The brick workers at Kadambini, the small factory that I've focused on, are all migrant laborers, primarily from two regions.
Others -- perhaps overseas Vietnamese who have returned for visits -- sometimes pay the brick workers to maintain the grave of a brother or a son.
It's about the dead: the field hands, housekeepers, single mothers, sharecroppers, brick workers, postmen, shoe repairmen, Pullman porters and maids — Mrs. Obama's relatives all, plain people who owned no property and left no writings.
There are more than 2 million brick workers in India.
Researchers say up to 68percentt of brick workers in South Asia are working in forced labor conditions, and nearly a fifth of them are younger than 18.
Investigators with the International Justice Mission, a human rights organization in Washington, DC, have also found extensive evidence of "debt bondage" among artisanal brick workers in South Asia.
Another study, by scientists at Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan, reported high rates of chronic cough, phlegm, shortness of breath, wheezing, bronchitis, and asthma among both smoking and nonsmoking male brick workers.
Most of the bricks that are made in Peru and other low-income countries are fired in artisanal kilns that pump greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere, posing a health threat to brick workers, their surrounding communities, and even farther afield.
A pedometer (Omron Step Counter, Model HJ-113, Japan) was hung around the waist of the female brick workers to record the number of steps that an individual took, and thus the distance as well as the speed were recorded while the subjects walked with or without a load in the brickfield.
His red-brick worker's cottage is, like its tousled owner, engagingly unkempt.
