Child labour

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first general laws against child labour, the Factory Acts, were passed in Britain in the first half of the 19th century. Children

younger than nine were not allowed to work and the work day of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours.[1]

Child labour refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labour. This practice is considered

exploitative by many international organizations and is illegal in many countries. Child labour was utilized to

varying extents through most of history, but entered public dispute with the advent of universal schooling, with

changes in working conditions during the industrial revolution, and with the emergence of the concepts ofworkers'

and children's rights.

In many developed countries, it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child below a certain age works

(excluding household chores, in a family shop, or school-related work).[2] An employer is usually not permitted to

hire a child below a certain minimum age. This minimum age depends on the country and the type of work

involved. States ratifying the Minimum Age Convention adopted by the International Labor Organization in 1973,

have adopted minimum ages varying from 14 to 16. Child labor laws in the United States set the minimum age to

work in an establishment without restrictions and without parents' consent at age 16.[3]

The incidence of child labour in the world decreased from 25 to 10 percent between 1960 and 2003, according to

the World Bank.[4]

Contents

[hide]

• 1 Historical

• 2 Present day

• 3 Recent child labour incidents

o 3.1 Meatpacking
 o 3.2 Firestone

o 3.3 GAP

o 3.4 H&M

o 3.5 India

o 3.6 Primark

• 4 Defence of child labour

• 5 See also

• 6 Notes

• 7 References

• 8 Further reading

• 9 External links

o 9.1 Child labour in diamond industry

Historical

Child labourer, New Jersey, 1910

During the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four were employed in production factories with dangerous,

and often fatal, working conditions.[5] Based on this understanding of the use of children as labourers, it is now

considered by wealthy countries to be a human rights violation, and is outlawed, while some poorer countries may

allow or tolerate child labour. Child labour can also be defined as the full-time employment of children who are

under a minimum legal age.

The Victorian era became notorious for employing young children in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps.
[6]
Child labour played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset, often brought about by

economic hardship, Charles Dickens for example worked at the age of 12 in a blacking factory, with his family

in debtor's prison. The children of the poor were expected to help towards the family budget, often working long

hours in dangerous jobs for low pay,[7] earning 10-20% of an adult male's wage. In England and Scotland in 1788,
two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered cotton mills were described as children.[8] In 19th-century Great

Britain, one-third of poor families were without a breadwinner, as a result of death or abandonment, obliging many

children to work from a young age.

Two girls protesting child labour (by calling it child slavery) in the 1909 New York City Labor Day parade.

In coal mines, children would crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for adults.[9]

Children also worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling matches, flowers and other cheap

goods.[7] Some children undertook work as apprentices to respectable trades, such as building or as domestic

servants (there were over 120,000 domestic servants in London in the mid-18th century). Working hours were

long: builders worked 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter, while domestic servants worked 80 hour

weeks.

Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked as prostitutes.[10]Many children

(and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working

hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective

and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission

recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11

a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer permitted to work. This act however

only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children

to 10 hour working days.

An estimated 1.7 million children under the age of fifteen were employed in American industry by 1900.[11] In 1910,

over 2 million children in the same age group were employed in the United States.[12]

Present day
A young boy recycling garbage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2006

See also: Children's rights

Child labour is still common in some parts of the world, it can be factory work, mining,[13]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 labour 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 labour 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 labour.[14]

According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 158 million children aged 5 to 14 in child labour worldwide, excluding

child domestic labour.[15] The United Nations and the International Labor Organization consider child labour

exploitative,[16][17] with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of theConvention 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.[17]

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.[18]

A boy repairing a tire in Gambia

In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998)[19] argue that the primary cause of child labour is parentalpoverty. That

being so, they caution against the use of a legislative ban against child labour, and argue that should be used only

when there is reason to believe that a ban on child labour will cause adult wages to rise and so compensate

adequately the households of the poor children. Child labour 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.
[20]

Child labour accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa, 17% in Latin America, 1% in US, Canada,

Europe and other wealthy nations.[21] The proportion of child labourers varies a lot among countries and even

regions inside those countries.

Recent child labour incidents

Young girl working on a loom in Aït Benhaddou, Morocco in May 2008.

Meatpacking

In early August 2008, Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil announced that his department had found

thatAgriprocessors, a kosher meatpacking company inPostville 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."[22] 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 57 charges of child labour violations by the Black Hawk County District Court jury

in Waterloo, Iowa, on June 7, 2010.[23]

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 labourers and their parents who had also been child labourers 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 labour claims.

GAP
After the news of child labourers 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 labourers 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 labourers 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 Labour appealed to the Honorable Chief Justice of Delhi High Court

through a letter at 11.00 pm.[26] 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.[27]

In a parallel development, Global March Against Child labour and BBA are in dialogue with the GAP Inc. and other

stakeholders to work out a positive strategy to prevent the entry of child labour 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."[28][29]

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."[30]

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 labour 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.[31]

India

In 1997, research indicated that the number of child labourers in the silk-weaving industry in the district of

Kanchipuram in India exceeded 40,000. This included children who were bonded labourers to loom owners. Rural

Institute for Development Education undertook many activities to improve the situation of child labourers. Working

collaboratively, RIDE brought down the number of child labourers to less than 4,000 by 2007.

On November 21, 2005, an Indian NGO activist Junned Khan,[32] with the help of the Labour Department and NGO

Pratham mounted the country's biggest ever raid for child labour 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,

mediahttp://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 labour,
[33]
advocating with the central and state governments for formulation of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of

children affected by child labour. 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 labour. In the following

years, Delhi's NGOs, came together with the Delhi Government and formulated an Action Plan for Rescue and

Rehabilitation of child labour.[34]

Primark

BBC recently reported[35] on Primark using child labour 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 labour

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 labour is also often used in the production of cocoa powder, used to make chocolate. See Economics of

cocoa.

Defence of child labour

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 labour. However, others have raised concerns

that boycotting products manufactured through child labour 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."[14]

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 labour declined,

both before and after legislation.[36] 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.[37]

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) labour 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 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."[36]

According to Thomas DeGregori, an economics professor at the University of Houston, in an article

published by the Cato Institute, alibertarian 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.[38]

The International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC),

founded in 1992, aims to eliminate child labour. 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 labour and provide children with education and assistance.[39]