A future denied: children who work.

A future denied: Children who work

In 19th century Europe, pauper children were sometimes apprenticed to factory owners, who mercilessly exploited them. In recent years, children have panned gold in sweltering, malaria-ridden jungles of South America, faced sharks and suffered ruptured eardrums when engaged in deep-sea fishing in tropical ocean waters, and risked physical deformity in archaic leather tanning workshops in the Middle East. They are among the more than 100 million working children around the world.

Ravages such as those inflicted by the industrial revolution on European and North American children about a century ago are now being felt by third world children amidst slum-filled mega-cities, abandoned countrysides, swelling populations and near-bankrupt economies struggling to meet next month's external debt interest payment.

The International Labour Organisation (ILO) has over the years been particularly concerned with this phenomenon. "Combating Child Labour", a 226-page book, edited by Assefa Bequele and Jo Boyden, and published by the International Labour Office in Geneva in 1988, details many aspects of the situation worldwide, including the trend towards reorienting public policy along pragmatic lines.

No other choice

In those countries, poor parents are sending their children to work because they have no other choice. Sometimes there are no schools or they are too expensive or their quality is so low and the drop-out rate so high that parents perceive them as irrelevant.

While child labour seems to have been more or less abolished in large, modern enterprises in most developing countries, it is still rampant in the huge "informal sector", a vast unorganized array of small enterprises.

But even where child labour is legally banned, employers openly flout the law, knowing that it won't be enforced: a handful of overworked labour inspectors cannot possibly cope with the thousands of illegal enterprises operating in the back alleys of a sprawling third world metropolis.

Legislation backfires when it ignores the realities of hunger and need and when it is not properly enforced. Banning child labour has often only meant forcing children to work clandestinely. It has also made child labour regulation and assistance to working children politically impossible for many Governments since public opinion may see that as a betryal of the abolitionist ideal.

But attitudes are changing and public policy is becoming more pragmatic in countries such as Colombia. Brazil, Peru, India and the Philippines. Today, the reality that millions of children work in the developing world is being acknowledged. While abolition remains the goal, greater protection for working children is recognized as an immediate need.

Another new development is that not all child labour is now automatically seen as evil. It is not work as such that is damaging to children, but the conditions under which most children work. Idleness--with the triple spectre of drug abuse, gang violence, and social alienation-- can be as detrimental to children as exploitative work.

Among the lowest paid

Children work too long and are among the lowest paid. They are often forced to do tasks for which they are entirely unprepared, physically and mentally.

Children are more prone than adults to suffer occupational injuries and have far more serious health problems than adults exposed to the same working environment.

Everywhere, girls are far more exploited than boys. While boy gold panners work eight hours a day for about 15 to 17,000 Peruvian soles a day, and can take Sundays off, girls cooking for them work 15 hours a day all week long, for an average 8,500 soles a day.

Very often exploitation goes well beyond low wages, subhuman working conditions and long hours. In one Asian nation's deep-sea fishing operation, now banned, food on board, transportation, medicines and even equipment maintenance costs were deducted from the young worker's meagre salaries.

Unions ignore children

Children have no protection when they work in industries, mining, household services or on the street. Labour unions largely ignore them and generally children do not organize themselves and fight for their rights. They are also less likely than adults to change jobs. Therefore, employers have tremendous power over them--a quasi parental power.

In agrarian societies, working children are at least protected by parents. But rural work can also be hazardous. But rural work can also be mauled by farm machinery, not only in third world countries where that technology is new, but in the American mid-West, where near-bankrupt farmers are counting more and more on their children's after-school work.

The meaning of

'hazardous'

Child labour has been a major concern of the ILO since it was founded in 1919. A number of international conventions on minimum age and work conditions have been adopted over the years and incorporated into national legislation throughout the world. In recent years, the ILO has stepped up its technical services in support of national action to wipe out child labour and protect working children.

ILO studies show big loopholes in most national child labour legislation: family enterprises and educational and training institutions are usually excluded and many countries also exempt the domestic service and agriculture.

The starting age for "hazardous work" is generally between 16 and 18. But the meaning of the term "hazardous" itself is quite vague.

A grass-roots approach

Most innovative programmers to help working children are run by private voluntary groups throughout the world, the ILO reports.

In Brazil, where millions of children live and work on the streets, the Government supports a vast network of community-based groups that is starting to successfully deal with the problem.

India is concentrating on wiping out the most hazardous types of child labour and regulating all others. A target is to provide all children under 14 with free and compulsory education by 1995.

In Manila, Philippines, voluntary groups have set up mobile schools in tents near places where children work. Meals and health services are also provided.

WWorking children are proving in Peru that they are not only capable of organizing themselves but that they can also play a leadership role in their communities. Manthoc, a social action movement launched in 1976 in southern Lima by a group of teenagers, is run by children themselves, with help from Catholic Youth volunteers.

Local chapters have successfully mobilized their communities to clean up hazardous garbage, fumigate malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and raise funds to help working children in case of illness.

Working conditions of some 350 children who arrange flowers in Bogota's cemeteries have dramatically improved since "Villa Javier", a project of the Colombian Institute for Family Welfare, helped them get organized in 1986.

Although extremely effective, most of these voluntary programmers lack sufficient funds and a national scope. Direct governmental involvement "remains far too limited", a new ILO study says.