What Role did Iqbal Masih play in Child Labour

892 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: effects of child labor

Iqbal Masih started his child labour journey at a very young age. At just four years old he was forced out of his home, away from his family, to work for a wealthy carpet maker, to whom his family owed a total of six hundred rupees, sixteen Canadian dollars. Iqbal and a large amount of children were forced to work more than twelve hours a day, six days a week. The over worked children were treated like rubbish. They were beaten regularly, verbally abused, and worst of all chained to their looms by the carpet factory owner. If that wasn’t enough the poor clueless children were cheated into working insane hours and were paid twenty cents a day, and that’s only if they make a certain amount of product. If that wasn’t awful enough, the children had to pay for their own food. Leaving the children to starve and pay off their debt sooner, or slave for more money so they can eat a meal of rice. After eight years of being over worked and beaten Iqbal ran away from his master, to the police, after learning child labour was illegal, Iqbal went back to his owner’s factory with police reinforcements. Iqbal was astounded when he saw his master bribing the police. Iqbal expressed to Francesco D'Adamo how he felt his stomach tighten and how fear took over his body because he knew he would be in trouble with his master. Iqbal was punished severally for his escape attempt but this only motivated him more. He escaped once more and this time he knew he had to make it count. Iqbal ran off to the BBLF, the Bonded Labour Liberation Fund, here they offered Iqbal a safe place to stay. Although Iqbal Masih passed away at a young age, he nevertheless left his mark on the world by travelling around the world to raise awareness for child labour, insp... ... middle of paper ... ...ildren Takes Flight." Free The Children. Accessed March 13, 2014. http://www.freethechildren.com/marc-and-craig/free-the-children-takes-flight/. WebsiteCommentsLinkTagsFootnoteEditDelete "Iqbal - Home." Iqbal. Accessed March 13, 2014. http://iqbalbookreport.weebly.com/. WebsiteCommentsLinkTagsFootnoteEditDelete "Iqbal Masih." About.com 20th Century History. Accessed March 12, 2014. http://history1900s.about.com/od/1990s/a/IqbalMasih.htm. WebsiteCommentsLinkTagsFootnoteEditDelete "Iqbal Masih." Moral Heroes RSS. Accessed March 12, 2014. http://moralheroes.org/iqbal-masih. WebsiteCommentsLinkTagsFootnoteEditDelete "Iqbal Masih." Wikipedia. March 03, 2014. Accessed March 04, 2014. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iqbal_Masih. WebsiteCommentsLinkTagsFootnoteEditDelete "Who Was Iqbal?" Who Was Iqbal? Accessed March 04, 2014. http://www.mirrorimage.com/iqbal/who/who.html.

Show More
Related

  • Free the Children, by Craig Kielburger

    1200 Words  | 3 Pages

    Employers charging high interest rates and increasing the total debt owed by a family was not out of the ordinary. Masih’s employer included fines to the original loan when he erred on the job and for the daily bowl of rice—making freedom an unattainable goal. During the six years he was “employed”, the debt increased from a mere 600 rupees ($6.06) to 13,000 rupees ($13.13). But with the aid of an organization for human rights, Masih escaped at the age of ten and was soon after enrolled in school. After his escape, he helped others break free and traveled to numerous countries as an advocate against child labor. Sadly, at the young age of 12, he was murdered under mysterious conditions, which gave way to conspiracy stories. The fact that the stories from key witnesses changed on more than one occasion did not help the truth come out.

    Read More

  • Chitra Divakaruni Live Free And Starve Summary

    324 Words  | 1 Pages

    Chitra Divakaruni wrote the essay “Live Free and Starve” to share her views on U.S. laws having to do with child labor. In her first paragraph, Divakaruni led the reader to believe that the bill passed had a positive effect on Third World Countries that allow child labor. Divakaruni took a different angle on a common problem. Instead of offering a quick, cheap solution, the author looked beneath the surface to find the root of the problem. Divakaruni knows that the children working in factories have no other choice if they want to eat another meal and live another day. She wants to end the cruelty these children are forced to live in, but she knows that boycotting child labor is not the best way to do so. Divakaruni is a credible source when

    Read More

  • Modern Day Child Labour

    1370 Words  | 3 Pages

    While we, as Americans, are currently living in the most advanced civilization up to this time, we tend to disregard problems of exploitation and injustice to nations of lesser caliber. Luckily, we don't have to worry about the exploitation of ourchildren in factories and sweet shops laboring over machines for countless hours. We, in the United States, would never tolerate such conditions. For us, child labor is a practice that climaxed and phased away during and then after the industrial revolution. In 1998 as we approach the new millenium, child labor cannot still bea reality, or can it? Unfortunately, the employment and exploitation of children inthe work force is still alive and thriving. While this phenomenon is generally confined to third world developing nations, much of the responsibility for its existence falls to economicsuper powers, such as the United States, which supply demand for the cheaply produced goods. While our children are nestled away safely in their beds, other children half way around the world are working away to the hum of machinery well into the night.

    Read More

  • History Of Child Labor In The 1920s

    941 Words  | 2 Pages

    Education | Global March Against Child Labour. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Dec. 2017. (-- removed HTML --) .

    Read More

  • Child Labor in Mexico

    3748 Words  | 8 Pages

    Veronica Hernandez began her working career in a factory sweatshop. She was only 8 years old. After more than 12 years of intense and monotonous work in a number of different factories, Hernandez still, “felt as poor as the day she first climbed onto the lower rungs of the global assembly line” (Ferriss, source#2). Veronica works about 45 hours a week for only a base salary of $55, an occupation where she assembles RCA televisions by the Thomson Corporation. While some people you know complain of not having cable or enough channels for their big screen television, Veronica is blessed that she even owns one. She lives in a one room hut that includes no more than an out-house and an old refrigerator. She has to haul water from a single faucet that services a group of other families as well as her own. Hoping that some development would come (either in working conditions or wage) since the beginning of her working career as a child, Hernandez knows that progress hasn’t developed within the last couple of years. While she continues to slave in ‘maquiladoras’ (U.S. and other foreign-owned factories that assemble products for consumers), people around the globe are searching to find alternate ways to create work. The need for improvement in working conditions and withholding laws to keep young children out of factory work is urgent. Child labor is a serious issue that needs the world’s attention now more than ever.

    Read More

  • Sweat Shops

    522 Words  | 2 Pages

    All of my life I have considered myself as a person who loves children. I enjoy playing with them, helping them, and just being around them. So when I first agreed with corporations who use child labor I shocked myself completely. After examining two articles; one “The Case for Sweatshops”, by David R. Henderson, and two “Sweatshops or a Shot at a Better Life”, by Cathy Young, I came to the conclusion that in some cases when young children work under proper conditions it can keep them out of the streets and be helpful to them and their families.

    Read More

  • Child Labor Depicted In Ender's Game

    940 Words  | 2 Pages

    Former president of South Africa and freedom fighter, Nelson Mandela once said “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” Regardless of the society they live in, every child has the right to grow, to learn, to dream, and ultimately be a child. However, in the world we live in, not all children have these rights. Several children are being forced to work at the expense of their education, health, and morals. What is there to say about a society’s soul that condones or overlooks child labor? This disheartening issue is evident in several societies and it takes place right under our noses. Orson Card’s novel, Ender’s Game, encompasses the human rights issue of child labor, a matter that

    Read More

  • Child Labor

    1721 Words  | 4 Pages

    Throughout time children have worked myriad hours in hazardous workplaces in order to make a few cents to a few dollars. This is known as child labor, where children are risking their lives daily for money. Today child labor continues to exist all over the world and even in the United States where children pick fruits and vegetables in difficult conditions. According to the article, “What is Child Labor”; it states that roughly 215 million children around the world are working between the ages of 5 and 17 in harmful workplaces. Child labor continues to exist because many families live in poverty and with more working hands there is an increase in income. Other families take their children to work in the fields because they have no access to childcare and extra money is beneficial to buy basic needs. Although there are laws and regulations that protect children from child labor, stronger enforcement is required because child labor not only exploits children but also has detrimental effects on a child’s health, education, and the people of the nation.

    Read More

  • Child Labor In Sweatshops

    1516 Words  | 4 Pages

    We are often unaware or pick to disregard the problem of child labor in sweatshops. However, even though most people are not conscious of this, it is a reality that many children are deprived of their childhood and are enforced to work. It has been estimated by the International Labor Organization (2013) that 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in emerging countries. More than half of these child laborers are hired in Asia, others work in Africa and Latin America mostly.

    Read More

  • Child Labor Essay

    622 Words  | 2 Pages

    Imagine you and I with such limited opportunities. Imagine if children like us did not know the joys of school life but rather the life of hard physical labor. Imagine if we had to struggle miles for water, work several hours a day to earn a few scraps of food that kept us barely alive. Unimaginable, yet the life of 215 million kids around the world today – child laborers. Children are engaged in the worst forms of child labor, many of them in agriculture. They use potentially dangerous machinery and tools, carry heavy loads, work long hours in extreme heat a...

    Read More

  • Child Labor

    1869 Words  | 4 Pages

    The problem spread to other industrialized countries including the United States. Massachusetts passed a law in 1836 that required working children to receive some amount of schooling. Connecticut followed in 1842 with a law that created a maximum amount of hours children could work a day in a textile factory. It wasn’t until the Fair Labour Standards Act of 1938 that real progress was made in child labour in the United States. One example of these terrible abuses is the story of Iqbal Masih, a Pakistani child who was forced into labour as a carpet weaver. At the age of four, the boy was sold as an indentured servant to a factory owner for ...

    Read More

  • Child Labor Argumentative Essay

    1669 Words  | 4 Pages

    Think about the cotton in your shirt, the sugar in your coffee, and the shoes on your feet, all of which could be products of child labor. Child labor is a practice that deprives children of their childhood, their potential, and their dignity and includes over 200 million children worldwide who are involved in the production of goods for companies and industries willing to exploit these kids for profit. Although most countries have laws prohibiting child labor, a lack of funding and manpower means that these laws are rarely enforced on a large scale. However, even for a first-world country like the United States, that has a large number of state and federal law enforcement officers, child labor is still a problem because priority is given to crimes that are more violent or heinous. Child labor must be made a priority issue because it is a global plague whose victims are physically and psychologically scarred, lack a proper education, are impoverished, and whose children are doomed to the same fate if nothing changes.

    Read More

  • Child Labor

    2143 Words  | 5 Pages

    Child Labor is not an isolated problem. The phenomenon of child labor is an effect of economic discrimination. In different parts of the world, at different stages of histories, laboring of child has been a part of economic life. More than 200 million children worldwide, some are as young as 4 and 5 years old, are slaves to the production line. These unfortunate children manufacture shoes, matches, clothing, rugs and countless other products that are flooding the American market and driving hard-working Americans out of jobs. These children worked long hours, were frequently beaten, and were paid a pittance. In 1979, a study shows more than 50 million children below the age of 16 were considered child labor (United Nation labors agency data). In 1998, according to the Campaign for Labor rights that is a NGO and United Nation Labor Agency, 250 million children around the world are working in farms, factories, and household. Some human rights experts indicate that there are as many as 400 million children under the age of 15 are performing forced labor either part or full-time under unsafe work environment. Based upon the needs of the situation, there are specific areas of the world where the practice of child labor is taking place. According to the journal written by Basu, Ashagrie gat...

    Read More

  • Child Labour: NOT Always Wrong

    1299 Words  | 3 Pages

    So I believe that the issue of child labour is not simple. As Unicef’s 1997 State of the World’s Children Report argued, children’s work needs to be seen as having two extremes. On one hand, there is the destructive or exploitative work and, on the other hand, there is beneficial work - promoting or enhancing children’s development without interfering with their schooling, recreation and rest. ‘And between these two poles are vast areas of work that need not negatively affect a child’s development.’ My firm belief is that there is a difference between child labour and child work and that in both cases the issue is whether or not the child is deliberately being exploited.

    Read More

  • Argumentative Essay On Child Labour

    1020 Words  | 3 Pages

    Child labour is an issue that has plagued society since the earliest of times. Despite measures taken by NGOs as well as the UN, child labour is still a prevalent problem in today’s society. Article 23 of the Convention on the Rights of a Child gives all children the right to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child 's education, or to be harmful to the child 's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.1 Child labour clearly violates this right as well as others found in the UDHR. When we fail to see this issue as a human rights violation children around the world are subjected to hard labour which interferes with education, reinforces

    Read More

More about What Role did Iqbal Masih play in Child Labour

Open Document