The police always cause trouble for us. They often raid here in search of child workers so the owners pay 200-500 rupees per month to the police to stop the raids. If the police take us they torture us until we pay them money.
The manager is known to my father. But it never stops him from treating me badly.
My work takes a great deal of concentration. Focusing on the needle and thread is very bad for your eyesight but we cannot think of the health impact because we need the money. This has become our way of life, we cannot change it.
I send Rs 500 per month to my family. My father is sick. He became blind from embroidering all his life. He is too weak to work so I have responsibility to look after my family.
We start working as soon as we wake up and do not even eat breakfast because the cost of food has increased drastically. We sleep in the same place where we work and all workers here share the same single dirty toilet and bathroom.
Children are paid a very low wage, only half as much as adults. My wage is also cut every time I make a small mistake. Most of the children can’t read and we have to trust the contractor to be fair and pay us our wages but sometime he forgets to enter our proper wage into the accounts and so we lose money.
Narrative provided by Anti-Slavery International from their report ‘Slavery on the High Street: Forced Labour in the manufacture of garments for international brands’, June 2012.
