Child Labor

The International Labor Organization (ILO), an agency of the United Nations (UN), defines child labor as work that interferes with a child’s physical development and mental health, and/or as work that does not respect a child’s dignity and inhibits the child from reaching their potential. To this end, the ILO also notes that the term child labor specifically refers to work that prevents a child from attending or completing school, either by prompting them to leave school before completing their studies or by forcing them to balance school attendance with long working hours at a demanding job. The UN directly addressed child labor in its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) program, which provide a developmental framework for the global community to use in working toward a sustainable future for citizens of both the developed and developing worlds. SDG Target 8.7 seeks to eliminate child labor by 2025.

Overview

ILO standards for defining child labor also recognize that not all work performed by children and adolescents is necessarily harmful or targeted for eradication. Children who are fairly compensated in paid positions for work performed in accordance with local labor laws does not qualify as child labor according to ILO and UN principles. Instead, the ILO generally considers such employment as a net positive, citing its beneficial impacts on skills development and on the child’s future economic, social, and civic participation.

Child labor has existed since ancient times and became a prominent feature of civilization as organized agriculture began to evolve and develop. In the modern world, historians primarily associate child labor with the colonial-era transatlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Children working in these contexts often toiled in dangerous and demeaning conditions for meager pay, or simply in exchange for basic necessities including food, clothing, and shelter. As the United States industrialized during the second half of the nineteenth century, many urban factory owners came to view child laborers as easier to manage, less costly, and more reliable due to their relative unwillingness to strike. As such, many industrial entrepreneurs actively sought to staff their production facilities with child workers. This remained relatively common during the period following the American Civil War (1861–1865) and persisted into the early twentieth century when US child labor rates reached their all-time highs. Disparate labor protection and enforcement standards among US states defined the national child labor landscape at the start of the twentieth century. Children worked in large numbers in industries including mining, agriculture, textile and glass manufacturing, food processing, and many other capacities.

In the United States, organized labor reform and lobbying campaigns grew and evolved from early efforts dating to the 1830s to specifically address the issue of child labor. A key development occurred in 1904 with the founding of the National Child Labor Committee. The committee worked not only to reduce the prevalence of child labor in US industry, but also to mandate public schooling programs to guarantee an education to all children at no direct cost to them or their parents. In 1938, during the final throes of the Great Depression (1929–1939), the US federal government adopted the Fair Labor Standards Act. The landmark legislation established national child labor standards, including minimum wages and age cutoffs for legal employment.

In 1946, the newly formed United Nations established the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and endorsed the influential and groundbreaking Universal Declaration of Human Rights two years later. The UN then adopted a broadened version of the Geneva Declaration on the Rights of the Child in 1959, which was originally created by the UN’s predecessor organization, the League of Nations in 1924. The 1959 version of the declaration established that all children have a right to access education, healthcare, and supportive learning and growing environments. The ILO’s 1973 adoption of Convention 138 established a minimum age of eighteen for accepting work that poses risks to an individual’s safety, health, or morality. In 1999, the ILO followed with Convention 182, which addressed what the organization considers the worst forms of child labor. These include slavery, serfdom, debt bondage, military recruitment, trafficking, and enlistment into drug trafficking, pornography, prostitution, and other forms of criminal and hazardous activity. The ILO defines hazardous labor as work situations that directly expose children to acute physical danger or any form of abuse, as well as underground and underwater work and work that takes place in high-elevation settings. Other forms of hazardous labor include jobs involving dangerous equipment, tools, or machinery, toxic or dangerous substances, and long or overnight hours.

Despite concerted efforts among members of the global community to regulate child labor and eliminate the exploitation of children, child labor remains a problem of global scope. The ILO regularly releases statistical assessments quantifying the prevalence of the forms of child labor targeted for elimination in accordance with the UN’s SDG program. ILO estimates for 2020, which were released in June 2021, placed the total number of global child laborers at 160 million. This figure accounts for nearly 10 percent of all children worldwide, with boys (97 million) and girls (63 million) both being heavily impacted.

However, the ILO notes that at every tracked age range, boys are more likely than girls to be involved in exploitative forms of child labor. According to ILO estimates for 2020, an estimated 9.6 percent of children around the world were involved in work meeting the agency’s definition of child labor. These overall figures include 11.2 percent of boys and 7.8 percent of girls. Among children aged five to eleven, 9.7 percent are engaged in child labor, including 10.9 percent of boys and 8.4 percent of girls. In the twelve to fourteen age range, 9.3 percent of children are involved in child labor, including 11 percent of boys and 7.5 percent of girls. An estimated 9.5 percent of children between fifteen and seventeen participate in child labor, including 12.2 percent of boys and 6.6 percent of girls. Observers note that the wider gap between child labor rates among boys and girls aged fifteen to seventeen may be explained by the fact that in many areas of the world with high child labor rates, girls of that age are routinely married off to have children. Experts from the ILO and other organizations also stress that these figures are only estimates, as an unknown amount of child labor takes place in underground settings that are difficult or impossible to monitor or quantify.

Further Insights

Of the 160 million children estimated by the ILO to be involved in child labor in 2020, 79 million were engaged in job activities meeting the ILO definition of hazardous labor. Breakdowns analyzing progress in reducing the global prevalence of child labor also noted slight regression during the 2016–2020 period. Between 2016 and 2020, the estimated overall global child labor rate held steady at 9.6 percent of children in the five-to-seventeen age range, while the percentage of children aged five to seventeen engaged in hazardous work rose slightly from the 2016 rate of 4.6 percent to 4.7 percent in 2020. The ILO acknowledged the impact of the global coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic; the economic turmoil created by the pandemic has created conditions that pose a risk of significantly increasing global child labor rates in the near term. Moderate ILO projections indicate the number of child laborers between the ages of five to seventeen could increase to 168.9 million by year-end 2022. If economic austerity policies result in social safety net declines in areas with particularly high child labor rates, the ILO believes the overall figure could climb as high as 206.2 million. That would indicate an increase of nearly 30 percent relative to the ILO’s 2020 global estimates.

A regional breakdown of child labor rates from UNICEF (2015–23) indicated that child labor rates are highest in eastern and southern Africa, where 28 percent of children aged five to seventeen located there were believed to be engaged in child labor, and sub-Saharan Africa, where 27 percent of children aged five to seventeen located there were believed to be engaged in child labor. A further 26 percent of children in west and central Africa toiled in child labor. Further, the ILO noted that since 2008, the greatest progress in fighting child labor has been made in the Asia-Pacific, Middle East and north Africa, Latin America, and Caribbean regions, while rates in sub-Saharan Africa rebounded after 2012 after a decline during the 2008–2012 period.

The global agriculture industry accounted for an estimated 70 percent of global child labor in 2020, according to the ILO. In a related trend, the ILO also found that 72.1 percent of all child laborers work within their own family units, while 17.3 percent work for external employers and 10.7 percent work independently. In examining the factors impeding progress toward the worldwide elimination of child labor, the ILO notes that poverty reduction challenges persist in regions of the globe where child labor rates are the highest. The persistence of informal employment structures in these regions is another major contributing factor, as they allow child labor to persist in unofficial channels that are difficult to monitor or regulate. A relative lack of social safety nets and protections also characterizes these regions, while they also tend to have high population growth rates, greater levels of internal political instability and violent conflict, and relatively low public education expenditures.

Issues

In 2002, the ILO launched its World Day Against Child Labor campaign, which strives to raise awareness about child labor as a global problem and encourage UN member states and stakeholders to take more aggressive and effective action against it. However, despite significant progress during the early decades of the twenty-first century, child labor remains a persistent problem with no easy or readily apparent solutions.

Some observers have drawn links between child labor and high demand in developed countries for inexpensive consumer goods. Proponents of this model contend that manufacturers and retailers have a direct financial incentive to base their production operations in areas with weak labor protection and enforcement standards, which often results in children being recruited to work for low wages. While a consensus of experts agreed that such factors play an impactful role in the global child labor problem, a 2021 article published in the peer-reviewed World Development scholarly journal noted a more complex set of underlying dynamics. The article used the West African cocoa industry as a case study, finding that child labor often evolves out of necessity as farmers struggle with low incomes in the face of a hypercompetitive global supply chain. In a related finding, the study’s authors noted links between child labor rates and a broader regional lack of access to capital investments.

Other analysts focus on the possible consequences that could follow from proposals to implement a meaningful and enforceable global ban on child labor practices. Proponents of such a ban generally believe that it would force widespread labor reform in areas with the highest child labor rates, theoretically improving the quality of life of children formerly engaged in unethical and exploitative labor practices. However, critics of this viewpoint argue that such a model overlooks essential dynamics within those labor markets and essentially functions to impose the values of the developed world onto areas where they do not match local realities. ILO statistics confirm that a significant majority of child laborers work alongside family members, mainly in subsistence activities. Disallowing such labor practices could have the effect of permanently subjugating those families into a crushing cycle of poverty, from which illicit activities such as criminality, prostitution, and other forms of underground work could prove to be the only viable escape.

In 2019, the ILO issued a six-point plan for making progress toward SDG Target 8.7 by 2025. The organization identified social activism as central to advancing legal and policy-based reform designed to eliminate child labor, along with focusing economic development on offering young people safe and positive opportunities to earn money. The ILO also advocated for expanding social welfare and protection systems that provide higher levels of baseline economic stability to a greater number of global households, and for expanding access to publicly funded education opportunities. Eliminating child labor from global supply chains and creating stronger international structures for protecting children during crisis situations were also identified as strategic keys to achieving the target.

Bibliography

"The 17 Goals." Dept. of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, 2024, sdgs.un.org/goals. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Busquet, M., Bosma, N., and Hummels, H. “A Multidimensional Perspective on Child Labor in the Value Chain: The Case of the Cocoa Value Chain in West Africa.” World Development, vol. 146, 2021, doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105601. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Child Labor: Global Estimates 2020, Trends and the Road Forward. International Labor Organization / United Nations Children's Fund, 2021, www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40ed‗norm/%40ipec/documents/publication/wcms‗797515.pdf. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

"Child Labour Rises to 160 Million—First Increase in Two Decades." UNICEF, 9 June 2021, www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-labour-rises-160-million-first-increase-two-decades. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Ending Child Labor by 2025: A Review of Policies and Programmes. International Labor Organization, 10 Dec. 2018, www.ilo.org/sites/default/files/wcmsp5/groups/public/%40ed‗norm/%40ipec/documents/publication/wcms‗653987.pdf. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Nilsson, Jeff. "The History of Child Labor in America." The Saturday Evening Post, 13 June 2023, www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2023/06/the-history-of-child-labor-in-america/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Parr, A. “A History of Child Labor.” Borgen Magazine, 2016, www.borgenmagazine.com/history-child-labor/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

"What Is Child Labour." International Labour Organization, 2024, www.ilo.org/topics/child-labour/what-child-labour. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.

Wijen, F. “Banning Child Labor Imposes Naive Western Ideals on Complex Problems.” The Guardian, 26 Aug. 2015, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/26/ban-child-labour-developing-countries-imposes-naive-western-ideals-complex-problems. Accessed 29 Oct. 2024.