Cambodia's Phnom Penh is a very populated and overflowing place. The more buildings that are made, the more bricks are required to build the new structures. But where do all these bricks come from? Cambodian bricks are made in brick kilns. It is a process that includes melting the material and shaping it (the brick,) with heavy duty machines. There are over 300 brick kiln factories in Phnom Penh. But what people don't tell you is the brick kilns in Cambodia are actually slave factories. Brick kilns in Cambodia financially enslave people. They don't care if you're a child or an adult, you have to work until there is no more debt. Furthermore the government has “tried” to help and thinks it is not a problem anymore.
In Cambodia, people borrow money from owners of brick factories. But after they borrow the money, they have debt to this factory, so they have to work off this debt. This is when people get tricked, and when they start working they get paid by the brick. On average they get paid 300 riel, the Cambodian currency, for one brick Which is equivalent to seven cents in US dollars. In America a bricklayer will get paid 22.47 dollars per hour. So if you get paid 0.07 per brick, you will not have enough money to buy essentials. So they take more money from the company which over time builds more debt. In one story, Mok Thy ( a cambodian mother) borrowed 12 dollars from a brick making company 15 years ago. That 12 dollar debt turned into 2,800 dollars worth of debt. So these innocent people are trapped and drowning in debt, and when they die they will pass their debt onto their children who will have more debt. It is an endless loop that will never end.
Child labor is also a huge problem in brick kilns. All over the world children are forced into work. In Vietnam, kids work in sweatshops; in Nigeria kids mine; in Yemen, kids hunt; and in Sudan, kids farm. Like the other countries, Cambodian kids make bricks for money. People need to make more bricks because you get paid by the brick. So usually whole families will be working off the debt, including children. It is actually illegal for children in Cambodia under the age of twelve to do any work at all, but if you go to factories you will see 9-15 year old children working just as hard as their parents. But in Cambodia, it is not just waking up at 3 am and working all day that hurts the kids. In brick factories there are huge machines that can break you in half. There have been many times when kids slip and fall into one of the machines, their arms or legs are broken and crumpled forever. Some kids say they work for food, others say they do it for debt and others say they do it because they want to help their families. There is no way of denying that child labor is bad, it ruins kids’ minds and bodies. The only other option is school, if kids go to school, they can start a new life. Most families can only afford one kid to go to school. So just like their parents, the kids are stuck in a loop, but the difference is they will have been working since they were nine!
You would think that by now in 2017 Cambodia's government would stop all this child labor but they haven't. In 2006, the government found more than one hundred kids working in brick kilns, by 2012 they had supposedly put all the working kids in schools. But when reporters went to factories outside of Phnom Penh, they found many kids working. Were these kids even helped by the government or are these new kids to the business? No one really knows. When people told the labor ministry of Cambodia, it rejected this as a “false statement” and said that debt bondage and child labor is not going up. So obviously, with no help from the government, these people are again stuck.
In conclusion, Cambodia's brick kilns are in equivalent of modern day slavery. What slavery means to me is people forced into something they don't want to do, whether it's through physical force or debt bondage. Slavery means taking innocent people such as children and elderly people to do their dirty work. Slavery means people are comfortable with the idea of a human making another human work under their laws. Over the course of world history, people have been kept as slaves. In ancient Rome, slaves were treated like trash and killed in arenas. In America, slaves were forced to work in cotton fields their whole lives. Slavery has always been in our world, and I think it is thriving in Cambodia.
How you can help:
Like I said earlier the government won't help but you can:
The most effective way to help is to tell people about this problem to educate people you know and to send money or school supplies anything will do.
Pictures
bibliography
Field, Alexandra. “The Children Working in Cambodia's Brick Kilns.” CNN, Cable News Network, 27 July 2017, edition.cnn.com/2017/07/26/asia/Cambodia-brick-kiln/index.html.
“LICADHO, A Cambodian Human Rights NGO.” LICADHO, www.licadho-cambodia.org/.
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