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	Hazardous Child Labor in Small-Scale Gold Mining in the Philippines by Human Rights Watch   In the Philippines, children dive underwater, swim down a wooden shaft barely wider than their shoulders, and mine for gold – all while breathing through a flimsy, narrow tube.   We haven’t seen underwater mining – called compressor mining – anywhere outside the Philippines, but other forms of mining involving children on these islands take a more familiar form: Boys lowered 75 feet into mine pits, and small children, even 8, 9, or 10-years-old, handling poisonous mercury to separate the gold from the ore.   Juliane Kippenberg, associate director of the children’s rights division, talks to Amy Braunschweiger about being at an underwater mine, the vertigo-inducing narrowness of some mine shafts, and the toll this takes on the Philippine children who work in gold mining.   Diving underwater to mine for gold sounds terrifying.   Definitely. One boy I spoke with at an underwater mining site told me how scared he was the first time he went into the murky water - it was cold and dark and he couldn’t see anything. I also met a boy who had just tried to go down for the first time the day we spoke. He was so terrified that he only stayed down for one minute and then came up. He was clearly shaken by the experience.   Mostly men do this type of mining, but boys do it as well. It is dangerous, and people have drowned, or the compressor – a diesel motor that pumps air through a miner’s breathing tube – breaks down, cutting off the air supply.   The Filipino government has good laws banning child mining and the use of mercury, but they’re simply not enforced.   Why do children work in these dangerous places?   Child labor stems from poverty, and much of the Philippines is extremely poor. Mining by children is part of daily life. Children don’t have the sense that they have a right to go to school and to have a better life. But they’re extremely aware of the immediate need to earn enough for rice for themselves and their siblings.   Sometimes children get satisfaction from helping support their families. But some children we interviewed also broke down crying because they couldn’t take the hard work, pain, and pressure to earn money anymore.   Let’s talk more about the underwater mines. What are they like? How do they operate?   One rainy day we paddled in a narrow and wobbly boat to a compressor mining site. It was so wet I left everything on the shore except my notebook and camera. The riverbanks were lined with tropical plants and small homes, and the water was muddy and green-gray – you couldn’t see 10 centimeters down.   The roar of the compressor engines lead you to the site – once there, it was so loud that I had to step away from them to talk to people. The mine itself is a contraption of buoys and wooden rafts and structures. It takes at least three people to operate one of these small mines, one to dive, one to pull up the earth and ore that the miner digs, and another to oversee everything, including the diver’s oxygen supply.   We talked to one boy who smiled easily, who had started doing this work when he was 14 – he’s now 17. He had no problem going down into the mine shaft, although he admitted that building the shafts scares him. His father operated a compressor mine nearby, so he grew up with it.   What did you learn talking to kids who mined pits?   Boys go deep underground. Most pits are narrow and some go as deep as a seven-story building is tall. You look down into them and are afraid you’re going to fall in. The air quality isn’t good so far down, and you need blowers to bring in oxygen.   I met Reynaldo, a 15-year-old miner who began panning for gold at age 5. When he found gold as a young boy, his family believed he was a gifted miner. After his father died, Reynaldo became his family’s main provider. “Sometimes I’m really afraid when I go down there because I may get hit with falling rocks,” he said. He goes down the mine at 6 a.m. and stays there until 6 p.m., coming up only for lunch.   His sister doesn’t want him to mine anymore, he said, not since another village boy and his brother died in the mines two months earlier.   The whole community was shaken by the deaths. The boy had been working with others, but decided to go down another shaft. He must not have realized that this could be dangerous. He had no blower to give him oxygen, and he suffocated. His adult brother, worried about him, went down to find him and died too.   What most shocked you in your research?   The extent of mercury pollution I saw in the village of Malaya. In five years working on child miners and small-scale mining, I’ve never seen any place so visibly polluted with mercury. The water, which is the grayish color of mercury, goes straight into the river. Big rotating machines, the size of garbage cans, grind the ore, and mercury is dumped into them. We saw liters and liters of this gray, milky liquid fly out of these machines, onto the ground, flowing down to the river and into the fields.   Wherever you walked in the village you saw this water. Kids played in it, swam in it, crossed it to go to school. We met teenage girls in the village who had panned for years using mercury, and some had serious health problems. The girls, like most people, didn’t know that exposure to mercury can cause heart and lung failure, brain damage, and can ultimately kill people.   Two girls had regular tremors and spasms. We aren’t doctors, and there are no doctors there to diagnose or even check mercury levels, and we can’t conclude their tremors are related to mercury exposure. But it certainly makes you suspicious.   Who’s buying this gold?   Officially, the gold should be bought by the Philippines Central Bank. Unofficially, a lot of the gold is smuggled out of the country. The Philippines is the world’s 20th largest producer of gold, most of which comes from small-scale mines. Ultimately, the gold likely becomes jewelry, is used in creating electronics, or is bought by banks.   What we found concerning is that the Central Bank doesn’t check which mines the gold comes from, whether children work there, and if mercury is used. There’s no due diligence.   What do we want to see?   Poverty causes child labor, but the government hasn’t addressed the poverty in these communities. Officials should ensure that government programs reach these families, such as those that provide families small amounts of cash or rice if they keep their children in schools. There should also be programs to help children leave mining and go back to school.   Schools should systematically reach out to children who drop out, something that is not happening now. And appropriate, safe employment opportunities should be made available to adolescents who are 15 or older.   The government should also enforce its child labor and mining laws instead of turning a blind eye to mining by children. In March, the government banned underwater mining and mercury use in small-scale mining. Now it needs to enforce this ban. In the long term, the government should create a legalized, regulated, child-labor-free gold mining sector that helps rural families thrive.   http://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/29/interview-filipino-children-diving-gold http://www.hrw.org/news?topic[0]=9728 Visit the related web page
	Inequality: The Structural Aspects by Branko Milanovic Social Journal Europe   Despite the unprecedented attention that income and wealth inequality has received in this year’s presidential campaign in the United States and in several recent elections in Europe, one cannot but have the impression that, for many centrist politicians, inequality is just a passing fad.   Their belief is, I think, that once the economies return to sturdy growth of at least 2 to 3 percent per year, and unemployment falls to 5 percent (or in Europe to single digits), people will just forget all about inequality and everything will go back to where it was some 20 years ago. Nobody would care about inequality again.   This, I think, is an illusion because it disregards the structural changes in societies wrought by the long and sustained process of increases in wealth and income inequality during the past 40 years. When there are deep structural changes, reminiscent of similar processes that have played out in Latin America during most of the 20th century, aggregate indicators, such as the growth rate of the economy (which is nothing else but the growth rate of income at the mean of income distribution, that is around the 65th or 70th percentile), lose the meaning that they normally have in economically more homogeneous societies.   I see three such structural changes: disarticulation of many Western societies, political influence of big money (plutocracy), and inequality of opportunity.   Disarticulation was a term used by the dependencia literature of the 1960s-1970s to express both the divergence of interest and different positions in the international division of labor of various classes in the developing world.   On the one hand, there was a domestic elite linked with capitalists internationally, participating in the global economy, both on the production side (as high-skilled workers or capitalists) or in consumption (as consumers of international goods and services). And then there was a majority of the population that lacked any connection with global economy and produced and consumed locally.   The situation in rich countries, and especially in the United States, is nowadays somewhat similar. There is an elite (whether it is the notorious top 1% of 5% or even 15%), that is entirely plugged into the global economy and that lives and consumes globally. Then, there is a shrinking middle class, whose incomes have been stagnant for 30 to 40 years and which is linked to the global economy in a negative way, that is, lives in a permanent fear of job or income loss because of competition from poorer countries or migrants.   These groups, rather than the bottom of the income distribution, are the disenchanted groups, so easily won over by Donald Trump’s protectionist speeches. I am not discussing whether their expectations can ever be satisfied in a globalized economy or not; I simply want to note a deep disconnect between the interests of the top and the interests of this middle class, a breach that has been created by globalization and rising income inequality.   When the economic interests of the two groups are so divergent, it becomes hard even to speak of something that would be a “national economic interest”; moreover, the divergence of interests carries over to a number of other divergences, in the way of life, perception of politics, cultural interests. This is the first structural gap.   The second is simply the extension of the first into politics. Due to a number of accommodating processes, including most famously Citizens United vs. Federal Electoral Commission, the role of big money in politics, always important in the United States, has further increased. But even without the facilitating court decisions (and these decisions could, in turn, be considered endogenous to the process of income differentiation), the very increase in income inequality would have brought greater political power to the rich.   More concentration in economic power simply means that there are fewer people who have sufficient funds to help politicians and political causes they either like or (more probably) benefit from, and the economic concentration thus naturally leads to the concentration of political funding.   Ultimately, influence in politics simply reflects uneven economic power. This then in turn, as has been argued by several political scientists (Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright; Martin Gilden’s “Affluence and Influence”), leads to political decisions that economically favor the elite and ultimately to further deepening of the economic differentiation.   The third structural change wrought by income inequality is rising inequality in opportunities. As income inequality gets more entrenched, it does not end simply In current income inequality but tends to carry over to the next generations. The chances of success of children from the rich and poor families diverge. In a process similar to what we can observe in Latin America, the divergence is not simply limited to inherited wealth, but is transferred to the acquisition of education (where the increasing importance of private education further exacerbates the trends), and family connections and networks that are often crucial for success.   Now, these structural inequities will not go away, may even be deepened, when the economy goes back to its long-run rate of growth. Higher rate of growth and lower unemployment might have been sufficient before the structural fault lines became strong because growth would have “papered over” these differences.   But when the structural cleavages are deep, growth alone (as we have seen in the case of Latin America, again) is not enough. If I can risk a medical analogy, an ordinary cold may be cured by essentially doing nothing other than lying in bed and taking more liquids. Gradually we revert to the status quo ante.   But if the cold continues for a while and transforms itself into a more serious illness, which is what a long process of inequality has done to the body-politic, stronger remedies are needed.   I recently reread some of Simon Kuznets’ writings from the 1960s. He argued that every income distribution should be judged by three criteria: adequacy, equity and efficiency. Adequacy is ensuring even the poorest have an income level consonant with local customs and economic ability of the society. Equity is absence of discrimination whether it is a discrimination in current incomes, as for example in racial or gender wage gaps, or in future possibilities (what we now call inequality of opportunity). Finally, efficiency is achievement of high growth rates.   When it comes to the interaction between equity and efficiency, Kuznets sees it going both ways: in some cases, pushing for equity too hard, as in full egalitarianism, may have detrimental effect on the growth rate. But in other cases, the very achievement of higher growth rates requires greater equity, be it because a significant part of the population is otherwise socially excluded, not allowed to contribute, or because it leads to the fragmentation of society and political instability.   I believe that Simon Kuznets would have seen today’s position of the developed Western economies as being at that second point and argued that pro-equity policies are not a waste of resources but rather an investment in, even the prerequisite, for future growth.   * Branko Milanovic is Visiting Presidential Professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York (CUNY) and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). He was formerly lead economist in the World Bank''s research department. Visit the related web page
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