No to Child Labor

Amar Lal at Bal Ashram in 2017 © Ravi Yadav

24-year-old lawyer Amar Lal has seen and felt the pain of child labor. Strictly speaking, child labor runs in the family.

“My life was at risk every single day. If I fell sick there was no hospital, no way of getting help. There was no concept of the broader world; the only reality was the stone quarry. I could not imagine any other kind of life. This has been the reality in my family across generations.”

We first met Amar Lal five years ago, when we were filming at Bal Ashram. He was nineteen, and a law student, a graduate of the children’s rehabilitation home. He is intent on strengthening the legal framework in India, so that brokers and criminal employers and traffickers are sent to jail. Every time.

Back then, an activist from Bachpan Bachao Andolan, the children’s rights organization founded by Kailash Satyarthi, stopped by the stone quarry and had a conversation with Amar Lal’s parents, convincing them that education can break the chain of generations of bonded labor. They agreed that their son should go to Bal Ashram to be raised and educated with other survivors of child labor. The children he met there, and the love and care of Kailash, whom he calls Bhai Sabji, and his wife Sumedha Kailash, who teaches the children personally, inspired Amar Lal to become an advocate for the right of children to be free, to be educated, to have a childhood and to thrive.

Fast forward to 2021. Amar Lal is the lead speaker at a launch event sponsored by the ILO and Alliance 8.7, the purpose of which is to collect pledges of specific actions from pathfinder countries and organizations. The intention is not to tackle child labor, to chip away at it, to make things incrementally better. The intention is to get rid of it entirely. It is 2021 - the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labour.

It’s an interesting moment to announce an intention of such sweeping ambition. Across the world, the Covid-19 pandemic has upended economies and threatens to undo decades of incremental social progress. But this moment of crisis is the right time to do the hard thinking about how we will organize societies and economies when we resume normal life. If we simply go back to the way things were, we will have missed an opportunity to organize a just society.

Kailash Satyarthi is hugely proud of Amar Lal’s achievements. But he is clear-eyed about the limitations of rescuing an individual child.

Kailash Satyarthi © Jatin Makkar

“Amar Lal is my adorable child. We are celebrating his freedom. But Amar Lal is not free, because 152 million children are still laboring. No one is free until every single child is free… For me the crux of the matter is that for generations, for centuries, we have not given fair share. That is unacceptable. And therefore just after this launch event, civil society is going to launch largest coalition and campaign in history, Fair Share to End CL campaign. We are demanding fair share of resources, adequate laws and enforcement and fair share of social protection.”

Meanwhile, Director General Qu Dongyu of the FAO (Food and Agricultural Organization) will be focusing investments and programs to address household poverty. IOM Director General Antonio Vitorino will work with the ILO to produce global figures on the prevalence of child labor, forced labor and child marriage. UN Global Compact Executive Director Madame Sanda Ojiambo pledges to step up monitoring of supply chains and require companies to move from aspiration to action. His Excellency Minister of Labor in Tunisia Mohamed Trabelsi affirmed Tunisia’s unwavering commitment to implementing Alliance 8.7 priorities. Chile Minister of Labor María José Zaldivár is committed to step up a regional initiative in Latin America to achieve SDG 8.7 in the context of recovery from Covid-19 crisis. Argentina Minister of Labor Claudio Omar Moroni pledges to reach the most remote areas of Argentina, to shore up a national development policy to address poverty in Argentina. And the list goes on… A wide-ranging global coalition of national governments, NGOs and trade union organizations have promised specific action to get rid of the scourge of child labor in the International Year for the Elimination of Child Labor.

Are world leaders doing enough? Amar Lal says they need to do more.

“I think much has been done, but this is not enough. As a lawyer, we need a commitment to implementation, to enforcement to action now. Today I would like to challenge everybody, not just imagine a world without child labor but to act on it. Every child should have their fair share for education, freedom and justice.”