The International Labour Organization (ILO) has estimated that 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries at least 120 million on a full time basis. Sixty-one percent of these are in Asia, 32 percent in Africa, and 7 percent in Latin America. Most working children in rural areas are found in agriculture; many children work as domestics; urban children work in trade and services, with fewer in manufacturing and construction.
Child labor ranges from four-year-olds tied to rug looms to keep them from running away, to seventeen-year-olds helping out on the family farm. In some cases, a child’s work can be helpful to him or her and to the family; working and earning can be a positive experience in a child’s growing up. This depends largely on the age of the child, the conditions in which the child works, and whether work prevents the child from going to school.
The Children’s Rights Division at Human Rights Watch has focused its efforts on the worst forms of child labor, those prohibited by the ILO’s Worst Forms of Child Labour Convention. Children who work long hours, often in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, are exposed to lasting physical and psychological harm. Working at rug looms, for example, has left children disabled with eye damage, lung disease, stunted growth, and a susceptibility to arthritis as they grow older. Children making silk thread in India dip their hands into boiling water that burns and blisters them, breath smoke and fumes from machinery, handle dead worms that cause infections, and guide twisting threads that cut their fingers. Children harvesting sugar cane in El Salvador use machetes to cut cane for up to nine hours a day in the hot sun; injuries to their hands and legs are common and medical care is often not available.
Denied an education and a normal childhood, some children are confined and beaten, reduced to slavery. Some are denied freedom of movement and the right to leave the workplace and go home to their families. Some are abducted and forced to work. The human rights abuses in these practices are clear and acute. We have found similar problems in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and the United States: children who work for too many hours and too many days, for too little, or sometimes no pay, subject often to physical abuse, exposed to dangerous pesticides, and made to work with too dangerous tools. Our objectives in tackling these aspects of the complex and troubling child labor issue include drawing attention to the plight of child workers, helping to end these appalling practices, and contributing to the debate on the rights dimension of the larger issue of children and work.
Of nearly 250 million children engaged in child labor around the world, the vast majority 70 percent, or some 170 million are working in agriculture. Child agricultural workers frequently work for long hours in scorching heat, haul heavy loads of produce, are exposed to toxic pesticides, and suffer high rates of injury from sharp knives and other dangerous tools. Their work is grueling and harsh, violating their rights to health, education, and protection from work that is hazardous or exploitative.
Bonded labor takes place when a family receives an advance payment (sometimes as little as U.S. $15) to hand a child-boy or girl-over to an employer. In most cases the child cannot work off the debt, nor can the family raise enough money to buy the child back. The workplace is often structured so that “expenses” and/or “interest” are deducted from a child’s earnings in such amounts that it is almost impossible for a child to repay the debt. In some cases, the labor is generational-that is, a child’s grandfather or great-grandfather was promised to an employer many years earlier, with the understanding that each generation would provide the employer with a new worker-often with no pay at all.
