Child labor

Child labor 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.

Overview
Child labor is very common, and 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, polishing shoes, stocking a store's products, or cleaning. 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 the International Labour Organization, there are an estimated 218 million
children aged 5 to 17 in child labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labor.[3] The
most widely rejected forms of child labor 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 Labor 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;
however it does not make child labour illegal.

History in industrialised countries

Child laborer, Newberry, South Carolina, 1908

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 novels Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. 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 argued 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 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 and in the urban
informal sector; child domestic work is also important. 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 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.

Child labor is still widely used today in many countries, including Bangladesh. Even
though country law states that no child under the age of 14 may work, this law is ignored.
Children as young as 11 go to work for up to 20 hours a day in sweatshops making items
for US companies, such as Hanes, Wal-mart, and Target. They get paid as little as 6 and a
half cents per item. One of the largest companies in Bangladesh is Harvest Rich, who
claim not to use child labor.

Campaigns against child labor

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, according to a UNICEF study.[2] "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.

Recent child labor incidents

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. On June 26, 2007, the judge in this
lawsuit in Indianapolis, Indiana denied Firestone's motion to dismiss the case and allowed
the lawsuit to proceed on child labor claims.

A UK investigative report in October of 2007 found children as young as nine working

sixteen to nineteen hours a day without pay in India producing Gap for Kids clothing.
One child, Jivaj, from West Bengal told The Observer that some of the boys in the
sweatshop had been badly beaten. 'Our hours are hard and violence is used against us if
we don't work hard enough. This is a big order for abroad, they keep telling us that. 'Last
week, we spent four days working from dawn until about one o'clock in the morning the
following day. I was so tired I felt sick,' he whispers, tears streaming down his face. 'If
any of us cried we were hit with a rubber pipe. Some of the boys had oily cloths stuffed
in our mouths as punishment.'[13]

On October 28, Marka Hansen, president of Gap North America, responded, "We strictly
prohibit the use of child labor. This is a non-negotiable for us – and we are deeply
concerned and upset by this allegation. As we’ve demonstrated in the past, Gap has a
history of addressing challenges like this head-on, and our approach to this situation will
be no exception. In 2006, Gap Inc. ceased business with 23 factories due to code
violations. We have 90 people located around the world whose job is to ensure
compliance with our Code of Vendor Conduct. As soon as we were alerted to this
situation, we stopped the work order and prevented the product from being sold in stores.
While violations of our strict prohibition on child labor in factories that produce product
for the company are extremely rare, we have called an urgent meeting with our suppliers
in the region to reinforce our policies.

Milton Friedman's 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. The
economist Milton Friedman, author of the phrase Miracle of Chile and educator of the
economists at the University of Chicago, popularly referred to as the Chicago Boys,
claimed that the Industrial Revolution saw a net decline in child labor, rather than an
increase.[14] He claimed this to be supported both by both economic theory, referred to by
some journalists as Market fundamentalism, and empirical evidence.[15][16] According to
Friedman's 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.

However, the British historian and socialist E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English
Working Class draws a qualitative distinction between child domestic work and
participation in the wider (waged) labor-market.[7] Further, the usefulness of the
experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current trends has
been disputed. Economic historian Hugh Cunningham, author of Children and Childhood
in Western Society Since 1500, 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]

Big Bill Haywood, a leading labor organizer and leader of the Western Federation of
Miners and a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World
famously claimed "the worst thief is he who steals the playtime of children!" [17]

Yet Friedman's theory posited that the absence of child labor is a luxury that many poor
states cannot yet afford, and that to prohibit it is to prevent the overall economic growth
necessary to eventually relieve a society of the need for child labor. In poor societies he
claimed that children will be put to work by their families by whatever means necessary.
Moreover, in addition to possibly increasing family costs on a depleted family income, in
the absence of a public school program, parents may have to forego potential labor time
and income, to care for their children.[14]

According to Thomas DeGregori, an economics professor at the University of Houston,

in an article published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank operating in
Washington D.C., "it is clear that technological and economic change are vital
ingredients in getting children out of the workplace and into schools. Then they can grow
to become productive adults and live longer, healthier lives. However, in poor countries
like Bangladesh, working children are essential for survival in many families, as they
were in our own heritage until the late 19th century. So, while the struggle to end child
labor is necessary, getting there often requires taking different routes -- and, sadly, there
are many political obstacles."[18].