Global Child Labor Practices

When people think of problems with child labor, they do not think of the United States anymore. The United States has laws that establish how children must be to perform certain kinds of work, and those laws are strictly enforced. The new face of child labor involves children from developing countries, often children who are working in factories to create goods that are then sold to consumers in the United States. Rugs, soccer balls, clothing all of these have been in the news because of the exploitative child labor practices of the suppliers and producers of these products.

The International Labor Organization estimated that approximately 250 million children in developing countries are working. These are estimates of children between the ages of 5 and 14, but there are actually some children younger than this who are employer as laborers, or sometimes enslaved to produce goods. Of this total, the ILO estimate that 120 million children are working fulltime, with 130 million parttime workers. Of this total, 61 percent are in Asia, 32 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America (Child labor, 1996).

The conditions that most of these children work in are less than ideal. They are often exposed to toxic chemicals or biological hazards, and forced to work long hours in poor conditions for minimal wages. In one ILO survey of working children in the Philippines, more than 60 percent had been exposed to hazardous conditi

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ten he attended a meeting of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front and learned that his bondage was illegal. He obtained his freedom, began to attend school, and worked for the labor movement. However, he was also murdered (McCarthy, 1997). What is interesting about his story is that although he was illegally in bondage in that factory, there were laws on the books that did free him when he learned about them. Pakistan did have a Bonded Labor System Abolition Act, with schools associated with it. It did have other initiatives designed to protect children and limit their involvement in the formal labor sector. Nonetheless, the problems did continue to exist. As Jonathan Silvers (1996) noted, there were still 11 million children from age four to age fourteen working in industry in that country, often sewing soccer balls from their homes. Further, children are still being sold into the kind of bonded labor that Masih escaped from. The legislation is there, but it is not always enforced or even known about by those it most affects. Problems of Child Labor Laws There is some commonalty between conservatives and development workers in criticizing child labor laws that are driven by the interests of the United States. Some dev

Category: Government - G