im working on an article about child labor (harrowing) and i've been looking up these various reports about children working on tea plantations with absolutely zero labor protections & very very little pay & no access to education & extreme vulnerability to trafficking into various other industries and even across national borders.
and as im searching for them, one of the results that comes up is this preschool talking about how they have their kids make their own tea as like. a fun activity and a grounding exercise. and also as a way to build independent skills. all these cherubic lily white children dipping little bags of tea into their cups of warm water.
and at first i'm hit with the overwhelming horrific irony of the situation. like i guarantee you no one involved is really thinking about the violence against children that produced that tea. or the racial and class dynamics of who produced it and who is consuming it.
but then there's Another level of like. these children are the lucky ones, but they still have no say about being sent to this institution that's meant to train them for induction into global capitalism. and their images are still being used without their consent (and probably even their knowledge) in the marketing for this institution in order to generate profit. for the adults who own it.
and all this is happening on a platform that is notorious for using image data in massively privacy violating ways for surveillance and consumer analysis. again, in order to generate profit for the adults who own it.
and then i'm seeing this post and reading these reports using my laptop and smartphone, which both use cobalt, lithium, and copper mined throughout central/sub-saharan africa and latin america. minerals which are mined by tens of thousands of children.
i need to go lie facedown somewhere for a while
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