Child Labour

The Sternsinger campaign will be held this year on the topic “United against child labor – in India and worldwide”. The Three Kings Sing, which is considered to be the largest children’s charity campaign for children worldwide, draws children from house to house and collects for social projects worldwide. In 2018, the focus will be on the fight against exploitative child labor. The star singers have put together interesting materials, which we recommend:

Das Werkheft (German)
“The workbook for Aktion Dreikönigssingen 2018 clearly explains what exploitative child labor worldwide means: Methods and games pick up on the topic and show what we can do about it in Germany.”

Sternsinger Spezial (German)
“In our campaign magazine 2018, we visit India: In no other country in the world are so many children working under exploitative conditions. We are accompanying our project partners to a village whose inhabitants live from carpet weaving, and showing the day-to-day working children there.”

Film: Willi in Indien (German)
“This year, reporter Willi Weitzel was traveling for the Star Singers in India, where he met children who have to work every day from an early age, often under exploitative and dangerous conditions.”

On June 12, 2017, the book “Kleine Hände – Großer Profit” by Benjamin Pütter has been published. The presentation of the work of XertifiX in the book makes it necessary to provide explanatory remarks:

It is the great merit of Pütter that he initiated and founded XertifiX with others. As a long-term honorary manager, he has done a tremendous amount of work and contributed significantly to the fact that the subject of child labor in the natural stone industry became known to the German public. By way of XertifiX in the first few years, child labor in the Indian natural stone industry has been significantly combated.

With the change of CEO and first chairman and the changed requirements for seals, however, XertifiX has also undergone a change in understanding that it is not enough to issue a seal in which there is no child labor but inhuman working conditions, e.g.

• the adult workers must work seven days without a break,
• work safety is not respected, so that there are regularly injuries, life-threatening or fatal accidents,
• the workers are not given personal protective equipment so that they become deaf or are dying early
• basic environmental protection measures are disregarded.

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Common press release from the
IG Bauen-Agrar-Umwelt, Union of Education and Science (GEW)
and XertifiX

Hannover / Frankfurt am Main – On the occasion of the Day against Child Labor, we want to point out the great successes in the fight against child labor. When XertifiX was founded together with the IG BAU in 2005, the main focus of our work was to comply with ILO core work standards. Through the controls in Indian quarries – especially unannounced ones – XertifiX has succeeded in the fact that in the quarries and factories controlled by XertifiX, fewer and fewer child laborers have been found over the years and today no children are working there.

From 2012, we have focused our work on improving the working conditions of adults, since 2014 also in China and Vietnam. There, too, no child laborers have been found in the natural stone industry in recent years. “Today, the partly catastrophic working conditions of adult workers are the focus. Anyone who buys gravestones, paving stones or kitchen tops does not realize that they are mostly produced at the expense of the health of the Asian workers, “says XertifiX chairman Ingrid Sehrbrock,” unless reliable certificates ensure decent working conditions and living wages. This is the work of XertifiX”.

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