Child labor (or child labour) is the employment of children under an age determined by law or custom. This practice is considered exploitative by many countries and international organizations. Child labor was not seen as a problem throughout most of history, only becoming a disputed issue with the beginning of universal schooling and the concepts of laborers and children's rights.
Child labor can include factory work, mining or quarrying, agriculture, helping in the parents' business, having one's own small business (for example selling food), or doing odd jobs. Some children work as guides for tourists, sometimes combined with bringing in business for shops and restaurants (where they may also work as waiters). However, rather than in factories and sweatshops, most non-agriculture child labor occurs in the informal sector, "selling on the street, at work in agriculture or hidden away in houses — far from the reach of official labour inspectors and from media scrutiny."
The most controversial forms of work include the military use of children as well as child prostitution. Less controversial, and often legal with some restrictions, are work as child actors and child singers, as well as agricultural work outside of the school year (seasonal work).
Human rights
The United Nations and the International Labour Organization consider child labor exploitative, with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that:
...States Parties recognize the right of the child to be protected from economic exploitation and from performing any work that is likely to be hazardous or to interfere with the child's education, or to be harmful to the child's health or physical, mental, spiritual, moral or social development.
In many countries, it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child below a certain age works, excluding household chores or schoolwork. An employer is often not allowed to hire a child below a certain age. This minimum age depends on the country; in the United States, the minimum age to work in an establishment without parents' consent and restrictions is age 16. Based on this understanding of the use of children as laborers, it is now considered by wealthy countries to be a human rights violation, and is outlawed, while some poorer countries may allow or tolerate it.
Poor families often rely on the labors of their children for survival and sometimes it is their only source of income. This type of work is often hidden away because it is not in the industrial sector. Child labor is employed in subsistence agriculture, in the household, or in the urban informal sector. A related problem is that people are often more preoccupied with the long-term survival and well being of their families than with their own direct, short-term interests. Child labor prohibition has to address the dual challenge of providing children with both short-term income and long-term prospects. Some youth rights groups, however, feel that prohibiting work below a certain age violates human rights, reducing children's options and leaving them subject to the whims of those with money. The reasons a child would consent to do such work may vary greatly. An example of this consent to work would be if a child says he or she wants to work, perhaps because the earnings are attractive or if the child hates school, because such consent may not necessarily be informed consent. However, the workplace may still be an undesirable situation for a child or adult in the long run.
The United States also has extensive child labor laws. In the 1990s every country in the world except for Somalia and the United States became a signatory to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, or CRC. The CRC provides the strongest, most consistent international legal language prohibiting illegal child labor.
Concern has been raised about the buying public's moral complicity in buying products assembled or otherwise manufactured in developing countries with child labor. However, boycotting products manufactured through child labor may force these children to turn to more dangerous or strenuous professions due to necessity, such as prostitution or agriculture.
For example, a UNICEF study found that 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the United States banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, after the Child Labor Deterrence Act was introduced in the US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," --"all of them more hazardous and exploitative than garment production" according to a UNICEF study. The study says that boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can actually harm rather than help the children involved."
Current Corporate Campaigns
Today there are several industries and corporations which are being targeted by activists for their use of child labor.
The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company operates a rubber plantation in Liberia which is the focus of a global campaign called Stop Firestone. Workers on the plantation are expected to fulfill an unreasonably high production quota or their wages will be halved. As a result, many workers are forced to bring children to work. The International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against Firestone in November 2005 on behalf of current child laborers and their parents who were also child laborers on the plantation.
The cocoa industry has been under consistent criticism for years over child labor in West Africa, especially Côte d'Ivoire. In July 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund filed suit against the Nestle, Archer Daniels Midland, and Cargill companies in Federal District Court in Los Angeles on behalf of a class of Malian children who were trafficked from Mali into the Ivory Coast and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings. The three children acting as class representative plaintiffs are proceeding anonymously, as John Does, because of feared retaliation by the farm owners where they worked. The complaint alleges their involvement in the trafficking, torture, and forced labor of children who cultivate and harvest cocoa beans which the companies import from Africa.
Defense of child labour
Children's participation in economic activity was commonplace prior to the Industrial Revolution as children performed labor on their farms or for their families. Milton Friedman claimed that the Industrial Revolution saw a net decline in child labor, rather than an increase. This is well supported by both economic theory and empirical evidence. According to this theory, before the Industrial Revolution virtually all children worked in agriculture. During the Industrial Revolution many of these children moved from farm work to factory work. Over time, as real wages rose, parents became able to afford to send their children to school instead of work and as a result child labor declined, both before and after legislation. While accepting this overall child labor declined in this period, other commentators draw a qualitative distinction between domestic work and participation in the wider (waged) labor-market. The usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current trends has been disputed. Economic historian Hugh Cunningham notes that:
"Fifty years ago it might have been assumed that, just as child labour had declined in the developed world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so it would also, in a trickle-down fashion, in the rest of the world. Its failure to do that, and its re-emergence in the developed world, raise questions about its role in any economy, whether national or global."
Friedman believed that the absence of child labor is a luxury that many poor states cannot yet afford. To prohibit it is to prevent the economic growth necessary to relieve a society of the need for child labor. In poor societies these children will be put to work by their families by whatever means because they cannot afford to feed idle and unproductive children. Moreover, in addition to possibly increasing family costs on a depleted family income, parents may have to forego potential labor time and income, to care for idle children. Some argue that if industrial child labor is legally forbidden, then many children are relegated to working in more dangerous black market occupations such as prostitution.
Posted 04/19/08 by
David John Coleman
0 comments
Nurture Change Agents
