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

Main article

In some countries, it is considered inappropriate or exploitative if a child below a certain age works, excluding household chores, school work or agricultural-based 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, either selling small items or doing odd jobs. Some children work as a guide for tourists, sometimes combined with working for owners of shops and restaurants, bringing tourists to these businesses. More controversial forms of work include the military use of children, child prostitution and illegal drug trade, illegal trade involving copyright violations such as facilitation of piracy, and child actors and child singers. According to a UNICEF study, it is a myth that most child laborer is in sweatshops that export goods to the rich countries. Most child labor is 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."

The consent of the child to do such work of such work may vary greatly, but even if a child says he or she wants to work, such as because the earnings are attractive or if the child hates school, because such consent may not necessarily be informed consent, 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.

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.

Industrial Revolution

In the west, during the Industrial Revolution, use of child labour was commonplace, often in factories, but on the decline. In England and Scotland in 1788, about two-thirds of person working in the new water-powered textile factories were children (). Subsequently a series of Factory Acts were passed to gradually restrict the hours that children were allowed to work, and to improve safety. It is widely argued that the industrial revolution increased hardship for children. Historian E. P. Thompson notes in The Making of the English Working Class that child labor was not new, and had been "an intrinsic part of the agricultural and industrial economy economy before 1780", however he argues that

"there was a drastic increase in the intensity of exploitation of child labour between 1780 and 1840, and every historian acquainted with the sources knows this is so. This was true in the mines, both in inefficient small-scale pits where the roadways were sometimes so narrow that children could not easily pass through them; where - as the coal face drew furher away from the shaft - children were in demand as 'hurreyers' and to operate the ventilation ports. In the mills, the child and juvenile labour force grew yearly; and in several of the out-worker or 'dishonourable' trades the hours of labour became longer and work more intense." <sup class="plainlinks nourlexpansion citation" id="ref_<1>">

Some historians have disagreed with this verdict. Economic historian Robert Hessen says

"claims of increased misery... based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses, apprenticed as unpaid household servants, rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor, or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist "good old days" simply never existed"

Laws were passed to prohibit child labor in the industrialized countries. However, according to economist Clark Nardinelli who conducted an historical analysis, child labor was already decreasing in the United States and Wester Europe due to increasing demand for educated and literate adults, brought about by an increasing technological sophistication of industry. The demand for educated workers also provided an incentive for children to stay in school to meet the new demands of industry.

Boycotts

International concern has recently been raised in connection to an implied morality complicity of the buying public with child exploitation, through the purchase of products assembled or otherwise manufactured with child labor in developing countries. 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 United States 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 dismissed 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 exploitative than garment production" according to a UNICEF study. The study says that boycotts are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences that can actually harm rather than help the children involved."

Justifications of child labor

Children's participation in economic activity was commonplace prior to the Industrial Revolution as children labored on their farms or for their families. Economists like Milton Friedman argue that the Industrial Revolution saw a net decline in child labor, rather than an increase. According to this view, children began to work in factories, but greater numbers of children stopped working in agriculture. Whilst accepting this overall child labor declined in this period, other commentators draw a qualitative distinction between domestic work and participation in the wider labor-market. The usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions about current trends has been strongly disputed by economic historians. Hugh Cunningham 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."

Friedman and other market economists believe that the absence of child labor is a luxury that many poor states cannot yet afford. To prohibit it, is to prevent the economic growth necessary to relieve a society of the need for child labor. In poor societies these children will be put to work by their families by whatever means because they cannot afford to feed idle and unproductive children. Moreover, in addition to possibly increasing family costs on a depleted family income, parents may have to forego potential labor time and income, to care for idle children.

Some argue that if industrial child labor is legally forbidden, then many children are relegated to working in more dangerous black market occupations such as prostitution.

The United States also has extensive child labor laws. 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. The CRC provides the strongest, most consistent international legal language prohibiting illegal child labor.

References

1. <span class="citation wikicite" id="endnote_<Thompson>"> E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Penguin, 1968), pp. 366-7
2. <span class="citation wikicite" id="endnote_<Cunningham>"> Hugh Cunninghame, "The decline of child labour: labour markets and family economies in Europe and North America since 1830", Economic History Review, 2000.
3. Hessen, Robert, Capitalism, Concise Encyclopedia of Economics
4. Nardinelli, Clark, Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution (Indiana University Press, 1990)

See also

• Labor law
• Children's rights movement
• International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, IPEC
• Sweatshop
• Child soldiers
• Child prostitution
• Trafficking in children
• IREWOC - Institute for Research on Working Children
• Youth activism
• Child Labour Research

International Conventions and other Instruments:

• Convention on the Rights of the Child
• Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention
• Worst Forms of Child Labour Recommendation

Types of Programmes focussing on Child Labour

• Child Labour Action Programmes
• Time-bound Programmes

Country-specific programmes:

• South Africa

External links

• Teaching about Child Labor and International Human Rights
• Child Labor in Agriculture
• History Place Photographs from 1908-1912
• Ethical and economic considerations in child labor
• Lightening the load of child miners - BBC
• Child labour challenge toughens - BBC
• Child Labor or Prostitution?
• Essay from 'The Fraser Institute'
• What Do The World and People Deserve? Len Bernstein on the Life and Work of Jacob Riis
• The State of the World's Children - a UNICEF study
• Child labor and the division of labor in the early English cotton mills
• Resources for young people fighting against child labor
• Ethical Alternatives to Sweatshops

• Childhood
• Child labour