Child Labour Day
© U.R. Romano courtesy of the Thomas J. Dodd Center for Human Rights, University of Connecticut
Recently, we had World Day Against Child Labor and unfortunately there’s little to celebrate. The new figures are giving us a reality check on the urgency of renewing measures to diminish the current and anticipated effects on the increased number of child victims at risk of child labor due to the ongoing pandemic.
According to the ILO-UNICEF report, at the beginning of 2020 there were 160 million children in conditions of child labor globally, 63 million girls and 97 million boys. To offer some perspective, this is almost 1 in 10 of all children worldwide. And nearly half of all those in child labour were in hazardous work - 79 million children.
As the richest countries dominate the economic resources to access covid-19 vaccination and poorer countries are still suffering the full effects of the pandemic, it is only to be expected that child labor will increase in the near future, if the situation is not properly addressed in a timely way, through access to direct and specific child social protections, as well as direct cash transfers for those families without sufficient income to cover their most basic needs, as well as ensuring access to dignified working conditions and fair wages for adult workers to allow them to support their families.
International cooperation funds and aid targeted to civil society and community trainings, awareness and education to collectively enforce child labor-free zones is key. In the context of the pandemic, it is necessary to continue pushing for government deals for financial support, programs and incentives to keep kids in school and out of work. This is a great example of public policies that successfully prevent children from falling into child labor.
As the pandemic continues, lockdowns and school closures are still widespread in many places, deepening the gap on access to education, especially for those in rural areas and in lower income families. Remote learning and access to Internet and computers sound unthinkable and unreachable…so far removed from the reality of millions of children worldwide. The more the children stay out of school, the more likely it is that circumstances will force them to continue to work to survive. This is true even for younger children. Worldwide, there are more than 16.6 million child laborers from 5 to 11 years old. The majority work harvesting and growing food they sometimes can’t even afford for themselves, and others survive working on family farms or micro enterprises. This is why governments need to guarantee worker’s rights and fair wages – if adult workers are not making ends meet, inevitably their kids will have to work in order to survive.
Another recommendation to prevent and end child labor is to ensure corporate accountability. Trade and investment agreements need a complete overhaul to adapt to up to date demands to respect human and environmental rights at all times and wherever they’re holding operations. We need mandatory procedures with independent overseeing mechanisms that periodically check viability and the conduct especially of certain high-risk businesses as absolutely necessary to grant permits of operation.
If there were no markets supporting these unlawful practices, there would be fewer children at work and more would be at school, one step closer to accomplishing their dreams and aspirations. As long as there are not tangible economic consequences or sanctions for risky daily operations, as long as we are not holding companies’ operations and their decision makers accountable, we cannot expect significant improvements. We can no longer keep relying on consumers demanding the elimination of child labor in company supply chains; we must press on with a multilevel coordinated effort.
We need to continue to demand that international and national policies be accompanied by economic and technical support to transition into fairer practices, that are backed up by mandatory agreements that benefit all stakeholders with the protection of children as the highest priority. Proper due diligence mechanisms need to become mandatory and a prerequisite to be eligible to sell any product, especially in the most important economies of the world that consume the most of the resources.
Another idea is to improve data collection with defined indicators to create a systematic understanding and provide insight for activists, civil society organizations as well as public and private actors as they create tailor-made initiatives that address their own forms of child labor specific to their own communities. Even though the roots causes are generally common, it is important to acknowledge the specific context of each community that has victims of child labor.
According to Fair Share to End Child Labor, there are more child laborers in the world than all the children living in the US and Europe combined. So far touching the companies’ pockets has proven to be one of the most efficient mechanisms to force them to comply, and as the effects of the pandemic keep unfolding, let’s keep creating hope with our actions. After all we need to make progress 18 times faster if we want to meet the goal of ending child labor by 2025.