CHILD LABOR
A young boy recycling garbage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2006
See also: Children's rights
Child labor is still common in some parts of the world, it can be factory work, mining, prostitution, 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). Other children are forced to do tedious and repetitive jobs such as: assembling boxes, polishing shoes, stocking a store's products, or cleaning. However, rather than in factories and sweatshops, most child labor occurs in the informal sector, "selling many things on the streets, at work in agriculture or hidden away in houses—far from the reach of official labor inspectors and from media scrutiny." And all the work that they did was done in all types of weather; and was also done for minimal pay. As long as there is family poverty there will be child labor.
According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 158 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labour. The United Nations and the International Labor 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. Although globally there is an estimated 250 million children working.
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. Somalia eventually signed the convention in 2002; the delay of the signing was believed to been due to Somalia not having a government.
A boy repairing a tire in Gambia
In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998) argue that the primary cause of child labor is parental poverty. That being so, they caution against the use of a legislative ban against child labor, and argue that should be used only when there is reason to believe that a ban on child labor will cause adult wages to rise and so compensate adequately the households of the poor children. Child labor is still widely used today in many countries, including India and Bangladesh. CACL estimated that there are between 70 and 80 million child labourers in India.
Child labor accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa, 17% in Latin America, 1% in US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations. The proportion of child laborers varies a lot among countries and even regions inside those countries.
Recent child labor incidents
Young girl working on a loom in Aït Benhaddou, Morocco in May 2008.
[edit]Meatpacking
In early August 2008, Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil announced that his department had found that Agriprocessors, a kosher meatpacking company in Postville which had recently been raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had employed 57 minors, some as young as 14, in violation of state law prohibiting anyone under 18 from working in a meatpacking plant. Neil announced that he was turning the case over to the state Attorney General for prosecution, claiming that his department's inquiry had discovered "egregious violations of virtually every aspect of Iowa's child labor laws." Agriprocessors claimed that it was at a loss to understand the allegations. Agriprocessors' CEO went to trial on these charges in state court on May 4, 2010. After a five-week trial he was found not guilty of all 67 charges of child labor violations by the Black Hawk County District Court jury in Waterloo, Iowa on June 7, 2010.
Firestone
The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company operate a metal plantation in Liberia which is the focus of a global campaign called Stop Firestone. Workers on the plantation are expected to fulfil a high production quota or their wages will be halved, so many workers brought children to work. The International Labor Rights Fund filed a lawsuit against Firestone (The International Labor Fund vs. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company) in November 2005 on behalf of current child laborers and their parents who had also been child laborers on the plantation. On June 26, 2007, the judge in this lawsuit in Indianapolis, Indiana denied Firestone's motion to dismiss the case and allowed the lawsuit to proceed on child labor claims.
GAP
After the news of child laborers working in embroidery industry was uncovered in the Sunday Observer on 28 October 2007, BBA activists swung into action. The GAP Inc. in a statement accepted that the child laborers were working in production of GAP Kids blouses and has already made a statement to pull the products from the shelf.[24][25] In spite of the documentation of the child laborers working in the high-street fashion and admission by all concerned parties, only the SDM (Sub-divisional Magistrate) could not recognise these children as working under conditions of slavery and bondage.
Distraught and desperate that these collusions by the custodians of justice, founder of BBA Kailash Satyarthi, Chairperson of Global March Against Child Labor appealed to the Honorable Chief Justice of Delhi High Court through a letter at 11.00 pm. This order by the Honorable Chief Justice comes when the government is taking an extremely reactionary stance on the issue of child labour in sweatshops in India and threatening 'retaliatory measures' against child rights organisations.
In a parallel development, Global March Against Child labor and BBA are in dialogue with the GAP Inc. and other stakeholders to work out a positive strategy to prevent the entry of child labor in to sweatshops and device a mechanism of monitoring and remedial action. GAP Inc. Senior Vice President, Dan Henkle in a statement said: "We have been making steady progress, and the children are now under the care of the local government. As our policy requires, the vendor with which our order was originally placed will be required to provide the children with access to schooling and job training, pay them an ongoing wage and guarantee them jobs as soon as they reach the legal working age. We will now work with the local government and with Global March to ensure that our vendor fulfils these obligations."
On October 28, Joe Eastman, president of Gap North America, responded, "We strictly prohibit the use of child labor. This is non-negotiable for us – and we are deeply concerned and upset by this allegation. As we've demonstrated in the past, Gap has a history of addressing challenges like this head-on, and our approach to this situation will be no exception. In 2006, Gap Inc. ceased business with 23 factories due to code violations. We have 90 people located around the world whose job is to ensure compliance with our Code of Vendor Conduct. As soon as we were alerted to this situation, we stopped the work order and prevented the product from being sold in stores. While violations of our strict prohibition on child labor in factories that produce product for the company are extremely rare, we have called an urgent meeting with our suppliers in the region to reinforce our policies."
H&M
In December 2009, campaigners in the UK called on two leading high street retailers to stop selling clothes made with cotton which may have been picked by children. Anti-Slavery International and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) accused H&M and Zara of using cotton suppliers in Bangladesh. It is also suspected that many of their raw materials originates from Uzbekistan, where children aged 10 are forced to work in the fields. The activists were calling to ban the use of Uzbek cotton and implement a "track and trace" systems to guarantee an ethical responsible source of the material.
H&M said it "does not accept" child labor and "seeks to avoid" using Uzbek cotton, but admitted it did "not have any reliable methods" to ensure Uzbek cotton did not end up in any of its products. Inditex, the owner of Zara, said its code of conduct banned child labour.
India
In 1997, research indicated that the number of child laborers in the silk-weaving industry in the district of Kanchipuram in India exceeded 40,000. This included children who were bonded laborers to loom owners. Rural Institute for Development Education undertook many activities to improve the situation of child laborers. Working collaboratively, RIDE brought down the number of child laborers to less than 4,000 by 2007.
On November 21, 2005, an Indian NGO activist Junned Khan, with the help of the Labor Department and NGO Pratham mounted the country's biggest ever raid for child labor rescue in the Eastern part of New Delhi, the capital of India. The process resulted in rescue of 480 children from over 100 illegal embroidery factories operating in the crowded slum area of Seelampur. For next few weeks, government, media http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=cr050708laterdayslave.asp and NGOs were in a frenzy over the exuberant numbers of young boys, as young as 5–6 year olds, released from bondage. This rescue operation opened the eyes of the world to the menace of child labour operating right under the nose of the largest democracy in the whole world.
Next few years Junned Khan did extensive campaigning on the issue of children involved in hazardous labor, advocating with the central and state governments for formulation of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of children affected by child labor. In 2005, after the rescue, Junned Khan, collaborated with BBA to file petition in the Delhi High Court for formulation of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of child labor. In the following years, Delhi's NGOs, came together with the Delhi Government and formulated an Action Plan for Rescue and Rehabilitation of child labor.
Primark
BBC recently reported on Primark using child labor in the manufacture of clothing. In particular a £4.00 hand embroidered shirt was the starting point of a documentary produced by BBC's Panorama (TV series) programme. The programme asks consumers to ask themselves, "Why am I only paying £4 for a hand embroidered top? This item looks handmade. Who made it for such little cost?", in addition to exposing the violent side of the child labor industry in countries where child exploitation is prevalent. As a result of the programme, Primark took action and sacked the relevant companies, and reviewed their supplier procedures.
Child labor is also often used in the production of cocoa powder, used to make chocolate. See Economics of cocoa.
Defense of child labor
Child workers on a farm in Maine, October 1940
Concerns have often been raised over the buying public's moral complicity in purchasing products assembled or otherwise manufactured in developing countries with child labor. However, others have raised concerns that boycotting products manufactured through child labor may force these children to turn to more dangerous or strenuous professions, such as prostitution or agriculture. For example, a UNICEF study found that 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", jobs that are "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production". The study suggests that boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can actually harm rather than help the children involved."
According to Milton Friedman, 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. Austrian school economist Murray Rothbard said that British and American children of the pre- and post-Industrial Revolution lived and suffered in infinitely worse conditions where jobs were not available for them and went "voluntarily and gladly" to work in factories.
British historian and socialist E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class draws a qualitative distinction between child domestic work and participation in the wider (waged) labor market.[5] Further, the usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current trends has been disputed. Social historian Hugh Cunningham, author of Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, notes that:
"Fifty years ago it might have been assumed that, just as child labor 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."
According to Thomas DeGregori, an economics professor at the University of Houston, in an article published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank operating in Washington D.C., "it is clear that technological and economic change are vital ingredients in getting children out of the workplace and into schools. Then they can grow to become productive adults and live longer, healthier lives. However, in poor countries like Bangladesh, working children are essential for survival in many families, as they were in our own heritage until the late 19th century. So, while the struggle to end child labour is necessary, getting there often requires taking different routes—and, sadly, there are many political obstacles.
The International Labor Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC), founded in 1992, aims to eliminate child labor. It operates in 88 countries and is the largest program of its kind in the world.[39] IPEC works with international and government agencies, NGOs, the media, and children and their families to end child labor and provide children with education and assistance.
