Child labor

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Child labor

Labor in economics

Child labour or labor is the term for the employment of children. The term child labor can have a connotation of systematic exploitation of children for their labor, with little compensation nor consideration for their personal development, safety, health, and future years prospects.

In some countries, it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child below a certain age works, except for some household chores and of course school work. An employer is often not allowed to hire a child below a certain age. This minimum age depends on the country.

Other forms of work include helping in the parents' business or having one's own small "business", like cleaning car windows, shining shoes, selling small items such as cigarettes, etc. Some children work as a guide for tourists, sometimes combined with working for owners of shops and restaurants, bringing tourists to these businesses. Also there is military use of children, child prostitution and illegal drug trade, illegal trade involving copyright violations (CDs, CD-ROMs, etc.) and there are child actors and child singers.

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The voluntarism of such work may vary greatly, but even if a child says he or she wants to work (e.g. because the earnings are attractive or if the child hates school) it may still be an undesirable situation for the child in the long run. Some youth rights groups, however, feel that prohibiting work below a certain age violates human rights as well.

The use of children as laborers is now considered by wealthy countries as a human rights violation, and outlawed, while poorer countries may allow it, as families often rely on the labors of their children for survival and sometimes it is the only source of income. This type of work is often hidden away because it is not in employment but in subsistence agriculture, in the household or in the urban informal sector. There is no evidence that this work would be less physically or mentally exhausting than employment, particularly because it is unpaid. A related problem is that children are often more preoccupied with the long-term survival and well-being of their families than with their own direct, short term interests. Child labor prohibition has to address the dual challenge of providing children with both short-term income and long-term prospects for a sustainable future.

International concern has recently been raised in regard to an implied moral complicity of the buying public with child exploitation, through the purchase of products assembled or otherwise manufactured with child labor. However, some express concerns that boycotting products manufactured through child labor may force these children to turn to more dangerous professions due to necessity, such as prostitution or agriculture. For example, a UNICEF study found that that 5,000 to 7,000 Nepalese children turned to prostitution after the U.S. 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 dimissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh, leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution," --"all of them more hazardous and exploitatitive than garment production" according to a UNICEF study. [1]

Individuals, corporations, nations, and other entities can often be active in a deliberate, systematic, use of children for their labor, while others will ignore such abuse.

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In the west, during the Industrial Revolution, use of child labour was commonplace, often in factories. In England and Scotland in 1788, about two-thirds of person working in the new water-powered textile factories were children ([2]). Child factory workers who were best able to cope with factory work become adult factory workers, and the composition of the factory labor force shifted toward adults before significant legislative intervention. Subsequently a series of Factory Acts were passed to gradually restrict the hours that children were allowed to work, and to improve safety. The United States also has extensive child labor laws. In the 1990s every country in the world, expect 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 labor.