay withheld under various
pretexts: to cover transportation and food costs, as a forced contribution to the school, or for no reason
at all. One teacher reported the district education department ordering that 10 sum per kilogram
picked be withheld and transferred directly to it.52
On average, the children interviewed for this survey earned much less for their work than the
official rate of pay would indicate. It is unclear, however, whether or not farmers took advantage of
children’s relative defenselessness and reduced rates paid to schoolchildren any more than they did
with adult workers. However, schoolchildren are uniquely vulnerable to economic exploitation by the
school itself. One school reportedly demanded financial contributions from the students in order to
purchase cotton to make up for the shortfall in its quota, as there was not enough cotton remaining in
the fields to be picked.53
Cases of accident or injury in the harvest underline the defenselessness of children and families,
and make clear their lack of any recourse. On the contrary, efforts to gain assistance may make families
vulnerable to further exploitation, extortion and bribe?taking. Uzbek families are left to face the
consequences of these preventable tragedies entirely on their own. Three of the seventy two interview
subjects had observed serious injuries first hand. In one case, a classmate contracted acute hepatitis
50 School is usually held for ½ day on Saturday.
51 The Uzbek sum is officially trades at 1,449 to the US dollar, but on the black market fetches much less, at 1,600?
1,700 per US dollar. At the official rate, 60 Uzbek sum is equivalent to .04 US dollars, or four cents. An average
daily amount reported picked by the children, or 20 kilograms, would (if compensated at the officially
recommended rate) yield .83 US dollars.
52 Khorezm A, teacher 4.
53 Khorezm B, teacher 5. This is a fairly common form of corruption by which cotton gins re?allocate the excess
cotton they amass by cheating some farmers on reported weights, and selling that cotton to those farms or other
institutions which have not met their assigned targets. Bukhara farmer 3, an interview subject, reported having to
sell livestock and vegetable crops in order to earn money with which to buy extra cotton from the gin so that he
could officially meet the obligatory state order.
23
which the district hospital linked to exposure to agricultural chemicals.54 “I don’t think they gave any
money. The farmer gave the local taxi driver 20 liters of gasoline [to transport the girl to the district
hospital for treatment] and the parents were even grateful for that. I heard the teacher [name
withheld] say to the girls’ father, ‘Don’t even think of asking the farmer for any money; don’t put us in
an awkward situation.’”
The second and third cases of serious injury occurred as a result of falls from the tractor wagons
transporting children to and from the fields. In one case this caused a compound fracture of the arm;
that family received no compensation for the boy’s injury.55 In another case, a young girl broke her leg,
as reported by a friend of the family:
The poor father had to sell his property to bring her to Tashkent several times for treatment, but it was all
in vain, and his daughter still has difficulty walking…The girl’s father went to the local prosecutor’s office
[to try to gain compensation], but there they tried to make out that the girl herself was guilty—‘why
didn’t she observe the safety procedures?’, they said. Therefore, supposedly they are going to prosecute
the girl herself. The poor father has really lost his mind since then. He has stopped going around with any
petitions, since he’s afraid that he’ll lose all of his money to the investigators. They did the same thing
with the tractor driver [name withheld]. They fleeced him like a sheep too. Those prosecutors should be
damned.56
In other cases of illness or injury, teachers reportedly told students that since the children
obtained them not in the service of anyone’s private interests (such as by working in a farmer’s private
garden plot) but working at the behest of the state, then no one is responsible and they should not
expect any assistance.
54 Samarkand pupil 3. Overall, respondents report little spraying of pesticides or defoliants in the period of the
harvest, though several complained of stinging and burning of eyes and skin, and headaches, presumed caused by
chemical residues on the cotton plants. Only one respondent witnessed spraying, of an unknown chemical, while
in the fields (Khorezm B, pupil 5); one Samarkand farmer reported using a defoliant as his cotton ripened late
(Samarkand farmer 2). While hepatitis is a viral illness which, in cases of type A and E, are contracted usually via
contaminated food or water, some researchers have tied viral hepatitis prevalence to decreased immunity, and
specifically to harmful effects on the liver brought about by pesticide exposure. El Safty, A., Amr, M, Faculty of
Medicine. Cairo University. Egypt, Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, “Effects of pesticides on human cell mediated immunity and
their relations with viral hepatitis,” Paper presented at the 25th meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology
and Chemistry, June 2004. Abstract accessed July 15, 2008,
http://abstracts.co.allenpress.com/pweb/setac2004/document/42198.
55 Bukhara parent 5.
56 Bukhara parent 1.
24
Consequences
Evidence shows that children undergo great risks to their health and well?being during their
forced labor on the cotton harvest. Beyond injuries resulting from accidents, hazards for health include
gastroenteritis and other illnesses, including hepatitis, contracted from contaminated food and water.57
There was little or no medical assistance provided for these illnesses, other than by teachers who
sometimes distributed over?the?counter anti?diarrheal medications.58
By far the most extensive, universal consequence of the forced mobilization of children is the
damage done to rural children’s education. In order to make up for time lost, respondents indicated,
children go to school during planned holiday periods, but often that is not enough to compensate for
the harvest period. One teacher summarized thus: “The curriculum is planned for nine months, but
each year the school year is cut by two or more months. At the beginning of the school year the
children are just waiting for cotton picking to begin and so don’t study seriously. Then after the cotton
harvest is over it is difficult to turn their minds toward study. Cutting back on school holidays doesn’t
help. And you must take into consideration that the overall quality of instruction is not high.”59 Other
teachers, parents and students echoed the complaint that the lapsed lessons are never learned properly
and that overall the quality of education suffers badly. “However many additional lessons we schedule,
however much we try to make up for lost time, nonetheless the mass mobilization for cotton has a
negative effect on our pupils’ level of knowledge.”60 One eighth?grade pupil concurred that “after
school resumes, the teachers have to cram a lot into one class period. It’s hard to remember all the
material. I’m a good student, but nonetheless I have trouble learning all the lessons.”61
Coupled with schoolchildren’s forced participation in spring fieldwork, and periodic school
closures in the winter months due to lack of heating, the discriminatory effect against rural children
57 There were five publicly reported fatalities of children during the 2008 cotton harvest. Though none of the
respondents of this survey had first?hand knowledge of any deaths, one pupil had heard of a death in a
neighboring district (Samarkand pupil 5).
58 Khorezm B, pupil 4.
59 Khorezm B, teacher 5.
60 Bukhara teacher 3.
61 Khorezm B, pupil 3.
25
erects a much higher barrier to their entry into higher education than for their urban counterparts.
Schoolchildren interviewed for this survey expressed frustration at the barriers to achieving their
ambitions created by their forced work picking cotton. “I don’t want to pick cotton. In the future I
want to become a doctor. First I want to complete the [location withheld] medical college [high school]
and then go on to Tashkent Medical Institute. I hate picking cotton!”62 Parents noted the increasing
difficulty of gaining admission to higher education, and even teachers admitted that their students are
generally admitted “only for money.”63
Social attitudes
Not one of the fifty?two teachers, parents or students interviewed for this report indicated that
they would elect to have schoolchildren in the fields harvesting cotton if given the choice. Every one of
them, as well as the twenty farmers interviewed, stated that they disapproved of the practice of taking
children out of school to pick cotton. Two parents, under extreme economic duress were grateful to
have the small financial benefit their children earned, but still stated that children’s work should be only
during after school hours.
Even farmers who ostensibly benefited from the arrangement regretted the cost to the children.
“They are children, of course they should be in school, not working in the fields!” exclaimed one. “But
what can you do if it is the government itself chasing them out there?” 64 Farmers interviewed also
noted that if they had a choice, they would prefer to engage adult labor, but that they too were victims
of a system in which the state underpays them for the cotton they grow, and then forces them to accept
coerced labor.65 For purely pragmatic reasons, according to many of the farmers interviewed, children
are not advantageous workers (cost considerations aside): they often tire easily, and are not particularly
focused on the quality of their picking, leaving half bolls or other portions of fiber on the plants. There
62 Samarkand pupil 2.
63 Khorezm A, teacher 3.
64 Bukhara farmer 2.
65 Farmers reported that the prevailing market wage for cotton pickers in neighboring countries is equal to 200,000
Uzbek sum per ton of raw fiber (or 139 US dollars, versus the 60,000 sum, or roughly 42 USD officially paid to
Uzbekistan’s laborers per ton picked). Farmers themselves reported receiving 495,000 Uzbek sum per ton for the
fiber itself (345 US dollars). At the current rates of remuneration for their crop, several farmers interviewed ended
the season in debt to the state, and most reported barely breaking even.
26
are even cases when farmers try to decline children’s labor in their fields, only to be instructed by the
village council to use them.66 “The farmer has to use the laborers the state tells him to: if they tell him
schoolchildren, then it’s schoolchildren, if they tell him college students, then it’s college students. But I
already mentioned that I didn’t want to use schoolchildren,” explained a farmer from Samarkand. 67
Though at times teachers and parents expressed rancor toward farmers, saying that it would be
better if those who grew the cotton were responsible for harvesting it, in general many of them, and
even the schoolchildren interviewed, understood the impossible economic situation and political
pressures farmers faced.68 Respondents recognized the paradox created by the many unemployed
workers migrating to neighboring Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan or even Tajikistan to pick cotton, while the
government forces schoolchildren to bring in the harvest at home in Uzbekistan. “There are 3?400
unemployed young men in our district but you can’t force even one of them out to pick cotton. The
village council has tried, and even the police. In my opinion, if you want them out in the fields, you have
to pay them the same rate as they would earn in Kazakhstan,” opined one teacher. 69 Schoolchildren
and parents recognized that the state simply finds it easier to exploit them than to risk the rancor of the
legions of unemployed young men. “We live subject to their orders just as our children live subject to
66 In the middle of the 2008 harvest season, the government issued a decree commanding local authorities to
repossess former collective farm land now cultivated under leasehold in plots of 30 hectares or fewer (60 hectares
on some regions). The policy aims to redistribute the land in larger parcels and therefore to “optimize” farming
practices. In practice this meant that local khokims, who enjoyed discretion in their decisions to confiscate and to
whom to re?allocate the land, were able to promote allies and punish others, while abrogating previous long?term
leasehold agreements. There were reports that some farmers planned to challenge the confiscations in court, but
no more recent reports that any cases have been heard. See “Uzbekistan: Farmers are Against Land Reforms,”
www.fergana.ru, 12.11.2008, http://enews.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=2476 ) At the time these interviews were
taken, in November and December 2008, some farmers had been informed already that their land would be
entered into the district “reserve fund,” and others were awaiting khokims’ dispensation. Decisions did not seem
to depend on whether or not farmers had met their assigned cotton quotas, although farmers assumed that their
chances of losing their land increased if the targets were not met. In this atmosphere, when the state’s power
over farmers’ economic survival was laid so bare, the thought of challenging state officials on the matter of
children’s forced labor in their fields seemed unrealistic to many respondents. (Bukhara farmer 1.)
67 Samarkand farmer 1.
68 Bukhara parent 4
69 Bukhara teacher 5.
27
their orders. It’s not every adult that you can just order around. Children are easy to force. You don’t
have to feed them or treat them well. They’re very profitable workers. “70
Conclusion
Although Uzbekistan has recently signed two ILO conventions against forced and child labor,
Nos. 182 and 138, and issued a new decree ostensibly prohibiting the practice, information from around
the country showed that the government continued to rely on the state?orchestrated mass mobilization
of children to bring in the 2008 cotton harvest. The measures taken since July 2008 appear to be largely
cosmetic, and intended to ease international pressure and a growing boycott movement through the
promulgation of paper measures. There is no indication that these measures have been implemented
and they should not be taken as indicators of meaningful steps forward.
To date, the Government of Uzbekistan publicly denies that the mass mobilization of children is
an official policy, claiming that children volunteer out of loyalty to family or their community. There has
been no public acknowledgement, nor any acknowledgement in the National Action Plan, that the state
plays a role in compelling children to labor. Blame is apportioned to irresponsible parents. However, as
the interviews in this report show, societal attitudes are not a relevant factor in this case. Interviewees
overwhelmingly recognized the inappropriateness of sending schoolchildren to harvest cotton, and their
concern with state policies that interfered with children’s health, welfare and education. Given the
strictly?imposed cotton quotas, and the threat of sanctions or penalties on non?compliant families and
even on farmers, in reality there is no alternative but that children leave school and join brigades to
participate in the cotton harvest.
Uzbekistan, with its massive unemployment, was and is entirely able to eliminate forced child
labor. The country already has several laws on the books that would, if respected, ban children’s forced
labor on the cotton harvest. The practice clearly violates Uzbekistan’s own longstanding statutes on the
rights of children, and the labor code including its provisions on the minimum age and conditions of
children’s work. Yet despite these laws, over the past decade, the government has only intensified its
70 Khorezm B parent 1.
28
reliance on forced child labor to bring in the cotton harvest, due to a number of economic and political
factors. Among these are the persistence of elements of a command economy in the sector, and
constraints on a free labor market.
The government of Uzbekistan, as demonstrated by the delay last year (2008) in sending out
schoolchildren, can put a stop to this mobilization. The order to these districts not to deploy
schoolchildren was strictly observed, just as the opposite order, issued just three weeks later, was
immediately carried out. Manpower shortage is not the factor driving the exploitation of children;
rather, it is the system of mandatory state orders for cotton crops and state control over the purchase
price for cotton, leaving no margin to pay the masses of unemployed Uzbekistani workers market
wages. Moreover, the authoritarian habit of command and control persists even when the economic
rationale is slim, given that schools were closed and children were in the fields in some areas when there
was already no cotton left to pick.
Meaningful steps toward ending the problem are well within the reach of the Government of
Uzbekistan; the principal obstacle to taking such steps is political will. Under its commitments to the
recently?signed ILO Convention No. 182, the Uzbek government is obligated to provide the ILO a list of
sectors where worst forms of child labor may be found. Public acknowledgement of the problem
through public identification of cotton as a target sector is one important precursor to further action.
Subsequent to identifying worst forms of child labor in cotton, a careful assessment of problem
undertaken in cooperation with ILO and would doubtless reveal and confirm the root causes of the
problem identified in this report. The next significant hurdle will be overcoming the political motivations
for continuation of forced child labor. In the event the Government of Uzbekistan is genuinely willing to
address drivers of child labor, a new National Action Plan should be drafted that addresses these root
causes, including a plan to ensure that adequate adult wage labor is available during the cotton harvest
season. As an important corollary to the plan itself, the Government of Uzbekistan must also allow
independent journalists and activists to have unfettered access to observe conditions during the fall
2009 harvest as a means to ensure independent external verification that meaningful action has been
taken to remove both children and forced adult labor from the cotton fields.
29
Appendix:
Questionnaire for interviewing schoolchildren
1. On what dates were children sent out to pick cotton?
2. When were they promised to return? When did they return?
3. Which grades were sent out?
4. Whom, and how many pupils were excused from this work?
5. Were there any labor contracts signed with you or your parents?
6. What would the school administration do if there were children who refused to go to the
fields, or parents who refused to send them?
7. How far away from the school were the fields where the children worked?
8. Did they remain in the fields or come home each night?
9. Who supervised their work; who was responsible for keeping order?
10. How long was their work day? When did it start and end?
11. Did they have any days off?
12. Is there any norm the pupils must meet, and if so, what is it? Does it vary from the beginning
to the middle to the end of the season?
13. [for schoolchildren] How much cotton did you personally pick per day? At the start of the
season? In the middle? At the end?
14. How much cotton did the majority of students from your school pick?
15. What actions did the school administration or farmers take toward those who didn’t meet
their norms?
16. Were you paid? If so, how much per kilogram? Was any portion of your pay withheld, and if
so, for what reason?
17. Were there meals provided, and if so, what were you fed morning, noon and night?
18. Who bore the cost of meals provided? Were funds deducted from pupils’ pay, and if so,
how much?
19. How was drinking water provided? What was the source of your drinking water during
fieldwork or during your stay in the fields? Was it boiled?
20. Were children exposed to any pesticides, defoliants, other agricultural chemicals or
chemical fertilizers in the fields? If so, then which ones? Do you know anything about how
they were used?
30
21. Were there any accidents among the children from your school, poisoning or other illnesses
during the harvest work? If so, then what kind of medical assistance was provided? Was
there any financial compensation provided?
22. What is your own view about this work? Do you like working here? What would you prefer
to do at this time of year: work in the fields, or study in school?
23. Do the teachers have to cut down the curriculum in order to accommodate field work? If
so, then how?
24. Name, age [school and grade], date time and place of interview
31
Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers, No 207
“On measures to implement to Conventions ratified by Uzbekistan On the Minimum Age of
Employment and the Convention on the Prohibition and Immediate Measures on the
Elimination of the Worst forms of Child Labor”
The Cabinet of Ministers, in connection with the Republic of Uzbekistan’s ratification of the Convention
on the Minimum age for Employment and the Convention on the Prohibition and Immediate Measures
on the Elimination of the Worst forms of Child Labor, in order to coordinate the activities of Ministries
and ministerial?level agencies, as well as local government bodies, and to strengthen their cooperation
with international and public organizations regarding child labor, resolves the following:
1. To approve the national plan of action on the implementation of the Convention on the Minimum Age
for Employment and the Convention on the Prohibition and Immediate Measures on the Elimination of
the Worst forms of Child Labor (hereinafter—the National Action Plan), in accordance with the
appended [document].
2. To entrust the Ministry of Labor and Social Defense of the Population with the coordination of
ministerial, agency and public organizational activities to fulfill the obligatons that stem from the
aforementioned Conventions as well as from the National Action Plan
3. The Ministry of Labor and Social Defense of the Population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the
Republic of Uzbekistan together with the cabinet of Ministers of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, the
provincial khokimiats and that of Tashkent city will oversee the enforcement of the prohibition on
forced child labor and adherence to the established legal norms on the labor conditions for minors by all
enterprises, organizations and physical persons. [The Cabinet of Ministers] recommends to the General
Prosecutor’s office of the Republic of Uzbekistan to strengthen its oversight of adherence to all
provisions of the Convention on the Minimum Age of Employment and the Convention on the
Prohibition and Immediate Measures on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor.
4. The Cabinet of Ministers Commission on Minors’ Affairs will regularly review the implementation of
the National Action Plan.
5. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan will inform interested international
organizations of the National Action Plan.
6. First Deputy Prime Minister R. S. Azimov will be responsible for monitoring the implementation of
this decree.
Prime Minister of the Republic of Uzbekistan Sh. Mirzioev
September 12, 2008