“…Hussain, who walks with a limp after he says he was shot in the leg by a brick kiln owner he was taking to court in 1992, believes some owners are in on the crime and take a cut of the profits. The pattern is always the same, he says. Owners begin to harass a targeted worker to repay their debts, and then an agent arrives to befriend them and convince them to sell their kidney.
The districts surrounding Lahore are dotted with thousands of brick kilns, marked by tall chimneys belching smoke into the already polluted air. Around each, hundreds of workers crouch, packing mud into rectangular moulds before flipping them over to turn out brick after brick. Whole families are at work, from elderly grandparents to children as young as six, caked in mud and dust. It is a scene repeated across Pakistan, where by some estimates, between 4 million and 5 million people work at brick kilns.
The brick kiln industry offers impoverished workers something few other businesses do: an advance against future wages. But what appears to be a benefit is actually a trap. “These cash advances are seldom documented, often deliberately manipulated, and subsequently become tools for prolonged exploitation and control,” says Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) in a recent report. The practice is widely recognised as debt bondage, a contemporary form of slavery.
Brick kiln owners typically deduct up to half of workers’ wages in the name of repaying the debt, leaving them with as little as 800 rupees (£2.15) for every 1,000 bricks they make. A family can make about 2,000 bricks a day. Additional and excessive deductions are made for costs such as the electricity workers use in the tiny huts where they live. With such low wages, workers are forced to borrow more money to pay for daily expenses and one-off costs such as medical treatment and weddings…”