Child labour

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The first general laws against child labour, the Factory 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 labour refers to the employment of children at regular and sustained labour. This
practice is considered exploitative by many international organizations and is illegal in
many countries. Child labour 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' and children'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 labour 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 labour 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 Defence of child labour
• 5 See also
• 6 Notes
• 7 References
• 8 Further reading
• 9 External links

o 9.1 Child labour in diamond industry

[edit] Historical

Child labourer, 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 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 child labour. Child labour 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 labour 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. In England and Scotland in 1788, two-thirds of the workers in 143 water-powered
cotton mills were described as children.[8] 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.
Two girls protesting child labour (by calling it child slavery) in the 1909 New York City
Labor Day parade.

In coal mines, children would crawl through tunnels too narrow and low for adults.[9]

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.

Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked as
prostitutes.[10] 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.

An estimated 1.7 million children under the age of fifteen were employed in American
industry by 1900.[11] In 1910, over 2 million children in the same age group were
employed in the United States.[12]

[edit] Present day

A young boy recycling garbage in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2006
See also: Children's rights

Child labour is still common in some parts of the world, it can be factory work, mining,[13]
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
labour 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 labour 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
labour.[14]

According to UNICEF, there are an estimated 158 million children aged 5 to 14 in child
labour worldwide, excluding child domestic labour.[15] The United Nations and the
International Labor Organization consider child labour exploitative,[16][17] 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.[17]

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.[18]

A boy repairing a tire in Gambia

In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998)[19] argue that the primary cause of child labour is
parental poverty. That being so, they caution against the use of a legislative ban against
child labour, and argue that should be used only when there is reason to believe that a ban
on child labour will cause adult wages to rise and so compensate adequately the
households of the poor children. Child labour 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.[20]

Child labour accounts for 22% of the workforce in Asia, 32% in Africa, 17% in Latin
America, 1% in US, Canada, Europe and other wealthy nations.[21] The proportion of
child labourers varies a lot among countries and even regions inside those countries.

[edit] Recent child labour incidents

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concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better
articles for suggestions. (February 2011)
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."[22]
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 57 charges of child labour violations by the Black Hawk
County District Court jury in Waterloo, Iowa, on June 7, 2010.[23]

[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 labourers and their parents who had also been
child labourers 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 labour claims.

[edit] GAP

After the news of child labourers 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 labourers were working in production of GAP Kids
blouses and has already made a statement to pull the products from the shelf.[24][25] In spite
of the documentation of the child labourers 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 Labour appealed to
the Honorable Chief Justice of Delhi High Court through a letter at 11.00 pm.[26] 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.[27]

In a parallel development, Global March Against Child labour and BBA are in dialogue
with the GAP Inc. and other stakeholders to work out a positive strategy to prevent the
entry of child labour 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."[28][29]

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."[30]

[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 labour 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.[31]

[edit] India

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

On November 21, 2005, an Indian NGO activist Junned Khan,[32] with the help of the
Labour Department and NGO Pratham mounted the country's biggest ever raid for child
labour 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
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=cr050708laterdayslave.asp 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 labour,[33] advocating with the central and state governments for formulation
of guidelines for rescue and rehabilitation of children affected by child labour. 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 labour. In the
following years, Delhi's NGOs, came together with the Delhi Government and
formulated an Action Plan for Rescue and Rehabilitation of child labour.[34]

[edit] Primark

BBC recently reported[35] on Primark using child labour 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 labour 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 labour is also often used in the production of cocoa powder, used to make
chocolate. See Economics of cocoa.

[edit] Defence of child labour

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 labour.
However, others have raised concerns that boycotting products manufactured through
child labour 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."[14]

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 labour
declined, both before and after legislation.[36] 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.[37]

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) labour 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 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."[36]

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 routes—and, sadly, there
are many political obstacles.[38]

The International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of

Child Labour (IPEC), founded in 1992, aims to eliminate child labour. It operates in 88
countries and is the largest program of its kind in the world.[39] IPEC works with
international and government agencies, NGOs, the media, and children and their families
to end child labour and provide children with education and assistance.[39]