[edit]Present day

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 Labour
Organization consider child labour exploitative,[16][17] with the UN stipulating, in article 32 of
theConvention 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 milllion children working.[17]

n 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. However according to the United
Nations Foundation Somalia signed the convention in 2002, the delay of the signing was believed
to been due to Somalia not having a government to sign the convention.[18] The CRC provides the
strongest,[citation needed] most consistent[citation needed] international legal language prohibiting illegal child
labour; however it does not make child labour illegal.

A boy repairing a tire in Gambia

Poor families often rely on the labours of their children in order to survive. Sometimes it is their
only income.
In a recent paper, Basu and Van (1998)[19] argue that the primary cause of child labour is
parentalpoverty. 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. The proportion of child labourers varies a lot
among countries and even regions inside those countries.

Recent child labour incidents

Young girl working on a loom in Aït Benhaddou, Morocco in May 2008.

BBC recently reported[21] 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.

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
highproduction quota or their wages will be halved, so many workers brought children to work.
TheInternational 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.

On November 21, 2005, an Indian NGO activist Junned Khan, 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 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.

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.[22][23] In spite of the documentation of
the child labourers working in the high-street fashion and admission by all concerned parties, only
the SDM 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 Honourable
Chief Justice of Delhi High Court through a letter at 11.00 pm.[24] This order by the Honourable
Chief Justice comes when the government is taking an extremely retrogressive stance on the
issue of child labour in sweatshops in India and threatening 'retaliatory measures' against child
rights organisations.[25]

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." [26][27]
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."[28]

In early August 2008, Iowa Labor Commissioner David Neil announced that his department had
found that Agriprocessors, a koshermeatpacking 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." [29] Agriprocessors claimed that it was at a loss to understand
the allegations.

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

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

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.[30]

[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.[31]

Austrian school economist Murray Rothbard also defended child labour, stating 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.[32]

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) labour market.[5] 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."[31]

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

article published by the Cato Institute, alibertarian 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.[33]

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
Engelsacknowledged.[34]

[edit]Efforts against child labour

The International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child
Labour (IPEC) was created in 1992 with the overall goal of the progressive elimination of
child labour, which was to be achieved through strengthening the capacity of countries to
deal with the problem and promoting a worldwide movement to combat child labour. IPEC
currently has operations in 88 countries, with an annual expenditure on technical
cooperation projects that reached over US$61 million in 2008. It is the largest programme of
its kind globally and the biggest single operational programme of the ILO.
The number and range of IPEC’s partners have expanded over the years and now include
employers’ and workers’ organizations, other international and government agencies,
private businesses, community-based organizations, NGOs, the media, parliamentarians,
the judiciary, universities, religious groups and, of course, children and their families.

IPEC's work to eliminate child labour is an important facet of the ILO's Decent Work
Agenda. Child labour not only prevents children from acquiring the skills and education they
need for a better future, it also perpetuates poverty and affects national economies through
losses in competitiveness, productivity and potential income. Withdrawing children from
child labour, providing them with education and assisting their families with training and
employment opportunities contribute directly to creating decent work for adults.[35]