Child Labour

What Is "Child Labor"?

"Child labor" is, generally speaking, work for children that harms them or exploits them
in some way (physically, mentally, morally, or by blocking access to education).

BUT: There is no universally accepted definition of "child labor". Varying definitions of

the term are used by international organizations, non-governmental organizations, trade
unions and other interest groups. Writers and speakers don’t always specify what
definition they are using, and that often leads to confusion.

Not all work is bad for children. Some social scientists point out that some kinds of work
may be completely unobjectionable — except for one thing about the work that makes it
exploitative. For instance, a child who delivers newspapers before school might actually
benefit from learning how to work, gaining responsibility, and a bit of money. But what if
the child is not paid? Then he or she is being exploited. As Unicef’s 1997 State of the
World’s Children Report puts it, "Children’s work needs to be seen as happening along a
continuum, with destructive or exploitative work at one end and beneficial work -
promoting or enhancing children’s development without interfering with their schooling,
recreation and rest - at the other. And between these two poles are vast areas of work that
need not negatively affect a child’s development." Other social scientists have slightly
different ways of drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable work.

International conventions also define "child labor" as activities such as soldiering and
prostitution. Not everyone agrees with this definition. Some child workers themselves
think that illegal work (such as prostitution) should not be considered in the definition of
"child labor." The reason: These child workers would like to be respected for their legal
work, because they feel they have no other choice but to work. .

To avoid confusion, when writing or speaking about "child labor," it’s best to explain
exactly what you mean by child labor — or, if someone else is speaking, ask for a
definition. This website uses the first definition cited in this section: "Child labor" is
work for children under age 18 that in some way harms or exploits them (physically,
mentally, morally, or by blocking children from education).
Who Is A "Child"?

International conventions define children as aged 18 and under.

Individual governments may define "child" according to different ages or other criteria.

"Child" and "childhood" are also defined differently by different cultures. A "child" is not
necessarily delineated by a fixed age. Social scientists point out that children’s abilities
and maturities vary so much that defining a child’s maturity by calendar age can be
misleading. For a discussion, see Jo Boyden, Birgitta Ling, William Myers, "What Works
for Working Children" (Stockholm: Radda Barnen and Unicef, 1998), pp 9-26.

Who Are Child Laborers? And How Many Are There?

In 2000, the ILO estimates, "246 million child workers aged 5 and 17 were involved in
child labor, of which 171 million were involved in work that by its nature is hazardous to
their safety, physical or mental health, and moral development. Moreover, some 8.4
million children were engaged in so-called 'unconditional' worst forms of child labor,
which include forced and bonded labor, the use of children in armed conflict, trafficking
in children and commercial sexual
exploitation.www.ilo.org/public/english/ standards/ipec/simpoc/others/globalest.pdf
Unicef’s State of the World’s Children Report says only that although the exact number
is not known, it is surely in the hundreds of millions.
More information about who child laborers are, where they live, and new statistics on the
total number can be found on www.ilo.org; also, the US Dept. of Labor’s By The Sweat
and Toil of Children, Vol. VI: An Economic Consideration of Child Labor.
For more information about individual child laborers, see stories produced by Child
Labor and the Global Village: Photography for Social Change.

Where Do Child Laborers Live?

61% in Asia, 32% in Africa, and 7% in Latin America, 1% in US, Canada, Europe and
other wealthy nations In Asia, 22% of the workforce is children. In Latin America, 17%
of the workforce is children. The proportion of child laborers varies a lot among countries
and even regions inside those countries. See Child Labour: Targeting the Intolerable,
Geneva, 1998, p. 7; and other ILO publications.

"In Africa, one child in three is at work, and in Latin America, one child in five works. In
both these continents, only a tiny proportion of child workers are involved in the formal
sector and the vast majority of work is for their families, in homes, in the fields or on the
streets." -- Unicef’s 1997 State of the World’s Children Report
What Do Child Laborers Do?

Work ranges from taking care of animals and planting and harvesting food, to many
kinds of small manufacturing (e.g. of bricks and cement), auto repair, and making of
footwear and textiles. (See a list in US Dept. of Labor, By the Sweat & Toil of Children,
Vo. V: Efforts to Eliminate Child Labor, Appendix C. http://www.dol.gov
A large proportion of children whom the ILO classifies as child laborers work in
agriculture.

See Child Labour: Targeting the Intolerable (1998) "Every Child Counts" (2002) and
other ILO publications (http://www.ilo.org).
More boys than girls work outside their homes. But more girls work in some jobs: for
instance, as domestic maids. Being a maid in someone’s house can be risky. Maids
typically are cut off from friends and family, and can easily be physically or sexually
abused by their employers.

Note: Less than 5% of child laborers make products for export to other countries. Sources
for this statistic include Unicef’s State of the World’s Children Report 1997.

Why Should We Care?

Many children in hazardous and dangerous jobs are in danger of injury, even death.

Beyond compassion, consider who today’s children will become in the future. Between
today and the year 2020, the vast majority of new workers, citizens and new consumers
— whose skills and needs will build the world’s economy and society — will come from
developing countries. Over that 20-year period, some 730 million people will join the
world’s workforce — more than all the people employed in today's most developed
nations in 2000. More than 90 percent of these new workers will be from developing
nations, according to research by Population Action International. How many will have
had to work at an early age, destroying their health or hampering their education?

How Can Ordinary People Help Reduce Child Labor?

Learn about the issue. Support organizations that are raising awareness, and providing
direct help to individual children.
What Are Some "Myths" Or Misunderstandings About Child Labor?

Unicef lists four "myths":

1. It is a myth that child labor is only a problem in developing countries. "But in

fact, children routinely work in all industrialized countries, and hazardous forms of
child labour can be found in many countries. In the US, for example, children are
employed in agriculture, a high proportion of them from immigrant or ethnic-minority
families. A 1990 survey of Mexican-American children working in the farms of New
York state showed that almost half had worked in fields still wet with pesticides and
over a third had themselves been sprayed."
2. It is a myth that child labor will only disappear when poverty disappears.
Hazardous labor can, and should be eliminated by even the poorest countries.
3. It is a myth that most child laborers work in sweatshops making goods for export.
"Soccer balls made by children in Pakistan for use by children in industrialized
countries may provide a compelling symbol, but in fact, only a very small proportion
of all child workers are employed in export industries - probably less than 5 per cent.
Most of the world’s child labourers actually are to be found in the informal sector -
selling on the street, at work in agriculture or hidden away in houses – far from the
reach of official labour inspectors and from media scrutiny."
4. It is a myth that "the only way to make headway against child labour is for
consumers and governments to apply pressure through sanctions and boycotts. While
international commitment and pressure are important, boycotts and other sweeping
measures can only affect export sectors, which are relatively small exploiters of child
labour. Such measures are also blunt instruments with long-term consequences that
can actually harm rather than help the children involved."
What Causes Child Labor Today?

Poverty is widely considered the top reason why children work at inappropriate jobs for
their ages. But there are other reasons as well -- not necessarily in this order:

1. family expectations and traditions

2. abuse of the child
3. lack of good schools and day care
4. lack of other services, such as health care
5. public opinion that downplays the risk of early work for children
6. uncaring attitudes of employers
7. limited choices for women
"The parents of child labourers are often unemployed or underemployed, desperate for
secure employment and income. Yet it is their children - more powerless and paid less -
who are offered the jobs. In other words, says UNICEF, children are employed because
they are easier to exploit," according to the "Roots of Child Labor" in Unicef’s 1997 State
of the World’s Children Report.

The report also says that international economic trends also have increased child labor in
poor countries. "During the 1980s, in many developing countries, government
indebtedness, unwise internal economic policies and recession resulted in economic
crisis. Structural adjustment programmes in many countries accentuated cuts in social
spending that have hit the poor disproportionately. " Although structural adjustment
programs are being revised to spare education from deep cuts, the report says, some
countries make such cuts anyway because of their own, local priorities. In many countries
public education has deteriorated so much, the report declared, that education itself has
become part of the problem — because children work to avoid going to school. This
conclusion is supported by the work of many social scientists, according to Jo Boyden,
Birgitta Ling, and William Myers, who conducted a literature search for their 1998 book,
What Works for Working Children (Stockholm: Radda Barnen, Unicef, 1998).

Children do some types of low-status work, the report adds, because children come from
minority groups or populations that have long suffered discrimination. " In northern
Europe, for example, child labourers are likely to be African or Turkish; in Argentina,
many are Bolivian or Paraguayan; in Thailand, many are from Myanmar. An increasingly
consumer-oriented culture, spurring the desire and expectation for consumer goods, can
also lead children into work and away from school."

.
What Are Some Solutions To Child Labor?

Not necessarily in this order:

1. Increased family incomes

2. Education — that helps children learn skills that will help them earn a living
3. Social services — that help children and families survive crises, such as disease,
or loss of home and shelter
4. Family control of fertility — so that families are not burdened by children
The ILO’s International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) has
explored many programs to help child laborers. See IPEC documents on
the www.ilo.org site.

The 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child calls for children to participate in
important decisions that will affect their lives.

Some educators and social scientists believe that one of the most important ways to help
child workers is to ask their opinions, and involve them in constructing "solutions" to
their own problems. Strong advocates of this approach are Boyden, Myers and Ling;
Concerned for Working Children in Karnataka, India; many children’s "unions" and
"movements," and the Save the Children family of non-governmental organizations.

Child labour

The first general laws against child labor, theFactory Acts, were passed in Britain in the
first half of the 19th century. Children younger than nine were not allowed to work and
the work day of youth under the age of 18 was limited to twelve hours.[1]
Child labor refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labor. This
practice is considered exploitative by many international organizations and is illegal in
many countries. Child labor was utilized to varying extents through most of history, but
entered public dispute with the advent of universal schooling, with changes in working
conditions during the industrial revolution, and with the emergence of the concepts
of workers' andchildren's rights.

In many developed countries, it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child

below a certain age works (excluding household chores, in a family shop, or school-
related work).[2] An employer is usually not permitted to hire a child below a certain
minimum age. This minimum age depends on the country and the type of work involved.
States ratifying the Minimum Age Convention adopted by the International Labor
Organization in 1973, have adopted minimum ages varying from 14 to 16. Child labor
laws in the United States set the minimum age to work in an establishment without
restrictions and without parents' consent at age 16.[3]

The incidence of child labor in the world decreased from 25 to 10 percent between 1960
and 2003, according to the World Bank.[4]

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Historical
• 2 Present day
• 3 Recent child labor incidents
o 3.1 Meatpacking
o 3.2 Firestone
o 3.3 GAP
o 3.4 H&M
o 3.5 India
o 3.6 Primark
• 4 Defense of child labor
• 5 Efforts against child labor
• 6 See also
• 7 Notes
• 8 Further reading
 o

[edit]Historical

Child laborer, New Jersey, 1910

During the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four were employed in production
factories with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions.[5] 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 child labor. Child labor can also be defined as the full-time
employment of children who are under a minimum legal age.

The Victorian era became notorious for employing young children in factories and mines
and as chimney sweeps.[6] Child labor played an important role in the Industrial
Revolution from its outset, often brought about by economic hardship, Charles
Dickens for example worked at the age of 12 in a blacking factory, with his family
in debtor's prison. The children of the poor were expected to help towards the family
budget, often working long hours in dangerous jobs for low pay,[7] earning 10-20% of an
adult male's wage.[8] In England and Scotland in 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143
water-powered cotton mills were described as children.[9] In 19th-century Great Britain,
one-third of poor families were without a breadwinner, as a result of death or
abandonment, obliging many children to work from a young age.[8] Workhouses would
also sell orphans and abandoned children as "pauper apprentices", working without
wages for board and lodging.[8] Those who ran away would be whipped and returned to
their masters, and some were shackled with "irons riveted on their ankles, and reaching
by long links and rings up to the hips, and in these they were compelled to walk to and
from the mill to work and to sleep."[8]
Two girls protesting child labor (by calling it child slavery) in the 1909 New York
City Labor Dayparade.
In coal mines, children began work at the age of five and generally died before the age of
25. They would crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for adults, many working long
hours from 4 am until 5 pm.[8] Conditions in the mines were dangerous, with some
children killed when they dozed off and fell into the path of the carts, while others died
from gas explosions.[8] Many children developed lung cancer and other diseases.
[8]
Chimney sweeps employed "climbing boys" and girls who would scale narrow
chimneys, with some masters lighting fires under them to force them to climb faster, and
some children falling to their deaths.[8] Children employed as "scavengers" by cotton
mills would crawl under machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins, working 14 hours a day,
six days a week. Some lost hands or limbs, others were crushed under the machines, and
some were decapitated.[8] Young girls worked at match factories, where phosphorous
fumes would cause many to develop phossy jaw.[8] Children employed
at glassworks were regularly burned and blinded, and those working at potterieswere
vulnerable to poisonous clay dust.[8] Children also worked in agriculture, with a
gangmaster walking behind them and whipping them if they stood up straight before they
reached the end of the field.[8]

Children also worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or selling matches,
flowers and other cheap goods.[7] Some children undertook work as apprentices to
respectable trades, such as building or as domestic servants(there were over 120,000
domestic servants in London in the mid-18th Century). Working hours were long:
builders worked 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter, while domestic servants
worked 80 hour weeks.

Bertrand Russell wrote that:[10]

The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America. ...
In the Lancashire cotton mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood),
children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or
seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite
of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to
the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a
desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural laborers
were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to
make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until
1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary
sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first
effect of machinery in England.
Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked
as prostitutes.[11] Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and
1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in
factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and
after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal
Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of
12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the
age of nine were no longer permitted to work. This act however only applied to the textile
industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children
to 10 hour working days.[11] Enforcement was difficult due to the small number of
inspectors.[8]

By 1900, there were 1.7 million child laborers reported in American industry under the
age of fifteen.[12] The number of children under the age of 15 who worked in industrial
jobs for wages climbed to 2 million in 1910.[13]

[edit]Present day
A young boy recycling garbage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2006
See also: Children's rights
Child labor is still common in some parts of the world, it can be factory work, mining,
[14]
prostitution, 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 many things on the streets, at work in agriculture or
hidden away in houses—far from the reach of official labor inspectors and from media
scrutiny." And all the work that they did was done in all types of weather; and was also
done for minimal pay. As long as there is family poverty there will be child labor.[15]

According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 158 million children aged 5 to 14 in child
labor worldwide, excluding child domestic labour.[16] The United Nations and
the International Labor Organization consider child labor exploitative,[17][18] 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. Although globally there is an estimated 250
million children working.[18]

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. Somalia eventually
signed the convention in 2002; the delay of the signing was believed to been due to
Somalia not having a government.[19]

A boy repairing a tire in Gambia

In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998)[20] 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 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 India and Bangladesh. CACL estimated that there are between 70 and 80
million child labourers in India.[21]

Child labor accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa, 17% in Latin
America, 1% in US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations.[22] The proportion of
child laborers varies a lot among countries and even regions inside those countries.

[edit]Recent child labor incidents

Young girl working on a loom in Aït Benhaddou, Morocco in May 2008.
[edit]Meatpacking
In early August 2008, Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil announced that his
department had found that Agriprocessors, a kosher meatpacking company
in Postville which had recently been raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
had employed 57 minors, some as young as 14, in violation of state law prohibiting
anyone under 18 from working in a meatpacking plant. Neil announced that he was
turning the case over to the state Attorney General for prosecution, claiming that his
department's inquiry had discovered "egregious violations of virtually every aspect of
Iowa's child labor laws." [23] Agriprocessors claimed that it was at a loss to understand the
allegations. Agriprocessors' CEO went to trial on these charges in state court on May 4,
2010. After a five-week trial he was found not guilty of all 67 charges of child labor
violations by the Black Hawk County District Court jury in Waterloo, Iowa on June 7,
2010. [24]

[edit]Firestone
The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company operate a metal plantation in Liberia which is
the focus of a global campaign called Stop Firestone. Workers on the plantation are
expected to fulfil a high production quota or their wages will be halved, so many workers
brought 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.

[edit]GAP
After the news of child laborers working in embroidery industry was uncovered in
the Sunday Observer on 28 October 2007, BBA activists swung into action. The GAP
Inc. in a statement accepted that the child laborers were working in production of GAP
Kids blouses and has already made a statement to pull the products from the shelf.[25][26] In
spite of the documentation of the child laborers working in the high-street fashion and
admission by all concerned parties, only the SDM (Sub-divisional Magistrate) could not
recognise these children as working under conditions of slavery and bondage.
Distraught and desperate that these collusions by the custodians of justice, founder of
BBA Kailash Satyarthi, Chairperson of Global March Against Child Labor appealed to
the Honorable Chief Justice of Delhi High Court through a letter at 11.00 pm.[27] This
order by the Honorable Chief Justice comes when the government is taking an extremely
reactionary stance on the issue of child labour in sweatshops in India and threatening
'retaliatory measures' against child rights organisations.[28]

In a parallel development, Global March Against Child labor and BBA are in dialogue
with the GAP Inc. and other stakeholders to work out a positive strategy to prevent the
entry of child labor in to sweatshops and device a mechanism of monitoring and remedial
action. GAP Inc. Senior Vice President, Dan Henkle in a statement said: "We have been
making steady progress, and the children are now under the care of the local government.
As our policy requires, the vendor with which our order was originally placed will be
required to provide the children with access to schooling and job training, pay them an
ongoing wage and guarantee them jobs as soon as they reach the legal working age. We
will now work with the local government and with Global March to ensure that our
vendor fulfils these obligations." [29][30]

On October 28, Joe Eastman, president of Gap North America, responded, "We strictly
prohibit the use of child labor. This is 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."[31]

[edit]H&M
In December 2009, campaigners in the UK called on two leading high street retailers to
stop selling clothes made with cotton which may have been picked by children. Anti-
Slavery International and the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF)
accused H&M and Zara of using cotton suppliers in Bangladesh. It is also suspected that
many of their raw materials originates from Uzbekistan, where children aged 10 are
forced to work in the fields. The activists were calling to ban the use of Uzbek cotton and
implement a "track and trace" systems to guarantee an ethical responsible source of the
material.

H&M said it "does not accept" child labor and "seeks to avoid" using Uzbek cotton, but
admitted it did "not have any reliable methods" to ensure Uzbek cotton did not end up in
any of its products. Inditex, the owner of Zara, said its code of conduct banned child
labour.[32]

[edit]India
In 1997, research indicated that the number of child laborers in the silk-weaving industry
in the district of Kanchipuram in India exceeded 40,000. This included children who
were bonded laborers to loom owners. Rural Institute for Development
Education undertook many activities to improve the situation of child laborers. Working
collaboratively, RIDE brought down the number of child laborers to less than 4,000 by
2007.

On November 21, 2005, an Indian NGO activist Junned Khan,[33] with the help of the
Labor Department and NGO Pratham mounted the country's biggest ever raid for child
labor rescue in the Eastern part of New Delhi, the capital of India. The process resulted in
rescue of 480 children from over 100 illegal embroidery factories operating in the
crowded slum area of Seelampur. For next few weeks, government, media and NGOs
were in a frenzy over the exuberant numbers of young boys, as young as 5–6 year olds,
released from bondage. This rescue operation opened the eyes of the world to the menace
of child labour operating right under the nose of the largest democracy in the whole
world.
Next few years Junned Khan did extensive campaigning on the issue of children involved
in hazardous labor,[34] advocating with the central and state governments for formulation
of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of children affected by child labor. In 2005,
after the rescue, Junned Khan, collaborated with BBA to file petition in the Delhi High
Court for formulation of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of child labor. In the
following years, Delhi's NGOs, came together with the Delhi Government and
formulated an Action Plan for Rescue and Rehabilitation of child labor.[35]

[edit]Primark
BBC recently reported[36] on Primark using child labor in the manufacture of clothing. In
particular a £4.00 hand embroidered shirt was the starting point of a documentary
produced by BBC's Panorama (TV series) programme. The programme asks consumers
to ask themselves, "Why am I only paying £4 for a hand embroidered top? This item
looks handmade. Who made it for such little cost?", in addition to exposing the violent
side of the child labor industry in countries where child exploitation is prevalent. As a
result of the programme, Primark took action and sacked the relevant companies, and
reviewed their supplier procedures.

Child labor is also often used in the production of cocoa powder, used to make chocolate.
See Economics of cocoa.

[edit]Defense of child labor

Child workers on a farm in Maine, October 1940

Concerns have often been raised over the buying public's moral complicity in purchasing
products assembled or otherwise manufactured in developing countries with child labor.
However, others have raised concerns that boycottingproducts 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 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", jobs that are "more
hazardous and exploitative than garment production". The study suggests that boycotts
are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can actually harm rather than
help the children involved."[15]

According to Milton Friedman, 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.[37] Austrian school economist Murray Rothbard said that
British and American children of the pre- and post-Industrial Revolution lived and
suffered in infinitely worse conditions where jobs were not available for them and went
"voluntarily and gladly" to work in factories.[38]

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.[5] Further, the usefulness of the experience of the industrial
revolution in making predictions about current trends has been disputed. Social 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 labor 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."[37]
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 labour is necessary, getting there often
requires taking different Do Child routes—and, sadly, there are many political
obstacles.[39]
What Laborers Do?

Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education contends that
the infamously brutal child labour conditions during the early industrial revolution
were those of "apprentice children" (who were forced to work, even actually sold as
slaves, by government-ownedWorkhouses) and not those of "free-work children"
(those who worked voluntarily). So, the government and State-managed institutions,
and not Laissez-faire capitalism, is to blame. He further contends that, although
work conditions of free-work children were far from ideal, those have been wildly
exaggerated in such "authoritative" sources as the Sadler report, a fact that even the
anti-capitalist Friedrich Engels acknowledged.[40]

[edit]Efforts against child labor

The International Labor Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination

of Child Labor (IPEC), founded in 1992, aims to eliminate child labor. It operates in
88 countries and is the largest program of its kind in the world.[41] IPEC works with
international and government agencies, NGOs, the media, and children and their
families to end child labor and provide children with education and assistance.[41]
 INDEX
I. Introduction
II. What is child labour?
III. Causes of child labour?
IV. History
V. Biblography
 CHILD LABOUR

NAME: RAITHTHA VISHAL A.

STD: F.Y.B.COM

DIV: A

ROLL NO: 119

COLLEGE: L.S.RAHEJA COLLEGE OF

ARTS & COMMERCE