Self-appointed NGOs often complain about child labour from the comfort of their plush offices and five- to six-figure salaries while their employees rush from one five-star hotel to another with $3000 subnotebooks and PDAs in hand. The ILO's small difference between "child work" and "child labour" makes it easy for it to focus on poor countries while letting the countries that pay into its budget, the developed ones, off the hook.
From time to time, news comes out about child labour. Children with pale faces and misshapen bodies were seen crawling in mines. The skilled fingers of hungry babies are making soccer balls for their better-off peers in the United States. Small people huddled together in sweatshops and worked in horrible conditions. All of it is heartbreaking, and it has led to a not-so-cottage industry of activists, commentators, legal eagles, scholars, and politicians who want to get votes by being sympathetic.
If you ask the people of Thailand, sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, or Morocco how they feel about this, they will say that they are suspicious and angry about it. They believe with all their hearts that trade protectionism is hiding behind the strong arguments. International treaties that have strict and expensive rules about labour and the environment may be a way to stop imports that are made possible by cheap labour and the damage they do to well-established domestic industries and their political stooges.
This is especially annoying because the rich West got rich by breaking the backs of slaves and children. In the United States, 18% of all children, or almost 2 million, were working at the time of the 1900 census. As late as 1916, the Supreme Court said that laws that banned children from working were not legal. This choice wasn't changed until 1941.
In a report released last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that the Labor Department doesn't pay enough attention to the working conditions in manufacturing and mining in the US, where many children still work. The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there are 3.7 million 15–17-year-olds who work in the United States. One in 16 of these people worked in factories or on building sites. In the last ten years, accidents at work killed more than 600 teens.
Child prostitution, child soldiers, and child slavery are also things that should be avoided. But you can't and shouldn't try to solve them one by one. Nor should everyone who works while too young be treated badly. Working in the Philippines' gold mines or fisheries is not at all like working as a waiter in a Nigerian or, for that matter, an American restaurant.
Child labour comes in many different forms and shades. Most people agree that children shouldn't be put in dangerous situations, work long hours, be used as payment, be physically punished, or be sex slaves. It may be less clear that they shouldn't help their parents plant and harvest.
Miriam Wasserman writes in "Eliminating Child Labor," which came out in the second quarter of 2000 in the "Regional Review" of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, that it depends on "family income, education policy, production technologies, and cultural norms." Around the world, about a quarter of children under 14 work regularly. This number hides the huge differences between places like Africa (42%) and Latin America (17 percent).
In many poor places, child labour is the only thing that keeps a family from being completely and life-threateningly poor. As income per person goes up, there are a lot fewer children working. It is the height of immoral hypocrisy to keep these breadwinners from being able to help themselves and their families get out of hunger, disease, and famine.
"Said by" "The Economist," a representative of the much-maligned Ecuador Banana Growers Association and Ecuador's Labor Minister, put it well: "Just because they are underage doesn't mean we should turn them away. They have a right to live." You can't just say that they won't work; you have to give other ideas."
Unfortunately, the debate is so full of feelings and arguments that serve only one side that the facts are often lost.
Nike and Reebok had to move their workshops because people were upset that soccer balls were being sewn by children in Pakistan. There were a lot of people who lost their jobs, including a lot of women and 7,000 of their children. The average family income, which was already low, dropped by 20%. Economists Drusilla Brown, Alan Deardorif, and Robert Stern make the following wry observations:
"Baden Sports can say with good reason that their soccer balls are not sewn by kids, but the fact that they moved their factory didn't help the kids who used to work there or their families."
There are a lot of examples like this. Manufacturers do this because they are afraid of legal repercussions and "reputation risks" (like when overzealous NGOs name and shame them). In 1993, German factories that made clothes fired 50,000 children from Bangladesh because they thought the US would pass the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which never happened.
Robert Reich, who used to be Secretary of Labor and was quoted by Wasserstein, says:
"Putting an end to child labour without doing anything else could make things worse for children. If they need to work, as most of them do, stopping them could force them into prostitution or other jobs that are more dangerous for them. Most important is that they go to school and learn things that will help them get out of poverty."
Contrary to what people say, three quarters of all children work in agriculture and with their families. Less than 1% work in mining, and only 2% work in construction. Most of the rest of them work in retail or services, like "personal services," which is a code word for prostitution. UNICEF and the ILO are working on setting up school networks for children who work and finding other jobs for their parents.
But this is just a small part of how bad things are. More than two thirds of the children in poor countries who are old enough to go to school rarely get regular education. This is especially true in rural areas where child labour is a big problem. Many poor parents think that education, especially for girls, is a luxury that they can't afford. In many cultures, work is still seen as an important way to teach children morals and build character, as well as to teach them a trade.
More from "The Economist":
"In Africa, children are usually treated like little grown-ups. From a young age, every child has chores to do around the house, like sweeping or getting water. A lot of children also work in stores or on the streets. A child from a poor family is often sent to a rich relative to work as a housemaid or houseboy so that he can get an education."
One idea that is gaining popularity is to give families in poor countries access to loans that are backed by the money their educated children will make in the future. The idea, which was first put forward by Jean-Marie Baland of the University of Namur and James A. Robinson of the University of California at Berkeley, is now widely accepted.
Even the World Bank has done a few studies. In June, Rajeev Dehejia of the NBER and Roberta Gatti of the Bank's Development Research Group wrote "Child Labor: The Role of Income Variability and Access to Credit Across Countries."
Abuse of children in the workplace is horrible and should be outlawed and stopped. All the other forms should be slowly taken away. Every year, developing countries already turn out millions of graduates who can't get jobs, including 100,000 in Morocco alone. There is a lot of unemployment, and in some places, like Macedonia, it affects more than a third of the workforce. Children who work may be treated badly by their bosses, but at least they stay off the streets, which are much more dangerous. Some kids even learn a skill and can get a job because of it.
