Child Labour in Indonesian Small Industries

Child labour remains a persistent socio-economic challenge in Bihar despite various legislative measures and welfare initiatives introduced by the Government of India and the Government of Bihar. This study examines the effectiveness of government policies and welfare schemes in reducing child labour in the state. It critically analyzes key interventions such as the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, the Right to Education Act, the National Child Labour Project (NCLP), Mid-Day Meal Scheme, and poverty alleviation programs. The research adopts a mixed-method approach, combining secondary data analysis from government reports, census records, and NSSO surveys with qualitative insights from field observations and stakeholder interviews. Findings indicate that while enrollment in schools has significantly increased due to educational incentives and awareness campaigns, economic vulnerability, migration, lack of strict enforcement, and socio-cultural factors continue to contribute to child labour, particularly in rural and marginalized communities. Welfare schemes have positively influenced school attendance and reduced hazardous child labour, yet informal sector employment remains a concern. The study concludes that although government initiatives have contributed to measurable progress, their impact is uneven across districts. Strengthening monitoring mechanisms, ensuring effective implementation at the grassroots level, enhancing livelihood opportunities for families, and promoting community awareness are essential for sustainable eradication of child labour in Bihar.

MotivationChild labour persists in the global South. After ratifying the International Labour Organization's Convention No. 138, on “the minimum age for admission to employment and work,” many southern countries have legislated minimum age criteria to fulfil their International Labour Organizations obligations. Often, however, making law has neither significantly reduced child labour nor boosted school attendance—largely because of states' inability to ensure compliance.PurposeWe investigate, using the case of Nepal, whether legal knowledge about minimum age standards among parents supplying, and employers demanding, child labour makes a difference to child labour.Methods and approachDrawing on data from communities in the Terai of Nepal, we use mixed methods to find correlations between legal knowledge, compliance with child labour laws, and prevalence of child labour. We draw on two novel data sets: a large household survey of parents and children, and a small census of owners of brick kilns, where child labour is often seen. We also make use of qualitative interviews with citizens in one community in the Terai.FindingsWe show that when parents and employers know the law on child labour, they are more likely to comply with it. Perceptions of the law also matter, independently of legal knowledge. When individuals know the legal working age and believe it is appropriate, we see even more compliance.Policy implicationsThese findings suggest that, even when enforcing the law may be difficult and costly, informing and educating parents and employers may be a less costly way to reduce child labour. Such measures would be even more effective if paired with efforts to change perceptions of the law.

A hard knock life

Child labor continues to exist as a problem specific to childhood worldwide. Children, considered disadvantaged groups, today face a wide range of risks. While sensitivity to child protection has increased, particularly after World War II, it is not yet at the desired level. States and international organizations continue their efforts to protect children. While these efforts have been effective to some extent, they have not met expectations, particularly in terms of reducing child labor. In this respect, the importance of sociological factors in reducing child labor comes to the fore. Sociology recommends examining childhood within the framework of social, cultural, economic, familial, and many other variables. When considered from this perspective, considering child labor within the framework of socioeconomic causes will facilitate understanding of the issue. The focus of this study is the family and the child. From birth, the child grows up within the family, and their identity is shaped by the values of that society. The society in which the child lives and the family’s perspective on the child have a shaping effect on all processes related to the child, especially child labor. This study conducted a socioeconomic analysis of child labor in Turkey, focusing on various social variables, particularly the family. A qualitative method was used in the study, and the dataset was developed using data from ILO, UNICEF, and TÜİK. Family, education, migration, economic, and regional variables were found to be influential in the emergence, perception, and resolution of child labor in Turkey.

Although there is an extensive literature on the determinants of child labor and many initiatives aimed at combating it, there is limited evidence on the consequences of child labor on socioeconomic outcomes such as education, wages, and health. We evaluate the causal effect of child labor participation on these outcomes using panel data from Vietnam and an instrumental variables strategy. Five years subsequent to the child labor experience, we find significant negative impacts on school participation and educational attainment, but also find substantially higher earnings for those (young) adults who worked as children. We find no significant effects on health. Over a longer horizon, we estimate that from age 30 onward the forgone earnings attributable to lost schooling exceed any earnings gain associated with child labor and that the net present discounted value of child labor is positive for discount rates of 11.5 percent or higher. We show that child labor is prevalent among households likely to have higher borrowing costs, that are farther from schools, and whose adult members experienced negative returns to their own education. This evidence suggests that reducing child labor will require facilitating access to credit and will also require households to be forward looking.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the theory, policy and practice of child labour in Latin America. Interventions to reduce child labour are more likely to be successful if they are locally‐driven, supported by legislation and based on theoretical understandings of childhood that reflect the realities and needs of the children, families and communities whose lives they aim to improve.Design/methodology/approachSociological and anthropological discourses on children's life worlds are reviewed to situate changes in our understanding of child labour. These theoretical developments are then discussed in the light of changing international legislation, such as ILO's convention 182. Recent statistics suggest a trend for declining child labour and we study the link between statistics, theoretical and legislative positions.FindingsThe ILO's 2006 child labour statistics and examples of policies in Latin America support the hypothesis that theoretical developments in the concept of childhood have influenced successful interventions aimed at its reduction. This theory‐policy‐practice partnership appears to have been a catalyst for the development of successful “government–private‐enterprise – civil society” programmes to reduce child labour.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough these multi‐sectorial strategies have been successful in Latin America, further research is needed to see whether similar policies and interventions can be repeated in other regions.Originality/valueThe paper is original in its linking of theory, policy and practice in the context of recent statistics and programmes at reducing child labour in Latin America.

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.

The Effect of ILO Minimum Age Conventions on Child Labour and School Attendance

Lucy Larcom and the Poetics of Child Labour Joe Lockard (bio) Child labour has been present in North America since the beginnings of European colonization, and regulation of their industrial employment dates at least to the early nineteenth century in Rhode Island (Abbott). Given moral injunctions to keep children from mischief and utilitarian demands for labour and family income, such regulation remained basically ineffective. With industrial expansion following the American Civil War children established themselves as a major presence in the workforce and occasionally appeared in industrial stories such as Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861). By 1880 an estimated 6 percent of U.S. children between ages ten to fifteen were working in industry (Felt 1). Early child advocates such as Charles Loring Brace of the Children’s Aid Society in New York opposed child labour and documented its prevalence (1872, 353–65, and 1893). The height of political concern over child labour occurred between the 1890s and the 1920s, with the establishment of the National Child Labor Committee; the documentary photography of Louis Hine; initiatives from Congress and state legislatures; the creation of the Child Labor Office within the U.S. Bureau of Labor; and legal contests over child labour taxes. Representations of child labour proliferated with social reportage such [End Page 139] as Thomas Robinson Dawley’s The Child That Toileth Not (1912), which describes his travels in Southern mills and industries as an investigator appointed by the Bureau of Labor. For all of this emergent social concern, we have very little literary documentation of the consciousness of working children.1 In the antebellum United States the predominant reform concerns—slavery, temperance, and women’s rights—addressed the social concerns of children in relation to these issues. There are no known antebellum autobiographies of working-class children, and their stories tend to appear in brief unreflective passages of adult autobiographies that mention childhood labour. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, representation of children at work came almost entirely from adult authors describing their observations. Much of it emerged in the form of short stories or romance novels, such as Day Kellogg Lee’s Merrimack: or, Life at the Loom (1854), a fictional first-person narrative of an orphaned thirteen-year-old girl who goes to work in the mills and benefits by acquiring independence. Autobiographical self-representation focused on the labour experiences of U.S. working-class children only begins to emerge a rough half-century later, with such texts as Through the Mill: The Life of a Mill-Boy (1911) by Al Priddy, a child immigrant from England who describes his experiences as an eleven-year-old in the New Bedford mills. As another example, Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918) is the autobiography of an immigrant Russian Jewish girl’s life in the piecework shops of the Lower East Side in the 1890s. Given the absence of more than limited narrative and epistolary evidence, one purpose of the present discussion lies in elucidating this tradition through examination of how child labour informed the ethos and conscience of a nineteenth-century American writer and how her work-place memories from a textile mill emerged in literary form to replace a foreshortened childhood. Lucy Larcom’s narratives of child labour during the mid-1840s, published several decades later, represented an inherent advocacy of human developmental rights during a period when U.S. law did not acknowledge children’s industrial labour as a social wrong. Her advocacy was fragmentary, mixed together with larger stories, and did not have an argumentative focus on child labour. Persistence delineates a consciousness, however, and Larcom’s persistent return to images and [End Page 140] themes of child labour characterizes her writing more than its repetition of standard sentimental tropes of nature. A consciousness of child labour contributed a subterranean radicalism that emerged with opportunity in the imagery of a poet otherwise careful to shape her market acceptability for middle-class Victorian America. The present paper first will address Larcom’s autobiographical self-observations in A New England Girlhood (1889) concerning her life as a child worker, in order afterward to contextualize representations of labour in...

This article examines child labor in the Iranian carpet industry, from around 1890 to 1930. During this period, child labor was shaped by a combination of local and global factors, including the involvement of international organizations of various kinds. Whereas European carpet firms, under the protection of British diplomats in Iran, employed and exploited Iranian children, British missionaries attempted to alleviate the physical harm that befell child laborers and treated them in missionary hospitals. In the years following the First World War, the International Labour Organization approached the Iranian government with a direct request to curb the practice, and British diplomats supervised and reported on what they saw as an improvement in the working conditions of these children. I argue that both child labor and the attempts to curb it were intrinsically linked to children’s bodies – their abilities, health, and protection. Children’s supple fingers were considered ideal for carpet knotting, and the damage this labor caused young bodies was central to the discourse on improving their labor conditions. This article uses the lens of childhood history to shed light on some of the intricacies of the attempts to regulate child labor in Iran and to analyze Western observers’ views on this issue.

This paper investigates the labor market effect of international migration on child work in countries of origin. We use an original cross‐country survey dataset, which combines information on international migration with detailed individual‐level data on child labour at age 5–14 in a wide range of developing countries. By exploiting both within and cross‐country variation and controlling for country fixed effects, we find strong and robust evidence on the role of international mobility of workers in reducing child labour in disadvantaged households through changes in the local labour market.

This paper focuses on the effects of domestic and international remittances on child labor and schooling. Using data from the 1992–1993 and 1997–1998 Vietnam Living Standards Surveys, we investigate school attendance and child labor in remittance recipient and non-recipient households. The results of our binomial logit and two-sided censored regression panel analysis indicate that remittances increase schooling and reduce child labor. Although international remittances are found to have a stronger beneficial impact than domestic remittances in the cross-section, the panel analysis, taking account of fixed effects, reverses this result, showing that the only significant impact stems from domestic remittances.

Child Labour is a global phenomenon. In Ghana, there is a high rate of Child labour on the Volta Lake in Yeji. However, knowledge about the key socioeconomic factors sustaining child labour has not been given considerable attention. Our study has addressed this phenomenon by employing a qualitative case study, and purposive and snowball sampling techniques to gather data from research participants through Focus Grouped Discussion and face-to-face interviews with 10 child labourers on the Volta Lake in Yeji. The key socioeconomic findings sustaining child labour, household poverty, household income or poverty, the largeness of the family, unemployment, and lack of access to employment opportunities. The findings contribute to both the growing body of knowledge and the empirical literature on child labour in the fishing industry and provide immense significance to policymakers and other stakeholders to reduce child labour in the fishing sector in Ghana and beyond.

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.

This study investigates the influence of home-country push factors on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflows into Sri Lanka's tourism sector. While Sri Lanka has experienced growth in tourism arrivals, FDI into the tourism industry has not kept pace, prompting a deeper examination of determinants beyond host-country conditions. Employing a mixed methods approach, the study integrates time-series data for Sri Lanka (1977-2023) and panel data from ten FDI-generating countries. Econometric analyses using Vector Error Correction Models (VECM) and panel regressions reveal that economic, regulatory, and geopolitical conditions in home countries significantly impact outbound FDI flows. The findings contribute to the academic discourse by emphasizing the importance of integrating both supply-side and demand-side determinants in FDI research and offer actionable policy recommendations for improving Sri Lanka's investment appeal.