- Report: #1338893
Complaint Review: handmadepiece.com - Internet
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handmadepiece.com
Internet, USA
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www.handmadepiece.com
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handmadepiece.com 1st-art.com Child Labor Abuse in Handmadepiece.com Oil-Painting Sweatshop Shenzhen Internet
I was a contented 13 year old until the dark day when a heartless recruiter from the Shenzhen sweatshops drove until my village in Henan province in central China. My parents, dirt poor farmers, accepted the recruiter’s Dickensian offer of $200 for me and that evening I was packed like a sardine into a mini-bus with twenty other impoverished children from surrounding villages for the long, heart-breaking drive to the industrial smog of Shenzhen.
When we arrived, I was allocated to work in 1st-art.com factory in Dafen Village, Shenzhen. We were put in a dorm room of 3 x 4 meters sleeping twelve kids on bunk beds and told we would work from 6am until 10pm with 30 minutes for lunch and two 10 minute toilet breaks, 7 days a week with one day a month off. We would be paid the equivalent of $50 a month but 1st-art.com would deduct $30 for lodging and food which consisted of two small bowls of rice and vegetables a day - we never got any meat. We had also, of course, to pay off with extortionate interest the $200 payment that was paid to our parents.
The owner of handmadepiece.com, a cruel, hard, dragon lady called Monica, put us to work the next day. We were painting over prints on easy paintings by a Western artist called Mark Rothko – the more difficult paintings were sent to be painted by adults with a little art training who were imprisoned in the ‘laogai’ - forced labor camps for political prisoners. If we made a mistake, then Monica would get the security guards to beat us severely on our backs with a bamboo cane – the physical scars have now healed but the mental ones are seared into my nightmares.
After two months of working in the oil painting sweatshop many of us kids lost our appetite, always felt drowsy and were frequently ill. I would latter discover that we had lead poisoning from handling the cheap oil paint that handmadepiece.com used in its oil paintings. We were never allowed to see a doctor and never given any medicine but our pay was docked if we were too ill to work.
I remember one day with much happiness. We were working at 7am when about five policemen burst into the sweatshop. Monica quickly escaped by running out of the back door and sped away on a motorbike. The police had been tipped off by an NGO about child labor abuses and had staged a raid. The police were kind to us and took us to a local hospital for treatment for lead poisoning and then we were returned to our families in our home villages. Unfortunately, Monica bought off some influential people and escaped any punishment- that is the way in our New China! She and her partners have now reopened 1st-art.com as handmadepiece.com with the same abuses being carried out.
I and the other kids, thank from the bottom of our hearts the Western NGO who pressured the police to rescue us. I know that Western customers like cheap oil paintings but please don’t buy from handmadepiece.com as they are painted with the blood, sweat and tears of poor Chinese children, each brushstroke represented an act of cruel misery for us.
