A five-year research involving child labourers in Bangladesh’s growing leather industry has discovered that youngsters, driven by the need to support their families, are found to be working in dangerous and damaging conditions at every level of the production and processing of leather.
According to the study, children as young as eight years old have been found to be engaged in hazardous child labour, which includes heavy lifting, manually dying leather with hazardous chemicals, working in extreme heat, and operating heavy machinery and cutting tools without following safety procedures.
The study was carried out via participatory action research as part of the Institute of Development Studies’ Child Labour: Action-Research-Innovation in South and South-Eastern Asia (CLARISSA) project. As part of larger reforms to the country’s legal system and respect for human rights, they are pleading with the incoming interim administration to protect children from the most brutal forms of child labour. The poorest children in the country and their families who live in destitute neighbourhoods near small, unauthorised leather production and processing businesses in and around Dhaka—the location of dangerous child exploitation—need special support.
Bangladesh’s second-largest export after ready-made clothing is leather, with the nation’s growing leather industry valued at US$ 2 billion (Bangladesh Investment Development Authority). According to the International Labour Organisation, 34.6 per cent of the children in the study, which looked at over 1,700 homes in underprivileged neighbourhoods connected to the processing and manufacturing of leather, were working in the worst kinds of child labour.
In line with the findings, a survey conducted in the districts of Hazaribagh, Hemayetpur, and Bhairab in Bangladesh found that over 25 per cent of the 880 employees at 158 small leather businesses were young people.
The most recent National Child Labour Survey (2022) from Bangladesh found that only 2.7% of children worked in hazardous industries like the leather industry and that 4.4% of children were involved in child labour. While not directly comparable, the CLARISSA study shows a far higher prevalence of the worst types of child labour.