Following up on Patrick Frost’s article on Child Labor in Central Asia at Central Asia, I have a couple of anecdotes that I have been collecting on child labor in Kazakhstan.

One tradition that I gather is a carry-over from Soviet times is the Subbotnik where people volunteer their time on Saturdays to do community service. In principle it’s a nice idea. Residents of an apartment complex go collect trash or repaint playground equipment or weed the lawns and sidewalks. Organizations like political parties or unions also make a big showing by sending members out to clean up leaves or what not.

However, more problematically, schools send kids out to sweep the yards, plant flowers, and even do more technical work like repainting. The times I have witnessed this the whole thing was over seen by teachers, some of whom treat the kids like laborers, yelling at them, ordering them around, telling them to work harder. I was also shocked to visit a school in Astana recently and see a calendar of summer events. Amid Kazakh language camp ad an Archeological Field Trip (which sounds neat–can I go?) was Repair Week with junior high school students assigned to do repairs at school. And Cleaning Week, where students will clean the entire school. During summer break! It is specially disturbing when kids are used to do work that should be done by hired staff, or work that requires training to be done correctly. In other words free child labor is exploited to save costs. Furthermore repair work could be dangerous for children.

In fact compared to Western schools, schools here demand quite a bit of labor from their students. Students are usually responsible for ringing the bell, going from class to class to register absences, collecting money for special events or birthday presents, even unlocking and locking classroom doors. It seems odd that a school would distract its students from becoming educated by giving them so many extra duties. In fact every day, two or three students are “on duty” and skip classes to do menial work that could easily be done by teachers or administrators. I hope that this trend of treating students as servants will be phased out.

In terms of what we traditionally see as child labor, it is certainly not uncommon to see children working at the bazaar, or small stores. There is a fruit stand near my house where a 12-13 year old boy always serves us while his mother looks on and cares for a small baby. I asked once why the boy was working. This family lives in a village near Astana. The father works in Astana so everyday he brings his family to the city and sets up the stand. Then he goes to work. An older brother spends the day securing shipments, buying from village farmers, driving goods to the stand, and any other odd jobs that need to be done. Mom has no one to leave the baby with, so she comes to oversee things but mostly has to care for the infant. Leaving the kid to work the stand. Of course he goes to school during the school year, but fruit stands only work in the summer anyway. It’s hard not to be a bit sympathetic toward this family, who claim that Father’s wage simply isn’t enough to support them and the stand is not profitable enough to make a profit. This sort of story is common throughout the world of course.

But other examples are a little more problematic. For example, a kid helping his older brother who runs a delivery service. I watched the other day as the big brother drove the truck to a store nearby and then send his little brother out to haul boxes, while he “guarded the truck” i.e. listened to the radio and smoked. I’d guess the kid was 10-12 years old! Or the child conductor on the bus a few months ago. Mommy (I assume) wearing the proper conductor uniform sat in the front and chatted with the driver, while her son ran around collecting money and giving out tickets. Truly disgusting.

Does anyone else have anecdotes of child labor? What can we do about it? Or is it not a serious problem? Maybe children should be put to work, especially if the family needs the extra labor? What do you think?