Child Labour

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...

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 ...

A hard knock life

Technical assistance is recognized in International Labor Organization (ILO) C 182 (Article 8) and ILO R 190 (Articles 11 and 16). Regulation of child labor outside the context of international treaty implementation has developed as well, in the context of the growing field of corporate social responsibility. Early reports from International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) emphasize that not all child work counts as child labor and focus on harmful forms of work. These reports helped to lay the groundwork for the development of ILO C 182 on the worst forms of child labor. One recent development in corporate social responsibility is the emergence of commodity-based agreements between companies. Rather than one company addressing child labor, or other core labor rights issues, a number of companies within a commodity sector have come together to establish common codes, with some remedial measures.Keywords: child labor; corporate social responsibility; International Labor Organization (ILO); International Program on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC); technical assistance programs

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.

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 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

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of globalization and credit market imperfections on child labour.Design/methodology/approachAnalysis is based on cross-country regression framework, incorporating 129 developing countries for the period 1970-2010.FindingsThe findings indicate that countries that are more open to trade and having higher foreign direct investment inflow have lower incidence of child labour. As child labour in export-related industries is hard to find, trade sanctions may not have a significant effect on child labour. Further study concludes that income of the bottom quartile of the population is the best representation of the income of the poor when studying child labour.Research limitations/implicationsThe study uses the data compiled by International Labour Organization (ILO). Though much of the variation in the data is because of the adjustments made by ILO, this is the only comparable cross-country estimates available. Hence in the absence of the cross-country comparable estimates, many empirical studies have used this data set (e.g. Cigno et al., 2002; Dehejia and Gatti, 2002; Rogers and Swinnerton, 2001). This study acknowledges this limitation but again in the absence of any comparable estimates, the assessment is also based on this data set.Originality/valueStudy contributes in the literature by comparing the effect of export and trade and by exploring the effect of an alternate measure of the income, estimated by using Gini coefficient, on child labour. Further studies exploring the effect of globalization did not explore the presence of imperfect credit market, however, this study has explored the effect of credit market imperfections as well.

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

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.

Sherry L. Baron, MDa In the mid-1990s, I was on a temporary assignment through the Pan American Health Organization to Mexico City. During my assignment, I oversaw a collaborative training program in occupational and environmental epidemiology between the Pan American Health Organization and the Mexican Secretary of Health. Through this training pro gram, one student, Dr. Zoila L?pez Sibaja, developed a pilot project to better character ize work-related injuries to children employed in the informal sector. The growth of the informal employment sector throughout the developing world has the potential to place workers and especially child labor at particularly high risk for work-related injuries. According to the International Labour Organization, in Latin America during the 1990s, the urban informal sector was the primary generator of new jobs.1 The informal sector is defined by the International Labour Organization as either self-employed workers and their unpaid family members, or workers (either paid or unpaid) in very small businesses (fewer than 5-10 workers), apprentices, contract labor, home workers, and paid domestic workers. The employment conditions of informal workers are based mostly on casual employment relations rather than contractual ar rangements with formal labor protections, such as protection under child labor laws. A small but important part of the informal employment sector is street children.1 Street children is a term used for child laborers who work and live in the street and may or may not maintain contact with their families. Although street children face many health risks ranging from violence to drug use, an important priority is protecting them from working conditions that may damage their health and well-being, especially work-related injuries.2 In Mexico, the Federal Labor Law clearly prohibits child labor under age 14; from age 14-16, children may work if they remain in school. However, in 1994 the Mexican Statistics Institute (INEGI) reported that 34.3% of children younger than age 15 were working.3 A joint survey by UNICEF and the government of Mexico City estimated that during the same time period there were over 11,000 street children in the central area of Mexico City, of whom about 1,000 both lived and worked in the streets.4 To address the general public health problem of injuries, in 1994, Mexico established the System of Epidemiological Surveillance of Externally Causes Injuries (SVELECE), with the primary objective to count, analyze, and then prevent injuries. According to SVELECE, 13% of the injuries that occurred in 1996 happened in the 5-17-year-old group, and, of the injuries occurring in that age group, 5% happened in the workplace.5 Since this data may undercount injuries in children employed in the informal sector, my student's pilot study was designed to estimate the proportion of childhood injuries resulting from work with a focus on informal sector workers.

This article traces the evolution of international attitudes toward child labour, and outlines its relationship to the global economy. It examines the way in which international treaties promulgated by the International Labor Organization (ilo) have conceived of child labour over time. At the national level, the most extreme pro-child labour position may be found in recent Bolivian legislation that recognizes work performed by children as young as ten years old. Much has been written on the problem of conflicting global values on child labour, but all agree that exploitative forms should be eliminated. The author updates her earlier recommendation that the World Trade Organization should place conditions on participation in the global economy by requiring its member states to honour core ilo standards. Eliminating exploitative child labour could thus be linked indirectly to the global economy, by requiring the elimination of children’s work detrimental to the child’s full development.

The work which affects the education, dignity and health of a child is known as child labor. It exists in agriculture sector of Pakistan mostly in the form of hazardous work. The main objective of the study was to investigate the degree of knowledge of cotton growers on child labor issue with special reference to Decent Work of International Labor Organization (ILO). The study was conducted in Bahawalpur district where Decent Work has been implemented by World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)-Pakistan since 2013 as a part of its Sustainable Agriculture Program. Three categories of farmers were identified among a total of 388 selected cotton growers i.e. Farmers having high level of awareness, farmers having basic level of awareness and farmers having no awareness of child labor. Farmers were also categorized into three groups on the basis of their land holding i.e. (Category ‘a’) 1-7 acres, (b) >7-20 acres and (c) >20-50 acres. The data was analyzed through descriptive statistical method. Among category ‘a’ 7.5%, 88.7% and 3.7% of the farmers had advance, basic and no awareness, respectively. Among category ‘b’ 7.2%, 88.5% and4.2% farmers had advance, basic and no awareness, respectively. Among category ‘c’ 5.8%, 90.2% and 3.9% farmers had advance, basic and no awareness, respectively. Since there was a large proportion of those farmers who have only basic level of awareness on child labor among all the three land holding categories, therefore, there is a need to educate farmers on preventing child labor at their farms to promote sustainable cotton.

Reviewed by: Upon the Altar of Work: The North-South Divide over Child Labor, 1850–1939 by Betsy Wood James Marten Upon the Altar of Work: The North-South Divide over Child Labor, 1850–1939. By Betsy Wood. University of Illinois Press, 2020. xiv + 243 pp. Cloth $110, paper $28, e-book $19.95. Work has always been a moral issue, even when we are unwilling to admit, recognize, or think about it on those terms. Children working has been one of the trigger points for debates over child welfare, capitalism, and culture since at least the rise of the factory system in the early nineteenth century. Historians of children and youth have long been interested in the nature of young people's work and especially in the campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to regulate, limit, and even eradicate it. Betsy Wood offers an interpretation of the campaign to regulate child labor that makes at least two original contributions to the long and storied historiography: extending the chronology back to the 1850s and rooting the issue firmly in the long sectional conflict that not only caused the Civil War but also shaped (and continues to shape) American politics and social welfare reform movements. Just as the campaign against human bondage had often drawn its force from images of enslaved children, the post–Civil War debates over the nature of capitalism, government authority, and welfare reform often revolved around the role of children in the economy and the responsibility of society to children. It was relatively easy for reformers to find new targets to blame for child labor, but an issue that to reformers in the North seemed to be a no-brainer raised hackles in other parts of the country and among other interest groups. Wood organizes her book chronologically and thematically, as reformers altered approaches and shifted targets. They first sought state and then federal legislation; then a constitutional amendment ratified by only a tiny handful of states; then, again, federal legislation that finally led to the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938. The perpetration of child labor also evolved, from the padrone system of recruiting cheap workers from Italy to the emergence of cotton mills in the southern Piedmont, recalcitrant capitalists, and increasingly conservative politicians. Although at times reform transcended sectional divisions, northern and southern activists were increasingly divided by attitudes about the necessity of work to the development of useful adults, the slippery slope of government regulation, and the importance of free enterprise in keeping the American economy strong. In these and other cases, child labor became [End Page 464] a surrogate for contentious larger issues. Wood effectively incorporates the ways in which abolitionist rhetoric blended into post–Civil War attacks on capitalism, on the waxing and waning of the Social Gospel idea, and on the ways in which patriotism and preparedness actually helped propel anti-child labor rhetoric after 1918. She also features rural and urban divisions, as throughout the decades covered by the book, the labor of farm children and youth was rarely addressed—except by opponents of child labor regulation, who used the specter of families not being able to control their own children's work as a kind of misinformation campaign, especially during the debate over ratifying the child labor amendment to the Constitution. Scholars from a number of fields will find uses for this fine book. Historians of the Civil War, Gilded Age, and Progressive eras in America will find familiar markers and personages framed in new and interesting ways. Historians of children and youth might find the core material more familiar, but they will also discover new approaches and chronologies. Wood's most useful contribution, in this reviewer's mind, is the connection made between the hyper-sectionalism caused by the issue of slavery to the post-emancipation campaigns against child labor that Wood convincingly argues became central to the new sectionalism that developed over the decades following the Civil War. Despite its brevity—the book runs about 210 pages, with nearly 30 percent of it taken up by footnotes that display the author's deep dive into primary and secondary sources—this is an ambitious...

'Child labour' is a worldwide problem that has caused detrimental effects to children's health and well-being. The ILO Convention 182 aims to address this issue by immediately eliminating its worst forms. This article provides a discourse analysis of this Convention. The analysis suggests that using an organizational discourse, the Convention promotes the maintenance of existing hierarchies of power, primarily through emphasis on legislative structures and consultation with the Organization of Employers and Workers. It has been recommended that the Convention be revised in light of the insights generated by the analysis and that the children be given a more active role in the process.