Spatial embeddedness: The case of child labour on BT cottonseed farms – Times of India

The global discourse resolutely insists on ending child labour which is often associated with slavery, forced labour, sexual exploitation and any work damaging the health and well-being of children. This is done by invoking a moral terminology which argues that low labour standards in ‘errant' countries of the Global South are unacceptable, unfair and illegitimate and only trade sanctions harmonizing international child labour standards, labelling products as child labour free, and bans and consumer boycotts of products made by children will ensure compliance.

Notwithstanding these aggressive global calls to address the problem, child labour persists across many sectors, including those tightly integrated into global production networks (GPNs). The reason being serious governance gaps, which include inadequate enforcement of laws against child labour and forced labour and widespread denial of the right to freedom of association and collective bargaining. This is exacerbated by the complicated sub-contracting arrangements within supply chains.

Consequently, global business has come under increasing pressure to demonstrate its commitment to be free from child labour. The industry has responded through CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiatives, corporate codes of conduct and other voluntary mechanisms to fill the governance gap. This implies that Polanyi's double movement is at work. On the one hand, commodity chains drive the dynamics of disembedding markets from society while on the other hand, diverse public and private actors seek to re-embed economic activities through regulations. 

The phenomenon of double movement is evident in the study of children working on BT cottonseed farms of Gujarat and Rajasthan through the comparison of migrant children from the Bhil community who move from their homes in Southern Rajasthan to work and live on farms in Northern Gujarat, with children who now stay back home in Southern Rajasthan (because of the campaigns by NGOs/ non-governmental organizations like Prayas Centre for Labour Research and Action [PCLRA]) and work for local Bhil farmers belonging to their own community.  

Children belonging to the marginalized Bhil community are forced to migrate due to poverty for work on Gujarat farms under conditions of debt bondage. Their class and tribal identities that are at variance with the class and caste identities of their employers, undergird the extreme exploitation, depersonalized bullying and commodification. Most children live in open housing or temporary/makeshift structures on a sharing basis. The absence of proper sanitation facilities leads children to defecate and bathe in the open. At work, the main manifestation of abuse is regular verbal intimidation relied on by farmers to get the children to wake up early, speed up work, increase output and reduce or eliminate mistakes.

Scolding and reprimands of severe nature are resorted to when they are caught resting between tasks. Physical abuse is also adopted sometimes as a means of punishment to ensure that mistakes are not repeated and to instil fear in all workers. Therefore, it is common for children to neglect their health or forfeit wages for the days of work missed. Moreover, if any child fell ill, the others were expected to pitch in to complete the job, forcing children to exercise peer control. Most of the children were paid below the minimum wage at the end of the season through their contractors.

This made leaving the worksite mid-season difficult. Farmers' tendency to force children to complete non-agricultural tasks at the end of the cropping season, by withholding their dues, effectively rendered the latter bonded labour. While some children, unable to bear such excessive mistreatment, leave the farm and forfeit their wages for the entire season, others involuntarily continue working.

Thus, the very nature of migration disembeds child labour because being migrants does not give them a footing in the destinations where they work. Locational constraints associated with living at the workplace (i.e. the farm) away from parental support, and developmental disadvantages linked to age, accentuate children's vulnerabilities and worsen their predicament. Migrant child labourers endure the ‘worst forms of labour' and exemplify disembeddedness wherein social relations are an add-on to the market. Indeed, under such circumstances, the governance positions adopted within GPNs, including soft law, regulations, framework agreements, codes of conduct, etc., and the commitment to upgrading operate as mere rhetoric, making no difference to the experience of disembeddedness.

However, Polanyi's double movement displays how markets are also embedded in society in ways that they can never be entirely free, as they rely on exchange mechanisms that belong not to the market but to the social sphere. Therefore, just as contemporary transformations entail fictitious commodification and disembedding, protective counter-movements try to re-embed the economy in society. In our context, policy makers, local administration, police, labour activists and NGOs jointly tried to control child trafficking and, thereby, child labour.

Though such pressure for change came from this network, place-related situatedness or ‘embeddedness', which implies a rootedness in a region, has considerable impact on improving the working conditions of children as employers shift space from Gujarat farms to farms of Bhil households in Rajasthan in pursuit of profits and in a bid to evade demands for improved working conditions. The working conditions of children working for Bhil farmers who belonged to their community countered the power of employers, illustrating the linkage between workplaces and the wider social context in which they are located. In-group affiliations, arising from common tribal and village identities, cement cohesive ties which exert social influence and operate as mechanisms of social control, ensuring conformity and pre-empting deviance such that employers notwithstanding the accompanying high controls, limit the levels of exploitation of child workers.

The social context serves as a ‘protective alliance' that ensures the well-being of the child workers. Given the physical and relational connectedness, farmers approached the children either directly or through the latter's parents, removing the middle person and the issue of debt bondage from the recruitment process. The children reported being paid daily and directly at a higher rate than migrant children's wages. Children went home at the end of the day, indicating that they always had family support that reduced their strain in case of any untoward incident at work. Moreover, the farmer and his family treated the child workers cordially. They were provided breakfast, lunch and tea, while mistreatment was largely absent in spite of high controls. 

To conclude, in the case of disembedded migrant child workers, glaring inconsistencies between micro-level practices and broader standards are discernible, while in the case of children working in their home villages, micro-level practices appear to aid broader standards. Yet, while the energetic campaigns by policymakers, local administration, police, labour activists and NGOs have certainly reduced child trafficking, the shift of production to the household sector may result in an adverse incorporation in the future, as observed elsewhere.

Corporations are attempting to obscure the difference between child labour and child work, making it even more difficult for civil society organizations to intervene. Thus, the constant tension between disembeddedness and embeddedness, with the seeds of disembeddedness sown through the very process of re-embedding, becomes apparent. In the given circumstances, it is worth resurrecting the ILO's more nuanced two-plank approach to child labour, which includes an eventual commitment to combining the progressive abolition of child labour with transitional measures aimed at improving the working conditions of children.