Child Labor

Child labor is notoriously difficult to define. Largely, the term child labor differs from the term child work. The first term encompasses harmful work, and the second, work done without damaging consequences upon children. The International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labor (IPEC) defines work in terms of “economic activity.” It covers all market production (paid work) and certain types of nonmarket production (unpaid work), including production of goods for ones own use. Inside this larger concept of “economically active children,” the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) defined distinctions among “child work” (light work), “child labor,” and “worst forms of child labor.” The first category, “child work” or “light work,” is considered to be “children's participation in economic activity that does not negatively affect their health and development or interfere with education, and which can be positive.” This category acknowledges that not all work is detrimental to children, and that, to a certain extent, work can be regarded as “a right” not to be denied to children. The International Labour Organization (ILO) permits light work from the age of 13.

The second category used by UNICEF is “child labor,” which refers to “all children below 12 years of age working in any economic activities, those aged 12 to 14 years engaged in harmful work, and all children engaged in the worst forms of child labor.” The third category, “worst forms of child labor,” refers to children being enslaved, forcibly recruited, prostituted, trafficked, forced into illegal activities, and exposed to hazardous work.

The major international documents regulating child labor are the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the ILO Convention No. 138 on the Minimum Age for Admission to Employment and Work (1973), and the ILO Convention No. 182 on the Worst Forms of Child Labor (1999).

A young girl works a loom in Morocco. Girls make up 46 percent of child laborers worldwide.

The highest prevalence of child labor is in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America. Child labor has largely been eradicated in the developed world, although isolated evidence shows that there is no country free of child labor. In the most industrialized countries, migrant children are at increased risk of early entry into work that is concealed from public scrutiny.