Chapter 8. Technical Assistance And Private Enforcement

The International Labour Organisation (the ILO) has regulated child labour through the Minimum Age Convention and the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. Such conventions aim at the reduction and eventual elimination of harmful labour practices. After the ratification of such conventions, many countries have adopted domestic laws prohibiting harmful labour. Despite such regulations, statistics prove that children still participate in harmful work. The main purpose of this article is to assess the ILO child labour conventions critically, so as to provide further understanding of the provisions of the text of such instruments. While the aim of the Minimum Age Convention was the progressive eradication of child labour, the Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention recognises the existence of tolerable forms of child labour, and it seeks to eliminate the worst forms of child labour.Keywords: Child labour, Worst forms of child labour, Child work, Hazardous work; Minimum age, International Labour Organisation, ILO

Concerns about the use of child labor in West African cocoa production became widespread in the early 2000s in many high-income countries. In 2015 in Ghana, 91.8% (or a total of 878,595) of the children working in the cocoa sector were involved in a form of hazardous work. Child labor in cocoa production is not just a symptom of poverty but also a contributing factor, as children often forgo a formal education to work in cocoa orchards. Current Ghanaian law prohibits child labor, but, with many cocoa households living in poverty, child labor becomes a necessity for survival, and as such, current child labor laws are rarely enforced. Therefore, an effective policy that eliminates child labor could compensate farmers by providing an economic incentive. In this paper, we develop and calibrate a farm household model to estimate the cocoa price premium necessary to eliminate child labor from cocoa production while leaving the farm household welfare unchanged. This welfare-neutral price premium removes the negative effects of eliminating child labor for the farm household. Varying degrees of child labor exists, with certain forms posing a greater risk to children’s wellbeing. The results show that eliminating the worst forms of child labor would require a cocoa price premium of 2.81% and eliminating regular work (non-hazardous work but over the maximum hours allowed for a child) and the worst forms would require an 11.81% premium, which could be paid for by the well-established Ghanaian Cocoa Marketing Board. An incentive for the Cocoa Marketing Board to pay the price premium and monitor and enforce this policy would be the ability to differentiate their cocoa as child-labor free and not lose market share to countries who cannot currently certify this practice.

A hard knock life

Child Labour in the Developed Countries

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 19% of children aged 5-14 in Asia and the Pacific are economically active (ILO, 2002). These 127.3 million children constitute 60% of all child labourers worldwide. The aim of this study is to better understand child labour in South Asia through in-depth case studies of the child labour experience in three countries: Nepal, Pakistan, and Vietnam. Several themes about child labour emerge in examining data from these three countries. First, any discussion of child labour needs to consider wage work as well as unpaid work including household production activities. Children who work in one type of activity are more likely to work in other activities as well. Thus, focusing on only one aspect of child employment seriously understates child labour supply. Second, there is some evidence of important substitutions of child and adult labour across different household activities that may be very costly for the welfare of the ...

Halima is an 11-year-old girl who clips loose threads off of Hanes underwear in a Bangladeshi factory. She works about eight hours a day, six days per week. She has to process 150 pairs of underwear an hour. At work she feels “very tired and exhausted,” and sometimes falls asleep standing up. She makes 53 cents a day for her efforts. Make no mistake, it is a rough life.Any decent person’s heart would go out to Halima and other child employees like her. Unfortunately, all too often, people’s emotional reaction lead them to advocate policies that will harm the very children they intend to help. Provisions against child labor are part of the International Labor Organization’s core labor standards. Anti-sweatshop groups almost universally condemn child labor and call for laws prohibiting child employment or boycotting products made with child labor.In my recent book, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy, I argue that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement agitates for would harm workers and that the process of economic development, in which sweatshops play an important role, is the best way to raise wages and improve working conditions. Child labor, although the most emotionally charged aspect of sweatshops, is not an exception to this analysis.We should desire to see an end to child labor, but it has to come through a process that generates better opportunities for the children — not from legislative mandates that prevent children and their families from taking the best option available to them. Children work because their families are desperately poor, and the meager addition to the family income they can contribute is often necessary for survival. Banning child labor through trade regulations or governmental prohibitions often simply forces the children into less-desirable alternatives. When U.S. activists started pressuring Bangladesh into eliminating child labor, the results were disastrous.

PurposeChild labour abolition is one of the four essential human rights identified by the International Labour Organisation and sustainable development goals. Although public organisations and governments have implemented a variety of actions to control business activity and protect children’s rights, cases of child labour adoption continue to be documented. This paper aims to establish multinational companies’ disclosure procedures regarding child labour and to identify some potential determining factors.Design/methodology/approachA content analysis approach is used on sustainability reports from multinational companies throughout the world to assess the overall amount of disclosure concerning child labour adoption and to generate a child labour disclosure (CLD) score. In addition, to better understand this issue, an empirical investigation was conducted on a sample of 85 multinational companies to identify the factors that influence CLD.FindingsThe findings show that there is a low degree of disclosure on this issue throughout the world and that stakeholder engagement has a positive impact on disclosure levels. In contrast, the existence of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) committee and a CSR-based compensation policy has a negative influence on CLD.Originality/valueThe statistical results provide a unique viewpoint as they illustrate the amount of CLD using impression management theory, confirming the notion of negative event omission and text manipulation in developing the business image. These findings have important implications for literature development, as well as for managers, policymakers and stakeholder groups.

The world has accomplished progress in human right and child education under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); the goal that comprises end modern slavery and human trafficking and secures the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labor, including recruitment and use of child soldiers, and by 2025 end child labor in all its forms, nevertheless, child labor issues are continuing to spread to many countries in the world. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to address the issue of child labor and factor that help to eliminate child labor issues in Malaysia. Data were collected through an online survey; the participants included twenty-nine (29) Malaysian civil services. The finding of this research indicated that, although the cost for hiring the children is low compare to the adult as highlighted in supply and demand side, few factors preventing community to use the child as a laborer like religion, awareness/knowledge, humanity, ethic, and culture, therefore, there must be a child labor policy that eliminates all forms of child labor in Malaysia. This research is carried values to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in enhancing the policy to end child labor, reduce poverty and hunger, and improves the quality of education; thus, this research carries values to the minister of labor and social affairs in enhancing the policy on human resources development.

Child labour deprives children of their childhood and is harmful for their physical and mental development. In order to identify, prosecute and stop child labour the government has made numerous efforts. In 1986, Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act was passed which prohibited the employment of children below the age of 14 years in 83 hazardous occupations. In July 2016 the parliament passed the Child Labour(Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act 2016. This act amends the Child Labour( Prohibition and Regulation) Act 1986 by widening its scope against child labour and provides for stricter punishment for violations. This act calls for a complete ban on child labour, so that children can obtain compulsory primary education under RTE. In this paper an attempt has been made to critically analyze the various aspects of Child Labour(Prohibition and Regulation) Act.

The field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been growing very exponentially over the past decade. There are continuous opposing views of the role of the firms in society and disagreements as to whether wealth maximization should be the sole goal of any corporations out there. With Insurance companies facing and fulfilling in the intense demand of diverse stakeholders, this study explores the impact of CSR disclosures on Financial Performance among the listed domestic-owned companies in Malaysian insurance sector. Although CSR is a hot topic in Malaysia and throughout various industries, no detailed study has been conducted to ascertain whether Malaysian insurance companies derive any benefits therefrom. The study examines the impact of CSR on financial performance using an extensive content analysis method on annual reports from 13 domestic-owned Malaysian insurance companies over the past 9 years (2008-2017). The content analysis data is further transformed into GRI CSR Disclosure Index table before matching the findings against the Financial Performance indicators (return on assets (ROA), return on equities (ROE) and earnings per share (EPS)). The relationship between CSR and ROA, ROE and EPS is tested using correlation analysis. The results indicate significant relationship between CSR disclosure and Financial Performance; designates CSR has significant impact on ROA; whereas relationship between CSR and ROE & EPS is found to be insignificant. The study suggests and indicates that insurance companies in Malaysia ought to carry out efforts continually in a bigger scale so that their CSR activities are more aligned with the reporting regulatory standards as well as to bring a positive impact in the current prospect. In addition, the remedial action proposed by Bursa Malaysia from year 2016 is expected to improve the findings of this study and bring a tremendous improvement to the exiting regulatory guidelines.

In a recent paper, Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van (BV, 1998) develop an important and very interesting model in which a fairly productive economy exhibits multiple equilibria, with children working in at least one. They identify two assumptions as essential to this result. The first - - which they call the luxury axiom - - is that a family sends its children to the labor market only if its income from sources other than child labor is very low. The second is embodied in their substitution axiom which states that from the point of view of firms, child labor is substitutable for adult In this comment, we show that in addition to these two assumptions about the micro-level behavior of households and firms, there is also an essential macro-level assumption that may be termed the distribution axiom: income or wealth from non-labor sources must be sufficiently concentrated in the hands of a few agents. We establish that if non-labor income is distributed with sufficient equality, a market equilibrium with child labor cannot exist in the BV model. Beyond their contribution as an extension of BV's theory, our results formalize a proposition implicit in recent policy discussions of child Christiaan Grootaert and Ravi Kanbur (1995) note that as household-level poverty is well-known to be the major cause of child labor, [g]eneral economic development, equitably distributed, is the best and most sustainable way of reducing child labor. (p. 198, emphasis added) Policy documents from the International Labor Organization (ILO) have long conveyed this view, and now the World Bank appears to as well (Peter Fallon and Zafiris Tzannatos, 1998). There is a growing recognition that while economic development and development policies are necessary to eliminating child labor, they are not always sufficient on their own. Distributional considerations matter. Indeed, in the case in which BV's model yields multiple equilibria, the economy is developed enough to eliminate child In this comment it becomes clear that if child labor exists in this economy, the causes are purely distributional.

The persistence of child labor as a widespread global phenomenon is a result of the failure to challenge the conditions of economic injustice and child exploitation. Underlying this failure are...

In the current literature, institutional adoption of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) governance standards is mainly understood in a binary sense (adoption versus no adoption), and existing research has hitherto focused on inducements as well as on barriers of related organizational change. However, little is known about often invisible internal adoption patterns relating to institutional entrepreneurship in the field of CSR. At the same time, additional information about these processes is relevant in order to systematically assess the outcomes of institutional entrepreneurship and to differentiate between substantive versus symbolic implementation. In this paper, we contribute a comparative intraorganizational differentiation of institutional adoption processes in the field of CSR, and we distinguish between broad and narrow organizational institutional adoption across different management functions relating to institutions of a similar type. Our study is based on a quantitative survey among members of the United Nations Global Compact Network Germany, as well as on qualitative interviews. We analyze different institutional adoption patterns and derive ten theoretical predictors of diverse institutional adoption choices and thereby inform the literatures on institutional entrepreneurship, CSR governance, and Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives. Besides our theoretical contributions, our findings serve as a source of information for practitioners engaged in CSR governance as they provide new insights into the managerial perception and assessment of different CSR standards and initiatives.

In this article, we explore the self‐oriented rather than socially‐oriented reasons why a doctoral dissertation in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is written. We base our article on Yuri M. Lotman’s idea on autocommunication which we use as tool in analysing a group interview conducted with six doctoral students studying in the field of CSR. We suggest that autocommunicational aspects might play a much more important role in rationalized Western culture and science than is often realized, and our main thesis is that one essential reason for writing a doctoral dissertation in the field of CSR might be to communicate with oneself and that this even might contain a therapeutic dimension. Implications for students, supervisors and future research are discussed at the end of the article.

Purpose Premised on the growing involvement of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), this exploratory study advances an NGO-led perspective on corporate social responsibility (CSR) institutionalization. It examines NGOs as CSR actors by approaching CSR as an institutionalized practice and explicating the strategic communication approaches NGOs employ in the CSR field. Design/methodology/approach We conducted interviews with 14 international NGO managers in Switzerland. Findings NGOs unanimously defined the CSR field in Switzerland as driven by “business logics.” Against this backdrop, Swiss NGOs employed strategic communication approaches of resistance, reform and (mutual) reinforcement. We treat these as a constellation or repertoire of practice that illustrate the intersections of the macro (CSR field description) and the micro (NGO strategies). Research limitations/implications Given the contested roles of NGOs as CSR actors, a contextual examination of NGO perspectives and approaches has important implications for illuminating how business and the NGO sector “relate to each other.” Originality/value Our study finds that NGOs view their role as more expansive than the traditional binary of corporate critics or corporate collaborators.