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Child labour refers to the employment of children in any work that deprives children of their

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.

Soviet Union and Russia


Although formally banned since 1922, child labour was widespread in the Soviet Union, mostly in the
form of mandatory, unpaid work by schoolchildren on Saturdays and holidays. The students were
used as a cheap, unqualified workforce on kolhoz (collective farms) as well as in industry and
forestry. The practice was formally called "work education". [47]

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]

Eliminating child labour


Concerns have often been raised over the buying public's moral complicity in purchasing products
assembled or otherwise manufactured in developing countries with child labour. However, others
have raised concerns that boycotting products manufactured through child labour may force these
children to turn to more dangerous or strenuous professions, such as prostitution or agriculture. For
example, a UNICEF study found that after the Child Labour Deterrence Act was introduced in the
US, an estimated 50,000 children were dismissed from their garment industry jobs in Bangladesh,
leaving many to resort to jobs such as "stone-crushing, street hustling, and prostitution", jobs that
are "more hazardous and exploitative than garment production". The study suggests that boycotts
are "blunt instruments with long-term consequences, that can actually harm rather than help the
children involved."[61]
According to Milton Friedman, before the Industrial Revolution virtually all children worked in
agriculture.[135] During the Industrial Revolution many of these children moved from farm work to
factory work. Over time, as real wages rose, parents became able to afford to send their children to
school instead of work and as a result child labour declined, both before and after legislation.
[136]

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]

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