Quarter Year

I called over the manager – a 30-year-old heavy-set man – to ask him about the boys. I could imagine him being intimidating to kids (big dude, lazy eye), but the boys stood tall when he approached, so it didn’t seem they were afraid of him or had ever been hit or anything. I started my questions carefully, “Why do the boys all work at this shop and not another shop?”

He said they have scouts in Bagan who find poor, uneducated families and want their poor, uneducated kids to work. So the restaurant takes the boys off their hands and brings them to Yangon. They promise to provide the kids valuable experience in the restaurant industry, considering tea shops are very popular in Myanmar. Tea shop workers can make good money, though not as much as educated people. (Educated people earn between 40,000 and 100,000 Kyat a month – around $40 and $100. I’m sure the kids at the tea shop are making way way less. $10 a month to sleep in the restaurant and probably work full days.) He says, “of course” most kids send money home – that’s the point – but a few waste it on sweets or games or whatever.

When you start talking about scouts in another part of the country sending children to work in the cities, it begins to sound very child-slavery-like. As Westerners we’re confident in our stance against child labor, so much so that we imagine it to be a universally held belief. But the manager told us all this stuff matter-of-factly, openly, with no concept that it might be a controversial practice.

When we left, Azure and I talked about how im-fucking-possible it is to pass judgment on this specific business because we just don’t know enough. Maybe the work will keep the boys from prostitution or drug use or crime. We don’t know. We wondered if the line about giving the kids experience in a reliable professional field was actually true.

What we can say with confidence are two things: First, the most pressing need is education, and that falls at the feet of the government. We suspect, however, that the Myanmar government intentionally makes people’s lives difficult so they don’t have the tools or energy to revolt.

Secondly, we can invoke the rule of labor we learned in Indonesia: If the job gives the worker the opportunity to BETTER THEIR LIFE, then the system is justifiable. If not, then the system has to change. Of course, the minimum wage is so low even in the US that people don’t have opportunity to improve their lives here.

Azure and I aren’t opposed to kids working in general, but with some major restrictions: It should be a family business, they need to be there by choice and the work needs to not interfere with some kind of more formal education.

Kids were working all over the country – selling things to tourists, selling things to locals, making and selling food, cleaning, serving, moving heavy stuff and so on. We saw kids working in Indonesia, I saw kids working in India years ago as well. It’s a fact of life in the Third World and to ban it outright without thinking of the consequences could be devastating for the families. To me child labor is not the problem itself, but the symptom of a disorganized (or worse, sabotage-minded) government.