The involvement of children in employment per se is not necessarily a problem. As an ILO report observes, many children combine part-time jobs with their education and gain valuable skills or make a useful contribution to family income in the process. For many others, however, child labor means being exploited by unscrupulous employers, exposed to harmful or dangerous conditions or, at the very least, missing out on an adequate education. The ILO has estimated that in 2000, 171 million workers aged between 5 and 17 were involved in work that was “hazardous to their safety, physical or mental health, and moral development,” and that 8.4 million were employed in the most serious forms of child labor, for example as prostitutes, child soldiers and bonded labor.

The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child requires governments to protect those aged under 18 from economic exploitation, from performing any hazardous work or any work likely to interfere with a child’s education. However, child labor is an intractable problem that is difficult to eradicate due to its perceived economic benefits at the family and household level. In low-income countries or communities, children are often sent out to work when the expected economic benefits to their family are higher than the perceived economic rewards of education, or when schooling their children is unaffordable for the parents.

Child Labor and Poverty

The links between child labor and poverty have been clearly demonstrated in many studies; there is evidence of a consistent negative association between the extent of child labor in a country and its GDP. The problem of child labor is not confined to the developing world, however. Although the vast majority of working children can be found in Africa and Asia, followed by Latin America, developed countries such as the U.S. also have significant numbers of child laborers, particularly among immigrant communities engaged in agriculture, where extra hands mean extra income. Moreover, countries with similar levels of GDP have differing levels of child labor, suggesting that other factors such as cultural traditions or attitudes and the availability of affordable education also play a role in determining the relative importance of child labor within their economies.

Child labor has an adverse affect on the development of human capital through education and skills development and is therefore likely to hamper economic development in the countries or communities concerned, as well as severely damaging the future prospects of the child workers for escaping poverty. There is a strong positive relationship between the proportion of children working in a country and the proportion not attending school, while not surprisingly, children who do attend school but also work long hours outside the home tend to perform poorly in academic examinations, according to World Bank research.

There is little consensus about the most effective policy options for reducing the prevalence of child labor. It is sometimes suggested that trade sanctions should be applied against countries with particularly high numbers of children working, but UNICEF argue this would make little difference since the majority of child laborers are employed in agriculture and relatively few in export sectors.

The preferred option of the ILO is for the introduction by national governments of “income transfer programs,” like those already in use in India, Mexico and Brazil, which offer financial benefits to low-income families whose children leave paid employment in order to attend school. At the same time, there is a need for adequate investment in the educational sector with the aim of making affordable, high quality education available to all. According to ILO research published in 2004, the long-term benefits of such policies for the countries concerned are likely to be significant; it was estimated that although the overall cost of eliminating child labor would be in the region of US$760 billion, the resultant benefits resulting from improved health and education, concentrated in the developing world, would be around US$ 5.1 trillion.

References

Duran, M.P. (2004). Investing in every child: An economic study of the costs and benefits of eliminating child labor. ILO: Geneva.

Fares, J. & Raju, D. (2007). Child labor across the developing world: Patterns and correlations. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 4119, February 2007. Available from http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTSOCIALPROTECTION/EXTCL/0,,contentMDK:20254527~menuPK:965612~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:390553,00.html.

International Labour Organization (1998). Child Labor: Targeting the Intolerable. ILO: Geneva.

International Labour Organization (2002). Every child counts: new global estimates on child labour. ILO: Geneva. Available from http://www.ilo.org/public//english/standards/ipec/simpoc/others/globalest.pdf.

UNICEF (1997). The State of the World’s Children 1997 – Child labour. Available from http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/.

US Department of Labor (1998). By The Sweat and Toil of Children, Vol. VI: An Economic Consideration of Child Labor.

So, how could there be a good side to this? And why would any self-respecting industrialized nation purchase products made in such a fashion? The instinctive, gut-level reaction is to boycott these goods; is that wrong?

In a word, yes.

On average, the employees of sweatshops work there because they have no better alternative. Children work in such conditions, not instead of going to school but because they have no school to attend or no means to support themselves if they do. Parents work there because the alternative is watching their children drop out of school and work themselves or starve.

Better Than the Alternatives?

It’s a painful fact that boycotting goods made by sweatshop labor only hurts the workers, not the factory owners. In 1993, a U.S. boycott forced Bangladeshi factories to quit utilizing child labor. According to Oxfam, most of those displaced children were forced into worse positions, including prostitution—when their first choice had been to sew clothing for Wal-Mart shoppers.

Being without better alternatives, the people who have sweatshop jobs are often glad to have them and see them as a positive beginning for a better life. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square massacre, recounted multiple stories of Chinese sweatshop workers who were puzzled when Western journalists bemoaned their twelve-hour plus workdays, seven days per week. More than one young woman they interviewed said how great it was that the factory allowed them to work such long hours, and others commented they had taken that job deliberately over others in the area to earn more hourly pay.

Since that interview in 1987, more companies invested in the area and additional factories opened across southern China. Although this workers’ state could still use a few stout labor unions, workers are now more mobile, wages have more than quintupled and conditions have improved as factories compete for the best workers. More people now work for private industry than for the state (although it’s also true that unemployment has risen as a result). Although the yuan’s exchange rate is still controlled by the government, its purchasing power has risen to approximately one-sixteenth that of the U.S. dollar. The rivers of bicycles once common in Chinese cities are being replaced by cars and even SUVs, with gasoline subsidized by the government.

Allowing Developing Countries to Develop

According to an article by Michael Strong in 2006, roughly 1.2 million people rise above poverty in China every month by moving to an urban area and taking a job that pays less than US$2 per day. He claims that Wal-Mart, through allowing developing economies access to industrialized markets, has helped more of the world’s desperately poor than the World Bank and relates the story of a Mongolian student who, when he heard U.S. college students ripping into sweatshops, shouted out, “Please, give us your sweatshops!”

Strong also points out, quite correctly, that a line must be drawn between criminal exploitation and market economics. Workers deserve decent wages and working conditions that won’t kill them, not only in developed nations but also in the backwoods of beyond. But to achieve that requires not fewer sweatshops but more of them, clustered together to create competition for workers in the Chinese pattern.

If China continues growing at its current rate, in 2031 it will reach a standard of living comparable to that in the U.S. It’s the same path taken by Japan in the 1950s and 1960s and the Asian tigers in the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s an ugly path, dirty and brutal. But it’s proven to work. Can the same be said for other forms of foreign aid?