Child Labor

The specter of small children toiling long hours under dehumanizing conditions has, over the last decade and a half, precipitated an intense debate concerning appropriate conditions of work for children. As during the midst of the 19th-century British Industrial Revolution, policymakers and the public have struggled to come to grips with the causes and consequences of child labor. Attempts to coordinate a policy response reveal the complexity and moral ambiguity of the phenomenon of working children.

Estimates of the extent of child labor today vary depending on the definition used. One International Labour Organization (ILO) survey identifies approximately 78.5 million economically active children under the age of 15 years. UNICEF reports 80 million children aged 10 to 14 whose work is characterized as “so long or onerous that it interfered with their normal development.” However, the ILO estimates that the total number of working children aged 10 to 14 worldwide is closer to 100 to 200 million. Employment among smaller children is pervasive as well. The ILO estimates that 250 million children aged 5 to 14 are working, of which 120 million are working full-time. The highest reported incidence of child labor is in sub-Saharan Africa. Labor force participation rates for some countries in this region are at or above 40%. (For recent estimates of child labor see ILO, 2002.)

Children are most commonly found working in family-based agriculture, services such as domestic help, restaurants, street vending, prostitution, and small-scale manufacturing of carpets, garments, and furniture. Working conditions can range from light activities, such as newspaper delivery before school, to brutal conditions in which children work until they drop from exhaustion. Children working in agriculture or small-scale manufacturing are often exposed to dangerous equipment and dangerous chemicals, such as fertilizers, pesticides, and solvents.

Children delivered into bonded labor for the purposes of intergenerational debt servitude perhaps suffer most of all. Human Rights Watch estimates that 10% to 20% of child laborers in the knotted-carpet industry in India are bonded child laborers, some as young as 6 or 7 years old. Such children may be forced to work up to 20 hours a day, eating, sleeping, and working in the same room. These children are found to suffer from skin ailments, chronic colds, [Page 246]respiratory problems, spine deformities, and weakened eyesight. (For a description of the industries and conditions under which children work, see U.S. Department of Labor, 1995).

Although child labor has been the norm throughout history, the fact of children working and the difficult conditions under which children work occasionally become more evident and troubling. During the 19th century, child labor became more visible as children were drawn into industrial settings. More recently, child labor has received intensified scrutiny in the West because of the increased awareness of children producing goods for export. For a review of the literature on the causes, consequences, and decline of child labor in a historical context, see Tuttle (1999).

There are two main competing explanations for the prevalence of child labor. On one hand, some argue that child labor arises as a response to technological change, thereby increasing the demand for the special characteristics of children. Proponents of this view site unskilled-labor-biased technological change that emerged during the early stages of the British Industrial Revolution, which drew children in droves into the textile factories while displacing textiles produced by adults in the home.

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