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' Child labor' (or 'child labour') is the employment of children under an age determined by law or custom. This practice is considered exploitative by many countries and international organizations. Child labor was utilized to varying extents through most of history, but entered public dispute with the beginning of universal schooling, with changes in working conditions during industrialization, and with the emergence of the concepts of workers' and children's rights.
Child labor can be factory work, mining^[1] or 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 or polishing shoes. However, rather than in factories and sweatshops, most child labor occurs in the informal sector, "selling on the street, at work in agriculture or hidden away in houses — far from the reach of official labor inspectors and from media scrutiny."^[2]
According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 218 million children aged 5 to 17 in child labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labor.^[3] The most controversial forms of work include the military use of children as well as child prostitution. Less controversial, and often legal with some restrictions, are work as child actors and child singers, as well as agricultural work outside of the school year (seasonal work).

Contents

Human rights

History in industrialised countries

Current situation in poor countries

Campaigns against child labor

Rubber

Defense of Child Labor

See also

References

External links

Human rights

The United Nations and the International Labour Organization consider child labor exploitative,^[4][5] with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of the Convention 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.''⁵

In most countries,^[6]
it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child below a certain age works, excluding household chores or schoolwork. An employer is often not allowed to hire a child below a certain age. This minimum age depends on the country; child labor laws in the United States set the minimum age to work in an establishment without parents' consent and restrictions at age 16.
In the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four were employed in production factories with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions.^[7] 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 it.
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. The CRC provides the strongest, most consistent international legal language prohibiting illegal child labour; it does not make child labour illegal.

History in industrialised countries

In the West, during the Industrial Revolution, use of child labor was commonplace, often in factories. From the 17th century to the 19th century poor children were sent to workhouses where they worked under slave conditions. Charles Dickens famously wrote about this in his novel Oliver Twist. In England and Scotland in 1788, about two-thirds of the workers in the new water-powered textile factories were children.^[8]During the industrial revolution child labor began to decline. Subsequently, largely due to the campaigning of Lord Shaftesbury, a series of Factory Acts were passed to restrict gradually the hours that children were allowed to work, and to improve safety.
Karl Marx argued that the Industrial Revolution increased hardship for children.^[9] Historian E. P. Thompson notes in ''The Making of the English Working Class'' that child labor was not new, and had been "an intrinsic part of the agricultural and industrial economy before 1780"; however he argues that "there was a drastic increase in the intensity of exploitation of child labour between 1780 and 1840, and every historian acquainted with the sources knows this is so. This was true in the mines, both in inefficient small-scale pits where the roadways were sometimes so narrow that children could not easily pass through them; where - as the coal face drew further away from the shaft - children were in demand as 'hurreyers' and to operate the ventilation ports. In the mills [factories], the child and juvenile labour force grew yearly; and in several of the out-worker or 'dishonourable' trades the hours of labour became longer and work more intense."⁷
Other historians have disagreed with this verdict. Objectivist economic historian Robert Hessen says
:"''claims of increased misery...[are] based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses, apprenticed as unpaid household servants, rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor, or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes (Nutten). The precapitalist "good old days" simply never existed''"^[10]
Laws were passed to prohibit child labor in the industrialized countries; however it is unclear whether this legislation is the principal cause of the decline in levels of juvenile employment.^[11] Research by Clark Nardinelli suggests that child labor was already decreasing in the United States and Western Europe prior to the passage of legislation, due to an increasing demand for educated and literate adults brought about by an increasing technological sophistication of industry. The demand for educated workers also provided an incentive for children to stay in school to meet the new demands of industry.¹¹ Nardinelli, a neoclassical economist, has been accused of suggesting that children essentially volunteered to be exploited, submitting, for example, to whippings out of a kind of entrepreneurial initiative.^[12].

Current situation in poor countries

Poor families often rely on the labours of their children for survival, and sometimes it is their only source of income. This type of work is often hidden away because it is not in the industrial sector. Child labour is employed in subsistence agriculture and in the urban informal sector; child domestic work is also important. In order to benefit children, child labour prohibition has to address the dual challenge of providing them with both short-term income and long-term prospects. Some youth rights groups, however, feel that prohibiting work below a certain age violates human rights, reducing children's options and leaving them subject to the whims of those with money. The reasons a child would consent or want to work may vary greatly. A child may consent to work if, for example, the earnings are attractive or if the child hates school, but such consent may not be informed consent. The workplace may still be an undesirable situation for a child in the long run.
In an influential paper on "The Economics of Child Labor" in the ''American Economic Review'' (1998), Kaushik Basu and Pham Huang Van argue that the primary cause of child labor is parental poverty. That being so, they caution against the use of a legislative ban against child labor, and argue that that should be used only when there is reason to believe that a ban on child labor will cause adult wages to rise and so compensate adequately the households of the poor children.

Campaigns against child labor

Concern has been raised about the buying public's moral complicity in purchasing products assembled or otherwise manufactured in developing countries with child labor. Others have raised concerns that boycotting products manufactured through child labor may force these children to turn to more dangerous or strenuous professions, such as prostitution or agriculture. For example, a UNICEF study found that 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the United States banned that country's carpet exports in the 1990s. Also, 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," -- all of them, according to a UNICEF study. "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production". The study says that boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can actually harm rather than help the children involved."
Today there are several industries and corporations which are being targeted by activists for their use of child labor.
On 21st November 2005 a big raid on factories employing child labour in zari work in Delhi was mounted by Junned Khan, an activist with the help of Police, Delhi Labour Department and an NGO Pratham. During this rescue operation nearly 480 children were rescued who ranged between aged 6 years to 14 years. This world's largest rescue operation opened the eyes of the government and civil society towards the ills of child labour and how small children are kept in bonded conditions within the four walls of a factory.

Rubber

The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company operate a rubber plantation in Liberia which is the focus of a global campaign called Stop Firestone. Workers on the plantation are expected to fulfill a high production quota or their wages will be halved. As a result, many workers are forced to bring 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 laborers and their parents who had also been child laborers on the plantation.

Defense of Child Labor

Child laborer, New Jersey, 1910. Click image for more background on the specific child.

Children's participation in economic activity was commonplace prior to the Industrial Revolution as children performed labor on their farms or for their families. Milton Friedman claimed that the Industrial Revolution saw a net decline in child labor, rather than an increase.^[13] This is well supported by both economic theory and empirical evidence.^[14][15] According to this theory, 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 labor declined, both before and after legislation. While accepting this overall child labor declined in this period, other commentators draw a qualitative distinction between child domestic work and participation in the wider (waged) labor-market.⁷ The usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current trends has been disputed. Economic historian Hugh Cunningham 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."''^[16]
Friedman believed that the absence of child labor is a luxury that many poor states cannot yet afford. To prohibit it is to prevent the economic growth necessary to relieve a society of the need for child labor. In poor societies these children will be put to work by their families by whatever means because they cannot afford to feed idle and unproductive children. Moreover, in addition to possibly increasing family costs on a depleted family income, parents may have to forego potential labor time and income, to care for idle children.
Some argue that if industrial child labor is legally forbidden, then many children are relegated to working in more dangerous black market occupations such as prostitution.DeGregori, Thomas R., "Child Labor or Child Prostitution?" Cato Institute.

See also

★ Bhima Sangha, an India based children's collective

★ Labor law

★ Ekta Child and Women Rights Collective Delhi

★ Slavery

★ Wage labour

★ Guaranteed minimum income

★ Oppression

★ Legal working age

★ Children's rights movement

★ International Labor Rights Fund

★ Kailash Satyarthi, leading child rights activist

★ International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, IPEC

★ Sweatshop

★ Child soldiers

★ Child prostitution

★ Trafficking in children

★ IREWOC - Institute for Research on Working Children

★ Concerned for Working Children (CWC), an Indian organization

★ Shantha Sinha, Indian activist and winner of Ramon Magsaysay Award

★ Junned Khan, Activist - Rescued Thousands of Children from Difficult Circumstances

★ Youth activism

★ London matchgirls strike of 1888

★ The Newsboys Strike

★ Swabian children
'International conventions and other instruments:'

★ Convention on the Rights of the Child

★ Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention, 1999

★ Worst Forms of Child Labour Recommendation
'Types of programmes focussing on child labour'

★ Child Labour Programme of Action

★ Time-bound Programmes
'Country-specific programmes:'

★ Concerned for Working Children India

★ Bachpan Bachao Andolan India

★ South Africa

★ Identity Foundation- Working for deprived children in Pune, India

★ Pune Street Children Project by Identity Foundation- Global volunteering initiative on Nabuur.com

References

1. Child labour in Kyrgyz coal mines
2. The State of the World's Children 1997
3. UNICEF - Child labor
4. Worst Forms of Child labor Recommendation, 1999
5. Convention on the Rights of the Child
6. Ratification of the Convention on the Rights of the Child
7. E. P. Thompson, ''The Making of the English Working Class'', (Penguin, 1968), pp. 366-7
8. Douglas A. Galbi. 1994. Child Labor and the Division of Labor in the Early English Cotton Mills. Pre-publication draft of a paper published in the ''Journal of Population Economics''. Retrieved on April 15, 2007.
9. Marx. Karl. Capital. vol. I. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1909
10. Hessen, Robert, ''Capitalism'', Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
11. Nardinelli, Clark, ''Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution'' (Indiana University Press, 1990)
12. Michael Perelman, ''The Perverse Economy: The Impact of Markets on People and the Environment'' (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). pp 153-154
13. Friedman, Milton. Take it to the Limits: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism." Interview. February 10 1999.
14. Nardinelli, Clark. "Child Labor and the Factory Acts." ''Journal of Economic History'', Dec. 1980.
15. Hugh Cunningham, "The Employment and Unemployment of Children in England c.1680-1851." ''Past and Present''. Feb., 1990
16. Hugh Cunninghame, "The decline of child labour: labour markets and family economies in Europe and North America since 1830", ''Economic History Review'', 2000.

External links

★

★ Concerned for Working Children (CWC)

★ Teaching about Child Labor and International Human Rights

★ Child Labor in USA Agriculture

★ History Place Photographs from 1908-1912

★ Ethical and economic considerations in child labor

★ Lightening the load of child miners - BBC

★ Child labour challenge toughens - BBC

★ Child Labor or Prostitution?

★ Essay from 'The Fraser Institute'

★ What Do The World and People Deserve? Len Bernstein on the Life and Work of Jacob Riis

★ The State of the World's Children - a UNICEF study

★ Child labor and the division of labor in the early English cotton mills

★ Ethical Alternatives to Sweatshops

★ Child Marriage Film www.childmarriage.org - (A film by Neeraj Kumar)

★ Visayan Forum - an NGO helping migrant working children in the Philippines

★ Lewis Hine Project: Nationally known project to locate and interview descendants of child laborers photographed by Hine

★ Documentary about Child miners in Tanzania mining Tanzanite