It is time for a more nuanced

debate on child labour

(Dunn W, 2015)

Child labour is a big issue. But, not all child labour is exploitive or wrong.

Children have been part of the economic structure of the family for millennia.

Working children have been both an economic necessity and an integral part of their
own learning and education.

If, that is, you assume that education includes practical preparation for adulthood and
being a productive member of society.

In West Africa, child labour is at it’s most complex as an issue

Children have long been expected to contribute to the collective workload of the family
and be part of the economic fabric that held family and community together.

I was milking cows and doing other chores on the farm for as long as I can remember.
In the early 1960s, well before I was six.
When I was nine I would take a tractor and, by myself, go work the fields all day, taking
a lunch and coming home at night for supper. My father spoke of taking a team of
horses and doing the same thing when he was the same age.

I’d also work picking rocks to clear fields for crops, cleaning barns, building fence,
milking cows, etc. The summer I was twelve I worked as a man on a logging crew
cutting, peeling and piling pulpwood. It was exhausting and, at the time, I hated it. But, it
taught me life lessons and prepared me for a world that didn’t always give me what I
wanted on a platter.

Sometimes, but not often, it interfered with school, but I learnt more useful life lessons
from the few days that I missed school than I would have learned with another day in
the classroom.

Nestlé Cocoa Plan, tackling child labour in West Africa

Yes, times change and it is fifty years since I was nine. Standards and societal norms
and expectations have shifted. Yet, I am proud of the fact that I was able to help my
family and I think it helped prepare me for life as a productive adult.

My father did me a favour by requiring the work he did from me.

It was hard, it wasn’t fun at the time, but, it helped support our family and it prepared me
for life, where hard work is key to success.

But this kind of work is very different from the exploitation many children face today. It’s
clear that the worst forms of child labour must be addressed and stopped.

These obviously include servitude types of situations, mind-numbing factory work for
young children, dangerous working conditions, and work that prevents any chance for
formal education. These are all exploitive and are worthy of campaigning hard against.

But people and organizations should learn to better distinguish between exploitive child
labour situations and those that are simply a normal and healthy part of family life and
economics in much of the world.

Too often there is an indiscriminate lumping of all child labour into the ‘this is terrible
and must be stopped’ bucket. Exploitive child labour is wrong. Period.

But normal youth participation in family economics should not be used by campaigners
to advance their causes, agendas and financing.

How do I distinguish them? I try (not always successfully) to simply apply common
sense. A ten-year old that is regularly kept out of school to work on the cocoa farm or
palm oil, or retail shop, or whatever the family economic base might be is wrong. Period.

A ten-year old that helps on the farm, or retail shop or other business after school and
might, in exceptional circumstances, miss a day or two of school for harvest or other
emergencies is often simply a necessary part of the economic survival of a family.

Practices involving child that are made to work in unsafe conditions in artisanal mining
or fishing are of course wrong and should be addressed. Safety is important for all
workers and especially for children.

I don’t know of a bulletproof framework for distinguishing between exploitive and non-
exploitive child-labour. Maybe there isn’t one.

Indonesian child fishing in the forests of Sumatra (with parent out of shot) Photo taken
by the author, February 2014
But, I do know that not all child-labour is exploitive and campaigners and those of us
that read and react to their reports and communications should learn to ask more
questions and try to better understand the difference.

Indonesian child fishing in the forests of Sumatra (with parent out of shot)

Campaigns and communications that fail to capture these nuances might capture short-
term headlines for the campaigner, but they can also cause harm to families.

Legitimate youth support to precarious family economic situations can become lumped
in with exploitive child-labour practices.

When we capture productive family economic practices and life lessons in all-
encompassing child labour campaigns we do harm to people and families, and
ultimately, over time we detract from those exploitive child labour situations that are so
important to address.

My challenge to the campaigning NGOs out there is to begin producing research that
makes these distinctions clearer.
Explicitly recognize that not all child labour is bad. Some is good and necessary.

This would allow us all to focus on eliminating the worst forms of child labour rather than
treating the whole area in the same way.

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Child Labour: A Stolen Childhood

Childhood is meant to be a time of learning, growth, and creative exploration. It is the
phase where children should engage in education, play, and activities that nurture their
personalities and prepare them for a better future. However, millions of children
worldwide are deprived of these basic rights due to a serious issue known as child
labour.

From so many days, while going home from office I am noticing the biggest pain of
small kids just begging for the money to have some food to eat. Don’t you ever felt why
it is happening and it should be really stopped.

Attention! Don’t just avoid all this stupidity, take some action against this. Why the child
labour is increasing day by day. Why it is needed for the children who should carry the
books in their ages. Each and every child is precious and have right to spend their
childhood in the way they like. It’s the age of playing and having the fun. They should be
aware of importance of education and learning the new innovative things and not the
heavy loads and pressures of doing labour in just a small age.

Child labour in numbers

After completing the research about the child labour, I came to know that there are 168
million children working worldwide and that was really shocking to know. No age
matters doing the heavy and risky works even by small kids, Survey found that 59% of
children works in agriculture, 32% in the service sector, 72% in heavy industry. The
most heart touching thing is 22.000 child labourers get into the accidents every year.

From the most recent Global Estimates of Child Labour of 2017, there are 73 million
children involved in hazardous work, that directly endangers their health and safety.
Hazardous work can cause death, serious illness or injury, permanent disability or
psychological damage, as a direct consequence of poor safety and health standards,
exploitation or abuse.

Children can work in dangerous conditions in all sectors, including agriculture, mining,
construction, manufacturing, the service industry, retail and domestic service. However,
agriculture is where the highest incidence of child labourers are found (71%) and it is a
sector particularly prone to dangerous conditions, especially for children. For example,
hazardous work in cotton production is among the worst forms of child labour, as
children are exposed to harmful pesticides (as indicated by ILO Convention 182 on the
Worst Forms of Child Labour, which was universally ratified in 2020). See the example
below of how the EU is helping protect children from these dangers under the Clear
Cotton project, implemented by the ILO and FAO.

The ILO estimates that some 22,000 children are killed at work every year. However,
due to the fact that much of child labour is hidden, it is difficult to obtain accurate data
on how children are being affected. For instance, the numbers of those injured or made
ill because of their work are not known.

This is even more reason to stamp out the practice of child labour altogether. Children
are some of the most vulnerable members of society and those involved in child labour
face significantly increased vulnerability, given their situation. Children working in
difficult and hazardous conditions, suffer higher levels of illness and injury. They are
more at risk than adults to workplace hazards because of their age and level of
development. As a consequence of hazardous work, a number of serious diseases
appear only in adulthood and are often more devastating and are more likely to cause
permanent harm.

Children involved in hazardous work may work at night, over long hours, be exposed to
physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, and have to work in dangerous situations,
such as underground, underwater, at dangerous heights, heat, cold or in isolated and
confined spaces. Some children have to operate unsafe machinery, equipment, and
tools, or be required to lift heavy loads and be exposed to hazardous substances,
agents, or processes, or to temperatures, noise levels, or vibrations that can cause
serious damage to their health.

There is also a gender dimension to hazardous work or worst forms of child labour. For
instance, girls are more likely to perform heavy domestic work and be subject to sexual
abuse and exploitation, while boys are more likely to be involved in dangerous work in
agriculture, operating heavy machinery, or spraying pesticides or handling dangerous
chemicals.
The long term impacts on health

Children involved in child labour are more likely to experience worse health outcomes
also later in life. The impact of hazardous work can cause profound and long-lasting
health problems, that may only become evident in adulthood. This makes them difficult
to measure or even prove. Cancer, infertility and chronic backpain are just some of the
possible long-term negative health outcomes. The consequences are worsened by
poverty and the lack of efficient health and social security schemes.

There is also the potential impact of child labour on individuals mental health. However,
like other aspects of health and child labour, the magnitude of the issue is hard to
measure and is therefore less known.