Child labour: a global scourge
Worldwide, millions of children are found working in hazardous or in
exploitative conditions.
By Ashley Tseng
Children being forced by extreme poverty into wage (as well as slave)
labour remains in the second decade of the 21st Century a chilling,
global phenomenon.
In its latest report on the issue, Marking Progress Against Child
Labour: Global Estimates and Trends, the International Labour
Organization (ILO) said that in 2012 at least 168 million children were
working in conditions that fell under its definition of "unacceptable"
or exploitative child labour.
Almost half of the child-labourers - 73 million - were between the
ages of 5 and 11. A further 47.4 million were children 12 to 14 years
old. (According to the ILO's definition, only 12- to 14-year-olds who
work at least 14 hours per week or are involved in hazardous work are
counted as child-labourers). And in 2012 there were 47.5 million
documented cases of 15-to 17-year-olds working in hazardous conditions,
or for more than 43 hours per week, as bonded labourers, or in some
other form of coerced labour.
The ILO report indicated a gender discrepancy in child labour cases.
There were 99 million boys between 5 and 17 years old who fit the
ILO's definition of unacceptable child labourers versus 68 million
girls. However, the ILO cautions that its statistics frequently do not
include less visible forms of child labour, such as work done in homes -
work that is often, and in the case of domestic labour generally,
performed by girls.
According to the ILO, there were 78 million fewer child labourers in
2012 than in 2000. While the ILO and others have been quick to laud this
"progress," the decline may have more to do with the world economic
crisis that erupted in 2008 than the efforts to enact and enforce laws
banning "unacceptable" child labour.
As the ILO report itself concedes, in the period immediately after
the 2008 economic meltdown, employers of child labourers cut back,
particularly amongst the cohort of early teenagers.
Of those the ILO considers child labourers, about 68 million work in
the agricultural sector, 54 million in the service sector (including
domestic work), and 12 million in manufacturing. 85 million children
(approximately half of the reported number) are engaged in hazardous
work, where they are regularly threatened with and fall victim to
serious workplace-related injuries and illnesses. In some cases these
prove fatal.
While hazardous working conditions - such as working barefoot and
without a helmet on a construction site - threaten all workers, children
are especially vulnerable. Such conditions compromise their still
developing physical and psychological well-being and youth are more
vulnerable to accidents because their bodies and minds are not yet fully
mature.
The ILO figures on child labour are revealing, but they are far from
definitive. Given the moral odour surrounding the practice and its often
outright illicit character, employers frequently hide and cover up their
use of child labour.
Moreover, in many countries bribery of the few officials tasked with
auditing workplaces for labour-code breaches is rampant, further
diminishing the veracity of official reporting of child labour.
In October 2013, at the third Global Conference on Child Labour, the
ILO conceded that its target to eliminate the worst forms of child
labour by 2016 would not be met.
This is hardly the first time that the UN agency has had to backtrack
on its targets and rosy projections.
International law prohibits the use of child labour and 155 countries
have signed a United Nations convention banning most types of labour by
minors. Nevertheless, this global scourge persists amidst unprecedented
wealth and technological progress, because employers and governments
find it profitable and because capitalism is continuously driving
workers and peasants into dire poverty, making them unable to support
and educate their children.
According to the charity Save the Children, to take just one example,
as many as 80 million children in India work. Indian law prohibits the
hiring of children under the age of 14 for "hazardous" occupations, but
even the Indian labour ministry admits that as many as 13 million
children work in prohibited manufacturing operations such as
glass-making, domestic work, and embroidery.
Child-rights activists commonly state that the Indian government has
no intention of implementing child labour laws and that police
frequently tip off factory owners or accept bribes during raids.
Moreover, activists have been targeted for assassination by business
owners.
In relative terms, the highest incidence of child labour is found in
Sub-Saharan Africa, where more than one in five children (21 percent)
between the ages of 5 and 17 are said to be engaged in child labour. In
Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, the numbers
are at 9 percent, followed by 8 percent in the Middle East and North
Africa.
Many of the more than one thousand workers killed in the April 2013
Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh were children.
In the aftermath of the collapse, Western retailers and governments
announced various measures, including "social audits" and inspections,
to ensure that garment manufacturers adhere to elementary safety
standards.
But these measures had much more to do with protecting corporate
brand names and profits than improving the lives of garment workers.
Giant Western retailers continue to relentlessly press the garment
contractors and subcontractors to lower costs and speed up production,
thereby ensuring the unsafe working practices that contributed to the
Rana Plaza disaster persist in Bangladesh's $22-billion-a-year garment
industry. Young girls still work for as long as 11 hours a day and are
subjected to physical and verbal abuse when they aren't considered to be
working fast enough.
In Peru, where producing gold is a $3 billion industry, children work
in mines, often having to wait prolonged periods before getting even
meagre wages. While working in these mines children are also exposed to
mercury poisoning, life-threatening diseases such as malaria, and
industrial accidents.
Even in developed countries such as the United States, child labour
can be found. In California, children are cultivating fruits and
vegetables and in North Carolina they are working on tobacco farms.
While some of these workers are migrant children, others are US
citizens. However, none of this is illegal.
According to the US's Fair Labor Standards Act, children are allowed
to work in agriculture as long as they have parental consent. (See:
HYPERLINK "http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/05/15/chil-m15.html"
Child labour widespread on American tobacco farms)
Corporations, anxious to market their products including amongst
liberal-minded middle-class elements, tout slogans of "corporate social
responsibility" as a means of sweeping their predatory practices under
the rug. Despite occasional corporate campaigns, often in alliance with
governments, trade unions and humanitarian organizations, child labour
and other brutal forms of exploitation stubbornly persist precisely
because all these entities have a vested interest in maintaining the
root cause of the very problem they shed their crocodile tears over -
capitalism.
Despite signing an agreement to end the use of child labour in its
cocoa farms, a leading food company still employs child labour in its
West African cocoa supply chain. Harvesting cocoa is hard, dangerous
work. There are frequent cases of children being injured from machetes
slicing into their legs as they harvest the cocoa pods.
A recent addition to the corporate social responsibility bandwagon is
cosmetic chain Lush . It has vowed to remove the mineral mica from its
cosmetic products in response to news reports that its supply chain
contains mica produced by forced labour.
However, its "social audit" program to monitor mica production did
not manage to reliably document incidences of child labour. This was at
least because some of the sites where the mica was being extracted were
deemed too dangerous for the auditors to visit!
The continuing prevalence of child labour underscores the failure of
all efforts to reform and "humanize" capitalist exploitation.
This scourge will not be ended through protest campaigns directed at
governments and corporations but only through the independent political
mobilisation of the working class against the profit system.
- Third World Network Features. |