“Here, every day we experience a new story of slavery, we experience and see the tears of mothers and children and broken young people who have no hope to keep living.”  

Those are the words of Kaleem Shahzad, Founder and President of the Holy Light Foundation and part of Pakistan’s marginalized and exploited Christian minority. Shahzad is currently working on the front lines of child labor exploitation at Pakistan’s brick kilns trying to end a form of modern slavery that is inexorably linked to child labor and has been going on generation after generation in Pakistan, bonded labor.  

The UK based All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Pakistani Minorities recently released a report, Exploitation of Bonded Brick Kiln Labourers in Pakistan: The Unseen Modern-Day Slavery. The report sheds light on the current state of this often hidden and now illegal form of slavery in Pakistan which has continued relatively unchecked for decades. And due to its generational nature, bonded labor continues to destroy the lives of countless families working futilely to try and claw their way out from debt and poverty and entrenches child labor as part of the system.  

End Slavery Now defines bonded labor as a process where people give themselves into what amounts to slavery as security against a loan. It is usually made to look like an employment agreement but in this type of arrangement, the worker starts work with a debt to repay, only to find repayment of the loan almost impossible due to low wages and/or extreme working conditions. This leads to essentially permanent enslavement that is sometimes passed down as debt bondage through generations, in other words, institutionalized slavery. In Pakistan it is standard practice to have children working alongside bonded parents to increase the chances of paying off their debt. And although the Government of Pakistan passed legislation to outlaw the practice of bonded labor, the report found that the implementation of the law is non-existent. That means generation on generation of children are working doing back breaking labor, with little hope of escaping the cycle of poverty. National statistics from Pakistan on bonded labor in brick kilns is thin, but a 2004 survey of brick kilns in Punjab, the most populous province, found that nearly 90% of brick kiln workers were bonded. That figure underlines the fact that when child laborers become adults and start their own families, the unpaid “eternal debt” forces them to bring their own children into the same endless cycle of exploitation.  

Bricks made on the backs of children 

Child labor is endemic at Pakistan’s brick kilns and is intimately linked to bonded labor due to the need to maximize earning potential to simply survive. Sometimes starting as young as 4 years old children work long hours, often up to 16 hours a day, and are paid very low wages, or none, to increase the number of bricks their parents will be paid for. Working with no safety equipment like masks or gloves, and in hazardous conditions including intense heat, dust, and shrouded in toxic fumes, they often suffer respiratory and skin problems and are usually seriously malnourished. In Pakistan marginalized minorities are the ones doing this repetitive and grueling work due to systemic discrimination that locks minority children and families out of education, support services and other types of more skilled, higher paid work.  

Pakistan supplies more than 45 billion bricks each year and a 2014 study from the ILO found that a high percentage of children working there suffer from injuries due to their work in the kilns. Of the working child respondents in Pakistan brick kilns, more than 50% started working at the kilns between the ages of 8 and 10 and at one site, the majority started working before they reached 8. Over 60% of those same children have never attended school of any kind.  

A US Department of Labour Report from 2022 looking at Pakistan’s progress in addressing child labor points out that: 

 Children in Pakistan are subjected to the worst forms of child labor…perform(ing) dangerous tasks in domestic work, brick manufacturing, and agriculture. Pakistan’s provincial labor inspectorates do not have sufficient human and financial resources, and enforcement data are unavailable. Furthermore, police corruption, particularly the taking of bribes from suspected perpetrators to ignore child labor crimes and a lack of willingness to conduct criminal investigations, hindered Pakistan’s ability to address child labor throughout the country. 

Pakistan’s unique child labor challenges 

It is important to contextualize this exploitative child labor in the political and cultural landscape unique to Pakistan to understand why the abuse has continued for so long. Speaking about the discrimination and exploitation he has seen in the Christian minority community he works with and is part of Shahzad said:  

Many types of slavery exist in Pakistan, I feel in all third-world countries around the world, using violence, coercion, illegal use of power, and abuse of power. But a few more types are present here in Pakistan, being an Islamic state. Due to the blind eye turned by the state about the oppression and abuse of minorities, you can say minorities in Pakistan live in constant slavery, without voice, without freedom, and under fear of death. At any time, their homes and churches can be burnt. The daily fears include the kidnapping of religious minority girls, forcible conversion to Islam and the random killing of Christians. Any time a Muslim can accuse any person of blasphemy and a mob can kill that human, burn that human, without fear of repercussion, so these minorities live in fear of death at any moment. It is easy to talk about, but it’s tough to live in such a situation. 

Out of Pakistan’s 220 million population, 2% are Christians. Due to poverty, and systematic discrimination, most are forced to stay at the bottom of the social ladder and remain largely uneducated, compelling them to work at low-paying jobs. Approximately, 60% of workers living and working in the brick kilns are Christians. Combining an exploitative system with a political climate of discrimination and crime without consequence has laid the groundwork for the vicious and ongoing abuse at the kilns in Pakistan. The APPG report shared a victim testimony highlighting the level of abusive and exploitative working conditions children at the kilns face, recounting the testimony of a 20-year-old victim who was born at a brick kiln site. The survivor told the inquiry: 

“My father had worked at the brick kiln for 22 years and I was born there. My mother passed away. I lived there with my father and brothers. The owner used to send my father away [under] a pretext and then 10-12 men would enter the house, and start raping me, despite my pleas. They would use force and beat me with baseball bats when I resisted. When I put up a lot of resistance, they would use medicine to make me unconscious. They would bite me and leave marks on my skin.” 

For women and female children working at the kilns the vulnerability to abuse is even higher as maintaining employment is vital to the family’s livelihood. Speaking up about gender specific abuse and violence in such a patriarchal and discriminatory society could cause a loss of work and would shame the family, meaning most stay silent and the abuse continues.  

The Solutions 

The APPG inquiry reported that it heard “damning evidence on the nature and scale of bonded labor in Pakistan” and recognized the extremely negative impact bonded labor and child labor in the kilns is having on the lives of people, whole families and communities there. The panel concluded that the government’s continued negligence around improving the treatment of bonded laborers at brick kilns is an ongoing issue and should be a serious concern for the government of Pakistan, especially regarding the treatment of already marginalized and vulnerable communities, like religious minority communities. The full list of recommendations to the Pakistani government are provided at the end of this post.  

 Talking about his own understanding of the current situation, Shahzad said that when he was young, he didn’t know it was abuse when children were beaten at their workplace. In Pakistani culture it was normalized and accepted that poor children who work in kilns, factories and workshops can be beaten. And as a minority Christian, his parents taught him to never talk to Muslim children as it could lead to trouble. According to Shahzad, every Christian child in Pakistan knows from very young age that talking to Muslims is “dangerous for their lives and their families”. But today he sees things in a different light and tries to work with Pakistan’s Islamic Government to bring about change. Shahzad and The Holy Light Foundation are part of several organizations, like SPARC and The Childcare Foundation of Pakistan seeking to educate, empower and protect the rights of Pakistan’s marginalized minorities as part of the solution, coupled with advocating for better law enforcement and more robust labor protections. The work he is engaged in now, helping children working at brick kilns and lifting families out of slavery by paying their debt, is just part of what he hopes to accomplish. Shahzad dreams of one day opening a safe house and schools exclusively for poor minority children and families where they can get free education and not feel stigmatized by their background or religion saying:  

“Right now, people cannot scream here for the pain they go through daily. I want to build a proper rescue home and rescue these priceless lives.” 

APPG Report Recommendations for the Government of Pakistan 

To ask that the Pakistan Government issue a report on the number of brick kilns visited by inspectors, a summary of the violations of the Bonded Labour and Child Labour law, and convictions obtained in the prior 12 months. 

• To confiscate the assets of all those who benefited from bonded labor and repurpose those assets to create a national trust fund to support victims/survivors of bonded labor, including funding the education of children from the families of bonded labor.   

• To introduce a certificate scheme for brick kilns which comply with all the requirements of the relevant laws in Pakistan and pay the Employees’ Old Age Benefits and Employees Social Security. (Only certified brick kilns should be used as suppliers for government contracts). 

• To ensure urgent and unconditional implementation of existing legislation, especially the Bonded Labour Abolition Act (BLAA) 1992 and the associated provincial legislation, and arrange mechanisms for their monitoring and compliance, for example by ensuring that the District Vigilance Committees (DVC) are effective, regularizing formalized contracts between owners and workers, and the registration of all brick kilns. 

• To ensure the complete abolition of child labor on brick kilns using the Employment of Children Act 1991, and the Punjab Prohibition of Child Labour at Brick Kilns Act 2016. 

• To ensure swift investigations of all allegations of violations of the bonded labor laws and ensure effective prosecutions. 

• To improve access to social services for brick kiln workers including the Employees Old Age Benefit Insurance and Employees Social Security Insurance; for example, sending mobile documentation clinic vans to ensure that all the workers have Computerized National Identity Cards (CNIC cards). 

• To appoint a senior official to oversee a nationwide campaign to end bonded labor in brick kilns and who will report every six months on the progress made in implementing the laws. 

• To engage in awareness raising about the issue of bonded labor, but also on women’s rights including highlighting the legal status and consequences of early and forced marriages and the creation of safe sanctuaries for women and children who escape from servitude. 

• To engage in awareness raising about the need for education for children, and work with civil society organizations on delivering education programs to children and adults locally. 

• To improve access to microfinance and eliminate the advances and loans from owners of brick kilns. 

By Human Trafficking Search Program Director- Rebekah Enoch