A Hong Kong electronics company is suspected of employing more than 70 underage workers in Shenzhen, China Labour Bulletin reports. The workers came from the Yi ethnic group in the remote mountainous region of Liangshan in Sichuan Province, which has been the source of several child-trafficking cases in recent years, according to local media.

The workers in their dorm, image courtesy of Nandu Daily

The bulletin has the harrowing details:

In this latest case, Shenzhen Click Technology reportedly recruited more than half of a group of around 130 children who were trafficked from their villages in Liangshan after the Yi New Year in November. Most of the child workers were girls, because, as one worker told the newspaper, they are “easier to manage.”

Another source told the newspaper that Click Technology usually employed 13- and 14-year-olds and that many of them stayed at the company for two to three years. “But this time,” the source said, “the kids are as young as 12-years-old, some even appear to be under ten.”

The girls initially claimed to be over the legal minimum working age of 16 but later admitted that: “We all came here when we finished the fifth or sixth grade. Most of us are around 12-years-old.”

The girls lived in cramped eight-bed dormitories and bought their lunch from a food vender across the street. The average shift at the factory was 12 hours: “It is very fast-paced on the assembly line, it is a very tiring job,” one girl said.

Meanwhile, the human resources manager at the company and the middleman, who brought the girls on a two-day train ride from Liangshan to Shenzhen, reportedly received a commission of 10,000 yuan per month for the overtime work done by the children.

Although it is not known whether any arrests have ever been made in these cases, there is a long history of factories in coastal boomtowns illegally recruiting underage workers from the Yi ethnic group.

In 2008, at least 167 trafficked child workers in Dongguan were rescued by the local authorities and sent back to Liangshan. Then in 2011, the media exposed another story of 21 adolescents who had been trafficked from Liangshan and sold to an electronics factory in Shenzhen’s Longgang district. The details of how the children were trafficked and the conditions they worked under were almost identical. And in 2012, the China Daily reported that a factory in Suzhou had employed more than ten child workers all of whom were from the Yi minority in Sichuan.

The company is being investigated.