Professional Documents
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childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and that is mentally, physically,
socially or morally dangerous and harmful.[3] This practice is considered exploitative by
many international organisations. Legislations across the world prohibit child labour.[4][5] These laws
do not consider all work by children as child labour; exceptions include work by child artists,
supervised training, certain categories of work such as those by Amish children, some forms of child
work common among indigenous American children, and others.[6][7][8]
Industrial Revolution
During the Industrial Revolution, children as young as four were employed in production factories
with dangerous, and often fatal, working conditions.[18] Based on this understanding of the use of
children as labourers, it is now considered by wealthy countries to be a human rights violation, and is
outlawed, while some poorer countries may allow or tolerate child labour. Child labour can also be
defined as the full-time employment of children who are under a minimum legal age.
Colonial empires
Systematic use of child labour was common place in the colonies of European powers between
1650 to 1950. In Africa, colonial administrators encouraged traditional kin-ordered modes of
production, that is hiring a household for work not just the adults. Millions of children worked in
colonial agricultural plantations, mines and domestic service industries. [37][38] Sophisticated schemes
were promulgated where children in these colonies between the ages of 514 were hired as an
apprentice without pay in exchange for learning a craft. A system of Pauper Apprenticeship came
into practice in the 19th century where the colonial master neither needed the native parents' nor
child's approval to assign a child to labour, away from parents, at a distant farm owned by a different
colonial master.[39] Other schemes included 'earn-and-learn' programs where children would work and
thereby learn. Britain for example passed a law, the so-called Masters and Servants Act of 1899,
followed by Tax and Pass Law, to encourage child labour in colonies particularly in Africa. These
laws offered the native people the legal ownership to some of the native land in exchange for making
labour of wife and children available to colonial government's needs such as in farms and
as picannins.
From the 1950s on, the students were also used for unpaid work at schools, where they cleaned and
performed repairs.[48] This practice has continued in the Russian Federation, where up to 21 days of
the summer holidays is sometimes set aside for school works. By law, this is only allowed as part of
specialized occupational training and with the students' and parents' permission, but those
provisions are widely ignored.[49] In 2012 there was an accident near city of Nalchik where a car killed
several pupils cleaning up a highway shoulder during their "holiday work" as well as their teacher
who was supervising them.[50]
Austrian School economist Murray Rothbard said that British and American children of the pre-
and post-Industrial Revolution lived and suffered in infinitely worse conditions where jobs were not
available for them and went "voluntarily and gladly" to work in factories. [137]
British historian and socialist E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class draws a
qualitative distinction between child domestic work and participation in the wider (waged) labour
market.[18] Further, the usefulness of the experience of the industrial revolution in making predictions
about current trends has been disputed. Social historian Hugh Cunningham, author of Children and
Childhood in Western Society Since 1500, notes that:
"Fifty years ago it might have been assumed that, just as child labour had declined in the
developed world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so it would also, in a
trickle-down fashion, in the rest of the world. Its failure to do that, and its re-emergence in the
developed world, raise questions about its role in any economy, whether national or
global."[136]
According to Thomas DeGregori, an economics professor at the University of Houston, in an
article published by the Cato Institute, alibertarian think-tank operating in Washington D.C., "it is
clear that technological and economic change are vital ingredients in getting children out of the
workplace and into schools. Then they can grow to become productive adults and live longer,
healthier lives. However, in poor countries like Bangladesh, working children are essential for
survival in many families, as they were in our own heritage until the late 19th century. So, while
the struggle to end child labour is necessary, getting there often requires taking different routes
and, sadly, there are many political obstacles.[138]