HARVEY: The global march against child labor was born in
a conversation that I had with Kailash Satyarthi-- the very
charismatic leader of the move to bring children out of
bonded labor in India-- the head of the South Asian
KAILASH: We have ample proof that the children are
being used as slaves. They are bought and sold. They are
tortured. They are confined to workplace. They are not
HARVEY: These are kids working in brick kilns, working
in farms as a part of bonded farm labor, working in granite
quarries; kids in sexual slavery, or being trafficked across
national or state boundaries for sexual purposes. Those are
the kinds of kids that this global march is an effort to
HARVEY: So we decided that the global march was a way
by which we could bring international pressure to country
This was not just a simple protest. Along the way,
organizers met with community groups like this one to
try to link local concerns with the March's broader
goals, which resonate with people in Thailand. They're
still reeling from the collapse of their currency.
SULAK: Economic growth must take human dignity, human
rights, environmental balance, into consideration.
In the wake of Thailand's financial crisis, Buddhist
Scholar Sulok Sivaraksa, like many activists, sees
growing poverty in human rights terms.
SULAK: We have more prostitutes than monks. We have
child laborers. We destroy our environment. The people in
Bangkok itself, 20% live in slums. And many people don't
even live in the slums, they live under the bridges and so on
and so forth. And yet people feel these are not human rights
The Global March is just one new cross-border
tactic--an illustration of how globalization from above
leads to a globalized resistance from below.
KAILASH: But in the case of children, in the case of poor
people, they have no calculations of
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