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Article

6 May 2016

Author:
Patrick Kingsley, Guardian (UK)

Turkey: From war to sweatshop for Syria's child refugees

According to Unicef, more than half of Turkey’s 2.7 million registered Syrian refugees are children – and nearly 80% of them are not in school...Campaigners believe that many of the rest are in work, for salaries far below the minimum wage....Hamza’s life is a good example of why this is all happening. Two years ago, his father was reportedly beheaded by Isis fighters in northern Syria, so his family fled to Turkey. There, his mother works as a housekeeper for the family’s elderly landlords, in exchange for a lower rent. But with Hamza’s father dead, the family has no other means of earning a money. So to put food on the table, he and his younger brothers, Tarek and Hammouda, work in this local shoe factory. Their daily wage is less than $10 – lower than the retail price of every pair of shoes they make.