The Scourge of Child Labour
Marie is a seven-year-old servant girl in Haiti. Every morning at 5 am she trudges out a nearby well to fetch water for her master’s household. Every day she helps prepare and serve the family’s meals, runs errands, sweeps the yard, washes dishes and clothes, and washes her mistress’s feet. She has no shoes and is fed cornmeal mush or meager leftovers. At her master’s beck and call night and day, she sleeps outdoors or on the floor. She is frequently beaten with a leather strap.
Marie is one of “the world’s most forgotten children,” a domestic worker hidden behind mansion walls. But domestic servitude is only one area where millions of children worldwide are exploited for their work, according to a 1997 report published by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), entitled “The State of the World’s Children”. “Other hot spots of child exploitation include: eleven-year-old boys in India who work 14 hours a day chained to carpet looms or soldering silver trinkets; Tanzanian children who harvest coffee and tea for 60 hours each week; Peruvian children who toil in hot, acrid brick-making factories; Pakistani children who stitch soccer balls for the equivalent of 50 cents a day.
1.
According to estimates made by the international Labor Organization (ILO), the UN branch that specializes in labour matters, there are at least 250 million working children worldwide under the age of 15. Three-quarters of those young workers toil six or more days a week; 125 million children work nine hours or more each day. Over half the working children are in Asia, while in Africa 1 in 3 children work, and in Latin America, 1 in 5.
2.
Simple greed is one of the primary causes of child labour. Unscrupulous employers will always be tempted to hire the group of workers that is easiest to exploit: children. The most vulnerable and weakest workers, children can usually be paid less than adults and are considerably less likely than adults to know the rights or to protest working conditions.
3.
Many desperately poor parents pledge their children, sometimes as early as four years of age, to factory owners in exchange for modest loans, sometimes as small as $ 15. This practice is known as bonded labour and is, in effect, little different from slavery. No matter how hard they work, many children are unable to free themselves from bonded labor by repaying the underlying debt because the interest rate is often exorbitant and they are paid just pennies a day. In addition, factory owners often add financial penalties to the debt – for instance, when children make mistakes tying knots in a rug. And the debt is often handed down through the generations: Children are sometimes placed in bonded labor because their grandparents never repaid their debts.
Some experts estimate that there are 15 million children working as bonded laborers in India alone. But the practice also exists in charcoal kilns and cotton plantations in Brazil and in construction projects in Myanmar, and is common in manufacturing cigarettes, bricks, matches, silk, and silver jewelry.
4.
In many poor countries, child labor is often the product of inadequate schools. Many children are channeled into jobs simply because there is no room for them in school. A 1994 survey by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) found that in 14 of the world’s least developed nations, classrooms for first-grade students had seating for only 40 percent of the pupils in that age group. In Bangladesh there was an average of 67 pupils per teacher and in Equatorial Guinea an average of 90 per teacher. Children in many developing countries say the schools are so rigid and the classes so uninspiring that they prefer to drop out, as early as age ten, to look for work.
5.
Child laborers grow uneducated and unprepared for the future. Sitting cooped up in factories for 50 or more hours a week gives them little chance to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, or how the larger world works or how to contribute to society. Without an adequate education, laborers who spent their childhoods working rather than learning have few long-term economic opportunities. Even when working children have enough time to attend school, the work often leaves them without energy to study effectively. In addition, children who are mistreated in the workplace may be so traumatized that they cannot concentrate in school or they become disruptive and, as a result, they end up being rejected by teachers and hating school. In its report, UNICEF observes, “Poverty begets child labor begets lack of education begets poverty.”
6.
A The sheer demands of work often stunt children’s growth. According to experts on child development, when children sit crouched on the toes for 14 hours a day in front of a carpet loom, they are often left deformed and unnaturally short. In many third World countries children work in mines, china factories, and the brassware industry, all-dust filled workplaces that foster respiratory problems, asthma, and bronchitis. In Brazil children working on tobacco plantations suffer frequent snakebites while child farm workers in Mexico and the Southwestern United States often are exposed to pesticides. Child prostitutes risk contracting acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and venereal disease and suffer from a lack of love, self-esteem, and family attachment.
B The number of child laborers is increasing, largely because the world’s population is growing rapidly and poverty remains pervasive in many countries. But child labour does not occur solely in poor nations; even in rich nations there are employers ready to exploit children. In California and Texas, many Mexican immigrant children work as farm laborers, and in many wealthy countries, children have been forced into prostitution.
C Children often find themselves involuntary in another form of virtual servitude: prostitution. More than one million girls have been lured or forced into commercial sexual exploitation, UNICEF estimates. Young teenagers, both male and female, are often the victims of a practice called sex tourism in which wealthy vacationers travel to Brazil, the Dominican Republic, or Thailand in search of sex. Adding to the tragedy, if these child prostitutes ever escape and find their way home, they are often stigmatized and rejected by their families and communities.
D The words “child labour” elicit grim, dark images of 19th century sweatshops and coal mines. But child labour – broadly defined as the employment of children, often in harsh conditions and for minimal pay – remains stubbornly alive throughout much of the world, in developing and industrialized countries alike. The human cost is immense: a childhood of hard labour often leaves children gaunt and crippled, sickly and uneducated.
E Poverty plays an enormous role in the phenomenon of child labor. Desperate for money, poor families around the world are forced to push even young children to work to increase the family’s overall income. “For poor families the small contribution of a child’s income or assistance at home that allows the parents to work can make the difference between hunger and a bare sufficiency,” according to the 1997 UNICEF report. A study of nine Latin American countries found that without the income of working children aged 13 to 17, the poverty rate would climb by 10 to 20 percent, the report found.
F Early this century, international organisations also grew concerned about a child labor. In 1919 the ILO, then associated with the League of Nations, approved an agreement establishing 14 years as the minimum age for children working in industry. By January 1997, 72 countries had ratified it. In 1930 the ILO’s members banned “forced or compulsory labour” – 140 countries had ratified this ban By January 1997.
G Child labour also owes its existence in large part to tradition. In India, lower-caste children and the children of Untouchables (the lowest caste in India) have worked for centuries, and it is most expected by both the upper classes and the impoverished lower castes that children will work. Tradition also plays a strong role in countries such as Indonesia, Haiti, and Kenya, where girls as young as seven have long worked as domestic servants. Recent studies suggest that there are 250,000 children working as domestic servants in Haiti and 400,000 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.
7. Scan the article again and make notes under the following headings. Then prepare to talk about the problem of ‘child labour”.