What is Child Labor?
"Police recently raided a Bangkok sweatshop that produced paper cups and rescued 31 children who had been locked in a small room. Not one was older than 13....They were emaciated and suffering from malnutrition. They had been beaten so badly that they needed to be carried to freedom....They told of being thrashed if they failed to make 700 cups a day, by hand....the owner....gave them amphetamine tablets [to keep them awake and working longer hours]....One 13 year old told police he had been beaten unconscious twice when he tried to escape."
--Chicago Tribune, 10/12/1991
Child labor is a problem that has been occuring throughout the world for a long time-since even before written history, in fact. Child labor is not necessarily a bad thing if it allows the child to spend adequate time in educating him/herself and when the conditions that the child works under are not detrimental to his/her health. However, this is not usually the case. In fact, very rarely do you find children working under safe conditions nor do they usually have adequate educational time. This is when child labor gets to be a problem.
What are some of the ways in which countries and the U.N. have tried
to get rid of child labor?
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has declared that the child shall have the right to be protected from work that threatens his/her health, education, and development. Each state shall set minimum working ages along with regulating the conditions that children must work under.
The problem with UNICEF's declaration is that often times the governments of countries who have problems with child labor exploitation are not able to give adequate funding for watching over the places where children work. Even if they do, the main exploiters of child labor are often large companies that not only give a lot of money to the country's economy, but they are also foreign owned. No lesser developed country wants to scare off any further industrialization, no matter how negative of effects it may have on its citizens, just because of a problem with foreign companies exploiting their children.
The International Labor Organizations Convention 138 on Minimum age for Employment (1973) said that the minimum age for work "....shall not be less than the age for compulsory schooling and, in any case, shall not be less than 15 years. Convention 138 allows countries whose economy and educational facilities are insufficiently developed to initially specify a minimum age of 14 years and ....12 years for light work...."
The ILO forgot to mention at its convention what exactly constitutes as light labor. Not only did they forget to create an international definition of light labor, they did not specify which countries had insufficiently developed economic and educational facilities. This would not be such a problem if it were not for the companies that come into countries specifically to exploit the cheap labor markets. Nor would it be such a problem if the governments of these countries (and of the companies that exploited child labor) would take a stand and demand that the rights of people, and especially children, not be exploited.
What are the percentages of child labor throughout the world?
The ILO estimates that there are between 100 and 200 million children whose labor is being exploited throughout the world. Over 95% of these children are found in the developing countries. Asia has over 50% of the child laborers, with Africa having the highest percentage of its children working- every 1 in 3 children. In Latin America, 15-20% of children work.
The largest percentage of these child laborers work in family-based agriculture, service industries (restaurants, venders), prostitution, and in small scale manufactoring (carpets, garments, etc). The children work in such small scale industries is because the more informal the business is, the harder it is for the government to notice who the workers are. The larger businesses draw more attention to themselves because of their size. It is believed that less than 5% work in the export business.
Where do children work throughout the world?
In Asia, most of the children work in factories and small scale agriculture, whereas in Africa most of the child laborers are in the "informal sector" of the economy. They are servants, venders, and work on commercial plantations. Very few of the child laborers work in the export industries such as mining and making carpets; however, it is feared that this small number of children working in these industries will continue to grow as industrialization and urbanization grow in economic importance. Latin American child laborers mostly work in the small mining operations where they have to dig, and work in, small tunnels that an adult cannot fit into. Europe, while not having a significant problem just yet, needs to watch out for its children living in the eastern and southern parts because of the economic problems that these sections are going through right now. In America, most of the child labor problem is located in the south and southwest along the Mexican border. This is where companies hire illegal immigrants and their children to work for outrageously low wages (if they get paid at all) and work under dangerous conditions.
As you can see, the problem with child labor is not that children working is a bad idea, but that the exploitation of children so that they are not able to grow into educated, well-rounded people is wrong. It perpetuates a cycle of injustice and poverty as well as benefiting those who endorse it.
Copyright: Janet Hutchinson, 1996
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