Telenor has discovered child labour at suppliers helping it build Myanmar’s first national mobile phone network, the Financial Tiimes reported on its website, citing Telenor’s sustainability reported. The company said it had identified five cases involving young people aged 12 to 14, plus another nineteen confirmed or suspected instances of teenagers of between 15 and 18 working in potentially hazardous construction jobs.
Child labour is a real problem in Myanmar, said CEO Petter Furberg, adding that underage workers were sometimes the breadwinners of the family. Despite this, Telenor has entered Myanmar with the same standards and requirements as in all the other countries where it operates.
The sustainability report said it had carried out more than 700 unannounced health and safety inspections on companies and subcontractors building transmission towers. In one case in Mandalay in central Myanmar, two 12-year-olds and a 13-year-old were found doing excavation work. Two 17-year-olds were found at another site in Bago near Yangon, the main city, having come to deliver lunch to their uncle. Telenor said all the young people it identified were removed from the building sites, with some of the 15- to 18-year-olds given other jobs such as office work. It did not name the subcontractors and said it was educating all its suppliers.
Telenor's sustainability report also said land grabbing and corruption were big risks in Myanmar, which ranked equal 157th with Zimbabwe and Burundi last year in Transparency International’s 177-country annual perceptions of corruption index.
