Children pay for indecent prices

(June 2007)

Story published in Union View n°4, also available at http://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/albania_EN.pdf

Hundreds of children work in the production of shoes and clothing exported from Albania. The prices imposed by international buyers go some way towards explaining this exploitation.

The textile, garment and footwear sector represented 54% of Albania's export revenue in 2006. The sector developed following the fall of the dictatorship, partly thanks to foreign investment (the companies existing before 1991 were generally closed because they were not competitive). Many of the companies in the sector are subcontractors of firms based in the European Union, especially Italy. They receive imported raw materials from abroad and process them into clothing or footwear, a large percentage if not all of which is exported.

The factories are concentrated along the Albanian coastline, around the ports of Durrës and Vlora, as well as around the large cities such as Tirana (the capital), Korça and Shkodra. The industry currently employs 65,000 people. The lowest wages are around 100 euros a month and the highest do not generally exceed 200 euros a month (except for highly skilled workers). The salaries are a key incentive for European companies, which are able to pay 10 times less for workers just hours away from home. Albania shares a border with Greece and is just a few hours by boat from the Italian coast.

Some Albanian factories, both garment and footwear, employ minors aged under 18 or even under 16 years old. "At least seven out of the 150 workers in my textile factory are under 18," confirms the employee of a company in Korça that exports to Italy. “Some are not even 14 years old. The employer likes to take on younger people because he doesn't declared them, so doesn't have to pay taxes for them, and because they’re more docile. My boss tells them to hide when a work inspector comes, so he's never been caught”.

Some Albanian factories inadvertently employ minors. One example is the Bertonni shoe factory, which is the largestemployer in Shkodra (northern Albania), with 870 workers. Its customers are exclusively Italian. The company's director, Paulin Radovanni, is confronted with the problem of forged documents. "I'm not interested in employing girls aged under 18,” he explains. “They are less productive and I risk having problems with the labour inspection or with my customers, who demand that all the workers be over 18. Having said that, some of the women I employ beg me to take on their daughters too, even if they're underage. They say that they don't want to leave their daughters home alone, that it's too risky, or that their family is so poor that they really need their daughters to work. I tell them it's impossible, but weeks later, they come with forged identity documents indicating that the girl is 18 or over!”

Crushed by a press at the age of 15

Although the number of children working in garment, textile and footwear factories is low relative to the 65,000 workers in the sector, a tragic accident recently shook public opinion in Albania. On 23 December 2006, a 15-year-old girl, Hava Haku, died in a workplace accident in the Camileto factory that produces cardboard handbags for Italian buyers. She had only been working in this small factory in the coastal town of Durrës since 4 December. Her lack of experience and training perhaps explain the accident (her head was crushed by a press). The factory owner, Ndricim Saliaj, is being prosecuted for employing this young girl without authorisation from the Labour Inspectorate. “I had gone to the factory a week before the accident,” says Hajdar Kanani, president of the textile, clothing, leather and handicrafts trade union federation (affiliated to the KSSH confederation), “but the employer had refused any union organisation.”

Whilst children can be found working in garment and footwear factories, they are employed in much higher numbers in home-based operations. Several Albanian companies subcontract work not requiring machines to home workers. Doniana, for example, a Tirana based company that exports to Italy and the United States, employs 1200 people in its three factories, but also works occasionally with 1500 families from some thirty different villages in Albania. They are most often subcontracted during the winter, when the company receives orders for summer shoes, which require less technology than those worn in winter. It works with intermediaries who distribute the work in the villages.

“I come to Doniana every two days to load semi-finished shoes into my vehicle,” explains one of the intermediaries. “I have a list of 25 women who I collaborate with in the village. They take the amount of shoes they think they can sew and bring them back to me the next day. I have no control over the way they work. It’s not up to me to find out whether they involve their children in the work. There is so much poverty in our villages that I could give work to hundreds of families, but there is not enough for all of them. The women prefer to work at home because they can look after their family at the same time.”

     Many children work at home

Home work implies the risk of children taking part in the work, all the more so given that it is the poorest families that resort to this kind of activity. Aurora, a 38 year-old mother works for Doniana at home along with her three children. She lives in a remote village where there is practically no work and only receives a widow’s pension of 10,000 leks a month (80 euros). She receives semi-finished shoes from Doniani’s intermediaries. Her work consists in assembling the different parts of the shoes by hand with a needle and thread. She receives 10 pairs of shoes to sew every day and is paid 25 leks (0.2 euro) for each pair. Like the other families in the village, she asks her children to help her, to be able to earn enough to feed them. So her three daughters aged 11, 12 and 14 kneel by her side to work every evening.

“My daughters don’t like the work and I feel guilty asking them to help me. I would rather let them play, but we wouldn’t be able to manage financially without their help,” she explains. “It’s really tough. In winter, they start to help me shortly after coming home from school, at  around 3pm, and we finish at around 10 or 11 in the evening. I wake them up in the morning at around 6 am so that they can do their homework before going to school, which starts at 8 am. They feel tired during the classes because of all this work and I would love to find a job  that would allow me to earn enough to spare them such a childhood. We work together all day during the weekend,” Aurora sheds tears as she explains how conscious she is of the handicap that this work represents for her daughters’ education.

"At school, the children who work are easy to spot"

Aurora’s three daughters continue their schooling under very difficult conditions. One of them is in the class of Dervish, who teaches Albanian language and is a member of the teachers’ union FSASH. “A teacher can easily spot the children who spend many hours sewing shoes after school,” he says. “We can see that they are more tired, that they have more difficulty concentrating. Aurora’s daughter is exceptional: she never complains, she does her best not to let her tiredness show, and tries to study like the others, even though she doesn’t have time because of work. She is, however, faced with other problems because of her mother’s poverty: at the beginning of the school year, some of the books are not available in the village, but her mother cannot afford to go to Tirana to buy them.”

Half of the girls over 12 in Aurora’s village help their parents to make the shoes exported mainly to Italy. It’s the same for thousands of other Albanian families. This child labour is clandestine, as is the work of many adult home workers, who are not declared by the intermediaries. As a result, they are not covered by social security, no one pays their pension contributions and they receive no assistance if they fall ill or are injured. And yet this type of work leads to health problems in the long run: the workers inhale the chemical products for  the shoe components and their sight is impaired by the long hours of detailed work often done by candlelight (blackouts are long and very common in Albania).

                        Indecent prices imply medieval working conditions

It would be easy to blame the Albanian companies for exploiting adult and child workers, but those really responsible for these Medieval working conditions are the big international buyers that impose indecent prices on their suppliers. At Filanto, for example, a pair of shoes bought from the factory in Tirana costs 4 euros and is resold for between 22 and 30 euros in the shops of Italy. In Shkodra, the director of Bertonni, who is in favour of dialogue with the unions, says that he would like to be able to offer his workers better wages, but the prices imposed by the buyers leave him with little room for manoeuvre: “I know my workers are not satisfied with the wages I pay them … but, on my side, I am not satisfied with the prices the buyers pay me. They provide me with the raw materials then pay me between 1.50 and 2.50 for each pair of shoes assembled. How can I pay my workers better with such low prices? I have to cover all my costs, including that of the electricity generators, because long blackouts are common in Shkroda.”

Engjellushe, the director of a garment factory employing 61 women in the coastal town of Durrës, has had no luck obtaining better prices, even though her main buyer is German. “The prices have stayed the same since the beginning of the 1990s, even though the wages have risen from 3000 to 18,000 leks a month (24 to 143 euros). I only receive two or three euros for a dress and three euros for a jacket. All of my employees are members of the KSSH union and I’m trying to collaborate with the latter to obtain tax cuts from the government to compensate for the rise in wages. I also invest in training my workers and in better machinery to remain competitive. It’s really difficult to keep my company alive. The blackouts lasting three hours a day on average make it all the more difficult, increasing my costs by 5%”.

It is the same in Korça, in the southeast of the country. An employer exporting clothing to Greece has tried to negotiate better prices with his main buyers. “I receive no more than two euros when my workers produce a dress sold for 60 euros in Greece. I tell the buyers that I cannot pay a salary of 20,000 leks (160 euros) a month with such prices, and I have to resort to using home workers; but they threaten to go to China if I increase my prices. I don’t know whether they would actually do that, because Korça is only a few kilometres from the Greek border, which makes life easier from my Greek buyers, but I don’t want to risk losing them. I’m responsible for the livelihoods of over 110 women.”

In this paradoxical situation where the major international buyers impose prices on their suppliers, it is very hard for an employer in a country like Albania to offer its workers a decent wage, or to organise production whilst eradicating all child labour. The Albanian authorities are confronted with a dilemma when it comes to clandestine homework: on the one hand, the families are in dire need of the work but, on the other, children should not be made to work so hard, and it is impossible to check what is happening inside private homes. The buyers are called on from all sides to be socially responsible…

                                                                                              Samuel Grumiau

Note: Part of the information published in this article is drawn from research into the textile, garment and footwear sector in Albania carried out at the beginning of 2007 by the Dutch union FNV. The anonymity of the interviewees was assured, to allow them to speak as freely as possible, which is why most of the names of the workers or employers quoted have been changed or left vague.

 BOX 1:

“I don’t control whether children work for me in their homes”

 “My Italian buyer pays me 3.20 euros for a simple pair of sandals that are sold for around 35 euros in the European Union,” explains the director of a footwear company employing 80 women in Korça. ”It’s not much, but the buyer provides me with the raw materials and pays for the goods transport. The wages in Italy are eight or nine times higher than in my company, but it has to be said that my workers are less productive than Italian workers. During the two periods of the year when we receive the most orders, we distribute home work to our employees or other workers, who we first train. I don’t know if they ask their children to help them at home. It’s the parents who are responsible for this kind of control, not me.”

 (Note: a former worker from this factory confirmed that children are most certainly involved).

QUOTE:

“Children who work until late in the evening sewing clothes or shoes at home often develop eye problems and are so tired the next day that they risk dropping out of school in the long run.”

(Natasha Lubonja, representative of the BSPSH trade union)

 BOX2:

Trade union presence still very limited

Only 10% of the 65,000 workers in the Albanian textile, garment, footwear and leather sectors is unionised. “We have to be very careful when trying to organise a factory in this sector, because the unemployment rate is very high in Albania, and many companies have closed their gates over the last few years to go to Bulgaria or Romania, or elsewhere. The employers brandish the threat of international relocation if workers approach a union,” underlines Eshtem Graci, president of the independent trade union of textile, garment and leather workers of Albania.

A garment worker from a factory in Korça that subcontracts for a Greek company, testifies to the fear of joining a union: “Here, when we form a union the employer considers us as an enemy and we can be dismissed as a result. So no one in our factory has the courage to form one. The same applies to strike action: it’s not something we’d never dream of, but we don’t have the guts!” Natasha Lubonja, representative of the BSPSH trade union confederation in Korça, confirms these fears: “Sometimes workers dare not tell us what is really happening in their factory for fear of the measures that will be taken by their employers, because they know that we will not stand by with our arms folded.”

“Some workers have already been fired because they provided us with information on home work and the involvement of children,” notes Petrit Dajko, president of the independent light industry and textile trade union (affiliated to the BSPSH). Hajdar Kanani, president of the textile, clothing, leather and handicrafts trade union federation (affiliated to the KSSH confederation), tries to secure an agreement with the employer before contacting the workers. “Once we have secured this agreement, it’s not very difficult to convince the workers to join us,” he ensures.

                                                                                                                       S.G.