CHILD LABOR

Child labourers coming out of a dye factory, Dhaka, Bangladesh

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 not
seen as a problem throughout most of history, only becoming a disputed
issue with the beginning of universal schooling and the concepts of
laborers and children's rights.

Child labor can include factory work, mining 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."

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).

Human rights
The United Nations and the International Labour Organization consider
child labor exploitative, 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."

In many countries, 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; in the United States, the minimum
age to work in an establishment without parents' consent and restrictions
is age 16.

Many children as young as four are employed in production factories

with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions. Based on this
understanding of the use of children as laborers, 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.

Poor families often rely on the labors 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 labor is
employed in subsistence agriculture, in the household, or in the urban
informal sector. In order to benefit children, child labor 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 or adult in the long run.

The United States also has extensive child labor laws. 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 labor.

Industrial Revolution
Child laborer, Newberry, South Carolina, 1908

In the West, during the Industrial Revolution, use of child labor was
commonplace, often in factories, but on the decline. In England and
Scotland in 1788, about two-thirds of the workers in the new water-
powered textile factories were children. 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. 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, 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."

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"

William Anderson writes,

"The pre-factory age was not a time of happy, contented kids.
From 1730 to 1740, 75 percent of children in England died
before age five. From 1810 to 1829, supposedly the evil age of the
factory, infant mortality fell to 32 percent and would continue to
drop. Capitalism and the industrial revolution gave youngsters a
chance to survive. "

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. 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. 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.

BOYCOTTS

Two girls wearing banners with slogan "ABOLISH CHILD SLAVERY!!"

in English and Yiddish. Probably taken during May 1, 1909 labor parade
in New York City.

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 more hazardous and exploitative than
garment production" according to a UNICEF study. The study says that
boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can
actually harm rather than help the children involved."

Current Corporate Campaigns

Today there are several industries and corporations which are being
targeted by activists for their use of child labor.

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 in November 2005 on behalf of current child
laborers and their parents who had also been child laborers on the
plantation.

Cocoa

The cocoa industry has been under consistent criticism for years over
child labor in West Africa, especially Côte d'Ivoire. In July 2005, the
International Labor Rights Fund filed suit against the Nestle, Archer
Daniels Midland, and Cargill companies in Federal District Court in Los
Angeles on behalf of a class of Malian children who were trafficked from
Mali into the Ivory Coast and forced to work twelve to fourteen hours a
day with no pay, little food and sleep, and frequent beatings. The three
children acting as class representative plaintiffs are proceeding
anonymously, as John Does, because of feared retaliation by the farm
owners where they worked. The complaint alleges their involvement in
the trafficking, torture, and forced labor of children who cultivate and
harvest cocoa beans which the companies import from Africa.

Chocolate manufacturers were given a 2005 deadline to end the use of

child laborers, but they failed to meet the deadline and it has been
extended to 2008.

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. This is well
supported by both economic theory and empirical evidence. 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
domestic work and participation in the wider (waged) labor-market.[5] 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."

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.
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