CHILD Protection & Rights > Child Protection Issues.

C- Protecting Children from Child Labor

Defining Child labor:

What is Child labor?

"Child labor" is, generally speaking, work for children that harms them or exploits them physically, mentally, morally, or by blocking access to education and better future opportunities.

Child labor is very common, and can be work in factory, in mining, in agriculture, in teashop or sweatshop. Most of children are forced to do repetitive jobs such as assembling boxes, polishing shoes, stocking a store's products, or cleaning. They work also as waiters, guides for tourists, sometimes combined with bringing in business for shops and restaurants. However, the main proportion of child labor occurs in the informal sector, children sell on the street, work in agriculture or work as domestic laborers.

In its “worst forms”, child labour involves children living in slavery-like conditions, separated from their families or exposed to serious danger and illness. It includes:

There has often been a tendency to focus on the visible forms of work, such as children who work in hazardous conditions, but this can obscure the many other ways in which children work. Rural working children, for example, are mainly engaged in agricultural activities and collect fruits and vegetables, water, fuel and fodder. In many countries, poor girls work as domestic servants for richer families.

- Agriculture
According to an ILO estimate on child labor, the number of children working in agriculture is nearly ten times that of children involved in factory work such as garment manufacturing, carpet-weaving, or soccer-ball stitching. Yet despite their numbers and the difficult nature of their work, children working in agriculture have received little attention. Of nearly 218 million children engaged in child labor around the world, 150 million (68%) are working in agriculture.

Many of the risks and abuses faced by child agricultural workers worldwide are similar. Child agricultural workers frequently work for long hours in heat, carry heavy loads of produce, are exposed to toxic pesticides, and suffer high rates of injury from sharp knives and other dangerous tools.

- Domestic Work
Millions of women and girls worldwide become domestic workers to provide for themselves and their families. Domestic workers are largely neglected by governments that have systematically denied them key labor protections extended to other workers.
Abuses against domestic workers, typically take place in private homes and hidden from the public eye. The long list of abuses committed by employers and labor agents includes physical, psychological, and sexual abuse; forced confinement in the workplace; non-payment of wages; and excessively long working hours with no rest days.

- Bonded Child Labor
Bonded labor takes place when a family receives an advance payment to hand a child-boy or girl-over to an employer. In most cases neither the child nor the family can raise enough money to pay back. In some cases, the labor is generational-that is, a child's grandfather or great-grandfather was promised to an employer many years earlier, with the understanding that each generation would provide the employer with a new worker-often with no pay at all.

Three types of bonded labour exist in practice around the world:
• The first is when a child inherits a debt carried by his or her parents.
• Another form of bonded labour occurs when a child is used as collateral for a loan. For example, a parent facing an unusually large or urgent expense would use this method to obtain necessary money.
• Finally, a child worker can enter into bondage to their employer by requesting an advance on future wages they expect to earn.

In all of these cases, the debt is consistently increased, through interest, to a sum beyond the capacity of the worker to repay. Expenses and interest consume all wages and also cause the debt to grow.

Bonded labor is outlawed by the 1956 U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. However, millions of children work as bonded child laborers in countries around the world.

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