Dateline: June 16

This week Dateline investigates the illegal practice of using children in the “gold coast” compressor mines of the Philippines.

“If the earth collapses, I’ll get buried underneath,” – 16 year old Gerald Lasap tells Evan Williams, who gained rare footage of children working underwater.

Gerald Lasap is a 16-year-old boy among the Philippines’ 5.5 million child workers who risk their lives to earn a few dollars a day.

Gerald works in compressor mining, a high risk and dangerous industry that is considered illegal under Philippine law. The practice, which is unique to the Philippines’ ‘Gold Coast’, includes pumping air into workers lungs as they descend 30 feet down a narrow mine shaft in search for gold.

Collapsing earth is just one of the risks Gerald is facing – a change in water currents, carbon monoxide poisoning or even a blockage in his breathing tube could also be fatal – yet his family relies heavily on the income he earns.

Evan also meets Larry and his 11-year-old son, Joshua, who often mine together.

Larry tells Dateline, “Joshua is a big help to me, because if he doesn’t help me we don’t have enough food to eat… If he has time, he needs to help me, he is my work companion.”

Some miners also expose themselves to mercury during the process – a heavy metal linked to toxic effects such as brain damage and sometimes death, used to help extract the gold from the powdered rock.

Joshua working in the mines means that he misses school and is now two years behind. However, because small scale miners like Larry are limited to earning around $15 Australian dollars a day when mining alone – bringing Joshua along means he can almost double that.

On Tuesday’s Dateline, Evan also speaks with Mayor Ricarte Padilla, the local Mayor of Jose Panganiban, to discuss the laws against child labour and small scale mining. Mayor Padilla admits there is no easy solution for families who are forced to break the law due to living below the poverty line.

Mayor Padilla tells Dateline, “We are doing the best we can, again, if I could only give them job opportunities, I will take them away, especially from compressor mining…I just have no alternatives at this point.”

Tuesday 16 June at 9.30pm on SBS ONE