Child labour refers to the exploitation of children through any form of work that deprives children of their childhood, interferes with their ability to attend regular school, and is mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful. Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation worldwide, although these laws do not consider all work by children as child labour; exceptions include work by child artists, family duties, supervised training, and some forms of child work practiced by Amish children, as well as by indigenous children in the Americas.
A sweatshop or sweat factory is a crowded workplace with very poor, socially unacceptable or illegal working conditions. The work may be difficult, dangerous, climatically challenging or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. The Fair Labor Association's "2006 Annual Public Report" inspected factories for FLA compliance in 18 countries including Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Malaysia, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, China, India, Vietnam, Honduras, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, and the US. The U.S. Department of Labor's "2015 Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor" found that "18 countries did not meet the International Labour Organization's recommendation for an adequate number of inspectors."
Labor rights or workers' rights are both legal rights and human rights relating to labor relations between workers and employers. These rights are codified in national and international labor and employment law. In general, these rights influence working conditions in relations of employment. One of the most prominent is the right to freedom of association, otherwise known as the right to organize. Workers organized in trade unions exercise the right to collective bargaining to improve working conditions.
The Child Labour Programme of Action is the national plan on elimination of child labour in South Africa. It was provisionally adopted by a large group of key stakeholders in September 2003. These stakeholders include key government departments, including those responsible for labour, education, provincial and local government, water service, justice, policing, prosecution, social development, and education. The lead department is the Department of Labour. It was previously known as the Child Labour Action Programme, but was renamed in February 2006 because of the negative connotation attached to the abbreviation CLAP.
The International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) is a programme that the International Labour Organization has run since 1992. IPEC's aim is to work towards the progressive elimination of child labour by strengthening national capacities to address child labour problems, and by creating a worldwide movement to combat it.
Trafficking of children is a form of human trafficking and is defined by the United Nations as the "recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, and/or receipt" kidnapping of a child for the purpose of slavery, forced labor and exploitation. This definition is substantially wider than the same document's definition of "trafficking in persons". Children may also be trafficked for the purpose of adoption.
Ivory Coast and Ghana, together, produce nearly 60% of the world's cocoa each year. During the 2018/19 cocoa-growing season, research commissioned by the U.S Department of Labor was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago in these two countries and found that 1.48 million children are engaged in hazardous work on cocoa farms including working with sharp tools and agricultural chemicals and carrying heavy loads. That number of children is significant, representing 43 percent of all children living in agricultural households in cocoa growing areas. During the same period cocoa production in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana increased 62 percent while the prevalence of child labour in cocoa production among all agricultural households increased 14 percentage points. Attention on this subject has focused on West Africa, which collectively supplies 69% of the world's cocoa, Côte d'Ivoire in particular, supplying 35%. The 2016 Global Estimates of Child Labour indicate that one-fifth of all African children are involved in child labour. Nine percent of African children are in hazardous work. It is estimated that more than 1.8 million children in West Africa are involved in growing cocoa. A 2013–14 survey commissioned by the Department of Labor and conducted by Tulane University found that an estimated 1.4 million children aged 5 years old to 11 years old worked in agriculture in cocoa-growing areas, while approximately 800,000 of them were engaged in hazardous work, including working with sharp tools and agricultural chemicals and carrying heavy loads. According to the NORC study, methodological differences between the 2018/9 survey and earlier ones, together with errors in the administration of the 2013/4 survey have made it challenging to document changes in the number of children engaged in child labour over the past five years.
The global march against child labour and the end child labor. It was a rum movement that motivated many loners and organizations to come together and fight against child labor and not a march.
Child labour on Bangladesh is common, with 4.7 million children aged 5 to 14 in the work force. Out of the child labourers engaged in the work force, 83% are employed in rural areas and 17% are employed in urban areas. Child labour can be found in agriculture, poultry breeding, fish processing, the garment sector and the leather industry, as well as in shoe production. Children are involved in jute processing, the production of candles, soap and furniture. They work in the salt industry, the production of asbestos, bitumen, tiles and ship breaking.
Child labour in the diamond industry is a widely reported and criticized issue on diamond industry for using child labour in diamond mines and polishing procedures in poor conditions mainly in India and Africa. In these mines, children come in contact with minerals, oil and machinery exhaust. In 1997, The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions claimed that child labour was prospering in the diamond industry in Western India, where the majority of the world's diamonds are cut and polished while workers are often paid only a fraction of 1% of the value of the stones they cut. It is argued that economic growth in Western India in the 1980s–90s was associated with an increase in the number of child workers who do simple, repetitive manual tasks that do not require long years of training or experience in low-paying hazardous working conditions that involve drudgery, foreclose the option of school education for most of them.
In 2011, the national census of India found that the total number of child labourers, aged [5–14], to be at 10.1 million, out of the total of 259.64 million children in that age group. The child labour problem is not unique to India; worldwide, about 217 million children work, many full-time.
TARKI Social Research Institute is an independent research centre located in Budapest, Hungary. TARKI conducts applied socioeconomic research in social stratification, labour markets, income distribution, intergenerational transfers, tax-benefit systems, consumption and lifestyle patterns and attitudes in Hungary and, in the majority of its projects, in Europe. TARKI is closely embedded in international collaborations with major European academic partners in various research projects. Senior staff at TARKI all have PhDs with substantive and methodological interests and many hold professorial appointments at major universities. TARKI has its own fieldwork apparatus, capable of carrying out regular empirical surveys on social structure and on attitudes and of managing large scale international research. TARKI also carries out the Hungarian fieldwork of various high-quality international surveys.
Child labour in Pakistan is the employment of children for work in Pakistan, which causes them mental, physical, moral and social harm. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that in the 1990s, 11 million children were working in the country, half of whom were under age ten. In 1996, the median age for a child entering the work force was seven, down from eight in 1994. It was estimated that one quarter of the country's work force was made up of children.
UCW: Understanding Children's Work is a programme to combat child labour. The 1997 Amsterdam Conference on Combating the Most Intolerable Forms of Child Labour and the 1997 Oslo International Conference on Child Labour both drew attention to the urgent need for concerted global action to end child labour, and called for an expansion of information gathering, statistics and empirical research to help inform this action. The inter-agency programme, Understanding Children's Work (UCW), was initiated by the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNICEF and the World Bank as one of the responses to the recommendations of the Amsterdam and Oslo conferences. Through a variety of research activities, the UCW Programme supports the partner agencies in improving statistical information on child labour in its various dimensions – its nature, extent, causes and consequences – as well as on what policy approaches are most effective in addressing it.
Child labour refers to the full-time employment of children under a minimum legal age. In 2003, an International Labour Organization (ILO) survey reported that one in every ten children in the capital above the age of seven was engaged in child domestic labour. Children who are too young to work in the fields work as scavengers. They spend their days rummaging in dumps looking for items that can be sold for money. Children also often work in the garment and textile industry, in prostitution, and in the military.
Debt bondage in India or Bandhua Mazdoori was legally abolished in 1976 but remains prevalent due to weak enforcement by the government. Bonded labour is a system in which lenders force their borrowers to repay loans through labor. Additionally, these debts often take a large amount of time to pay off and are unreasonably high, propagating a cycle of generational inequality. This is due to the typically high interest rates on the loans given out by employers. Although debt bondage is considered to be a voluntary form of labor, people are forced into this system by social situations.
There is a difference between the definition of child labour in African communities and those in western environments. When children work in Africa, mostly in family farms, they are doing so as part of training for their future and aiding family income. In the western sense this is viewed as harmful and exploitative but that is not the case because the type of work children do matches their age and their environment. Cases of exploitative or harmful work are there, but they are also everywhere including the developed world. Child labour in Africa is generally defined based on two factors: type of work and minimum appropriate age of the work. If a child is involved in an activity that is harmful to his/her physical and mental development, he/she is generally considered as a child labourer. That is, any work that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children, and interferes with their schooling by depriving them of the opportunity to attend school or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work. Appropriate minimum age for each work depends on the effects of the work on the physical health and mental development of children. ILO Convention No. 138 suggests the following minimum age for admission to employment under which, if a child works, he/she is considered as a child laborer: 18 years old for hazardous works, and 13–15 years old for light works, although 12–14 years old may be permitted for light works under strict conditions in very poor countries. Another definition proposed by ILO's Statistical Information and Monitoring Program on Child Labor (SIMPOC) defines a child as a child labourer if he/she is involved in an economic activity, and is under 12 years old and works one or more hours per week, or is 14 years old or under and works at least 14 hours per week, or is 14 years old or under and works at least one hour per week in activities that are hazardous, or is 17 or under and works in an "unconditional worst form of child labor".
International labour law is the body of rules spanning public and private international law which concern the rights and duties of employees, employers, trade unions and governments in regulating the workplace. The International Labour Organization and the World Trade Organization have been the main international bodies involved in reforming labour markets. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have indirectly driven changes in labour policy by demanding structural adjustment conditions for receiving loans or grants. Issues regarding Conflict of laws arise, determined by national courts, when people work in more than one country, and supra-national bodies, particularly in the law of the European Union, has a growing body of rules regarding labour rights.
Child Rights International Network (CRIN) is an international network that supports the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and child rights. The network's goal is to advocate for children's rights and enforce them globally.
Child labour laws are statutes placing restrictions and regulations on the work of minors.
