The Ho Chi Minh City police have saved 23 ethnic minority children who had been employed illegally at two unlicensed sewing factories.

The abused children were waiting for their flight to Hanoi at Tan Son Nhat Airport in HCMC yesterday. Jetstar Pacific offered a free flight to the kids. Photo: Vnexpress

The children, 12-16 years old, are of the Kh’Mu ethnic minority in the northern mountainous province of Dien Bien, the police said.

On September 29 afternoon, Jetstar Pacific Airlines Joint Stock Aviation Company offered these children a free flight to Hanoi, where they would take a bus to Dien Bien, Dan Tri Newswire reported.

Earlier, the HCMC criminal police department received a request from its Dien Bien counterpart to search for a number of children who were employed illegally in HCMC’s Tan Phu District.

The Dien Bien police asked for help after they were reported by a child who had escaped from a sewing factory in Tan Phu and returned home in Dien Bien’s Tuan Giao District.

After investigation, the HCMC police early this week raided an establishment owned by Le The Tuan, 35, in Tan Phu’s Tay Thanh Ward and found 3 Kh’Mu children working there.

The police later found another 9 teenagers at another sewing factory nearby owned by Le Hong Quang, 30, who is Tuan’s brother.

They then received 5 others from the Orphan Vocational Training Center, where the abused children had come for help after they fled from the two factories.

The two factories’ owners have confessed to the police a woman named Le Thi Duc had sent the children there to work.

Working without pay Duc, 68, from Bac Ninh Province, who lives as a temporary resident in Tan Phu, told the police that she “recruited” the child workers from some communes in Tuan Giao, VnExpress Newswire reported.

In the first two years of work, these children would be not paid. From the third year onward, they would receive VND500,000 (US$24) per month, Duc said, adding that she had written agreements about these terms that had the signatures of the parents of 14 out of the 23 children.

She said before taking the children to HCMC, she had paid VND1-3.5 million in advance as part of the children’s salaries to their parents.

For their parts, the children said they had been forced to work 14 hours per day without labor contracts and banned from going out of the factories.

They said they were not provided enough food daily and were beaten whenever they made mistakes at work.

In addition to the 23 children, some other children had also worked at the factories, but they had escaped, the police said.

The police said they were considering punishments on Duc for violating the Labor Code and on Tuan and Quang for operating businesses without a license and employing child labor.