The situation of child labor in the country has improved, but it has not been completely eradicated.
Abdurahmon is 13 years old, now in 6th grade and on vacation. But he is not idle. From the early morning he brings in cucumbers grown by his grandmother in her garden and sells them until late at night near the Chilanzar metro. The boy’s family lives in the Zangiota District of Tashkent Oblast, a 40-minute drive from the capital.
“I wake up early in the morning so I can get to Tashkent early and be in time for the morning rush near the metro. In the morning everyone goes to work, so they buy little, and in the evening the main sale starts, when everyone rushes home and buys vegetables for dinner on the way,” said Abdurahmon.
According to the boy, his parents don’t force him to work. Only his father works, but it’s difficult to feed a family of six alone. This is why he feels responsible and helps his family.
“I am satisfied with my work. Of course I want to spend time with my peers, but everything has its time. Every three days we harvest cucumbers, and I go out to sell them. I give all the money I earn to my grandmother,” says Abdurahmon in a mature way.
The area near the Chilanzar metro is very lively. It is there, right by the sidewalk, that Abdurahmon and many other peasants work.
He earns 200-300 thousand sums a day (about $19-28).
Many of the adults who stand next to Abdurahmon with their products are positive about the boy earning his own money and try to help him, treating him to something tasty.
One of his colleagues, 49-year-old Karima Makhmudova, believes children should be accustomed to hard work from childhood.
“There are a lot of kids like Abdurahmon. If he earns enough money, he can buy notebooks, pens, and maybe a uniform for school. In my opinion, it’s better to keep him busy here than to just sit idle and fight with his peers,” Karima Mahmudova said.
Meeting children working behind the counters at the bazaar and in crowded places is an everyday occurrence.
Many children work during the vacations to help their families and improve their financial situation. Today, children mostly work in markets and bazaars, selling agricultural products; as loaders, transporting visitors’ purchases to cabs in homemade wheelbarrows (aravachi). Also common is the sale of wet wipes by children in busy points of the city.
The category of working children is divided into those who are forced to work due to difficult family living conditions and those who want to earn their own money.
Officially, the minimum age at which one can start working in Uzbekistan is 15, and in some cases, it is 14, with the written consent of one of the parents or a parent in loco parentis. This complies with international norms and the 138th ILO Convention, which Uzbekistan ratified in 2009.
In this case, students of general education schools, vocational schools and secondary educational institutions are employed to perform light work that does not harm their health and development and does not interfere with the process of learning in their free time.
But the situation today is far from describing the norms of the law.
The “Cotton” Boycott
The topic of forced child labor has long been a painful one for Uzbekistan because of a major global scandal, when a number of Western wholesale and retail companies boycotted the purchase of Uzbek cotton because of the use of child labor in its harvest.
Uzbekistan ratified the Convention on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labor in 2008, but until 2013, the country was on a list of 25 countries that did not comply with the Convention.
For more than 10 years, major retailers refused to sell Uzbekistan’s cotton, and it wasn’t until March of this year that the boycott was lifted. The problem was solved by banning child labor and increasing penalties for its use.
In 2019, the International Labor Organization (ILO) reported in its annual report that systemic child forced labor in Uzbekistan’s cotton industry had been eradicated.
As an additional safeguard to the country’s rejection of child labor to lift the boycott against Uzbekistan by the Cotton Campaign coalition, in January 2020, Uzbekistan’s president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, signed amendments that criminalized the use of child labor.
An ILO report on independent monitoring of Uzbekistan’s cotton harvest in 2021 reported that some two million children were freed from forced labor.
While noting progress in eliminating forced child labor in its 2019 annual report on eliminating the worst forms of child labor, the U.S. State Department emphasized that there has been no national study on child labor to determine the extent of its use in non-cotton-producing sectors. No more recent data on such a national study could be found in open sources.
But it is not yet possible to completely eradicate child labor in the country. This may be due to the economic situation of families, as well as to the tradition of accustoming children to work from an early age.
Helping Parents
More often than not, children in the country work to be able to help their parents. The nation’s unemployment rate today is 9.6 percent as of Jan. 1, 2022, with 1.44 million people in need of employment.
It is not in the interests of the municipality to hire minors officially. They do not want to take on that responsibility. At the same time the spheres in which child labor is now being used are contrary to the law and do not include light child labor. This applies to labor in rural areas, work in the fields, weeding, harvesting, as well as work in markets, transportation of goods, etc.
Most of the experts interviewed believe that it will not be possible to completely eradicate child labor until the socio-economic situation of families in Uzbekistan improves.
A teacher in one of the capital’s schools, on the right of anonymity, said from her own experience that most children are forced to work and miss classes because their parents have no money.
“The children’s desire to help their parents financially is not bad. However, parents should think about the safety of their children. Being at the bazaar and constantly lifting weights that are disproportionate to their age can have very detrimental health consequences for a child. In addition, children are unsupervised by adults,” she said.
There are no official statistics on the number of working children in the country.
Saidakhon, an employee of Prometheus, a Fergana Oblast-based NGO that provides legal protection to children with disabilities, agreed, saying that children are forced to work because their parents lack money.
“In Uzbekistan, children from low-income families take care of their families by working in agriculture and other areas to help their parents,” she said.
Solving the problem of child labor seems possible only with a comprehensive approach, paying attention to each family. Uzbekistan has a large number of agencies dealing with families and children – the Ministries of Public Education, Health, Labour Relations, Internal Affairs, the Women’s Committee and the Oila Centre. However, the problem of child labor has not yet received the attention it deserves.